Rebane's Ruminations

Nate Beason on Large Gatherings Ordnance

George Rebane

Given the interest in the recent ordnance on large gatherings on private land that Nevada County Board of Supervisors is considering, I promised to ask my supervisor (District #1) Nate Beason for some publishable clarification about what is intended and what is going on regarding this issue.  Specifically, I asked -

1.    What problem the new ordnance is supposed to address that current laws and ordnances don’t cover?
2.    What are the high hard ones in your preferred version of the ordnance?
3.    What is the current progress on adopting such an ordnance?
4.    Where should people go to find out more?

Nate was kind enough to give a timely reply to the email I sent him earlier in the day.  His response follows.

For over 30 years, the County has required that, prior to conducting certain outdoor music events, the event sponsor must obtain an Outdoor Festival Permit from the Sheriff. In the past, these events have been defined as “…any outdoor gathering of more than 100 people for the purpose of participating in or attending a dance, music carnival, ‘rock’ festival, or like musical activity.” 

At our workshop in January, the BOS took a decision to review and update the current ordinance. The decision was driven by two primary issues.

First, the potential for large events to occur in the unincorporated area without permits (which they have) and the current lack of enforcement tools provided to the sheriff to address the potential impacts of such events on neighboring properties.

Second, the BOS expressed an interest in establishing a reasonable mechanism by which wineries and other small businesses might hold occasional outdoor events on properties that do not have or cannot provide sufficient permanent facilities to hold such events.

A related issue is provision of discretionary enforcement authority to the sheriff regarding events that are exempt from the permitting process and cause disturbances. This enforcement would be complaint-driven and enforcement would be up to the responding officers’ discretion, i.e., a range of enforcement from asking people to please hold the noise down to requiring them to terminate their activities, depending on the nature and/or severity of the impact on the surrounding area. Our current ordinance is silent on this type of activity.

One of our major concerns is large, unpermitted gatherings at the end of dead end roads with inadequate sanitation and lack of safe emergency egress. We have had several of these types occur in recent years, and they appear to be on the increase. The current ordinance does not give the sheriff a sufficient range of authority to deal with them.

The first draft was sent back for revision for a variety of reasons. Any future BOS addressal of the issue will be publicly noticed.  Any resident who wishes notification beyond that required by law can call the Planning Department, 265- 1759, and ask to be put on a list of contacts for this specific issue.

At this point, I can offer very little in terms of specifics, but I hope the foregoing helps.

Thanks for contacting me,

Nate

Rep McClintock on Resolving the Healthcare and Fiscal Dilemmas

[Representaive McClintock made the following speech on the floor of the House today 28 September 2013.  It is here reproduced in its entirety.  gjr]

Tom McClintock (R-CA4)

Mr. Speaker:

            A crisis is not a good time for inflammatory rhetoric and ad hominem attacks.  I will simply say that yesterday, the President missed an opportunity to bring both sides together.  That responsibility now rests solely with us.

            Nobody on the Republican side of the aisle wants to see a government shutdown or a credit default.  And I am confident that nobody on the Democratic side wants to see millions of Americans lose the health plans they were told they could keep; or see their healthcare costs skyrocket, or lose their jobs or work hours because of the unintended consequences of Obamacare.

            But these events -- that nobody wants to see -- are now unfolding.  They will do great damage to our nation that nobody on wants to see happen. 

            If we agree on these fundamental issues, our course should be clear and is only blocked by the kind of partisan division that we heard yesterday from the White House. 

            We can avert these calamities and redeem this institution if we can put aside the name-calling for a few days and get down to business.

            The good news is that we have a process of government that has evolved over centuries that is very good at resolving differences of opinion within and between the two houses of Congress. 

            And in this case, there shouldn’t even be much to resolve: ALL OF US want to see the government stay open; ALL OF US want to see the government’s credit preserved; ALL OF US want to see Americans protected from losing health plans they want to keep; or from being socked with crushing premium increases; or from losing their jobs or having their hours cut back.

The Dawn of Perennial Easing

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 27 September 2013.]

Something happened this week that will change the course of our country and our lives, something that few people noticed.  It happened while we were all in a lather about defunding Obamacare and funding government; while we worried about Iran’s nuclear bomb building and Syria’s civil war; while realizing that today Al Qaeda is stronger than ever, and while we are forgivably exercised about the sophomoric foreign policy and demonstrated ineptness the Obama administration has shown us during the last years.  And rightly so, but going forward, that is not what will trouble us most.

Sustainability Quantified (updated 9oct13)

George Rebane

Sustainability, especially of government programs such as healthcare, has been a constant topic of debate on RR since its inception.  Our friends on the Left have trouble understanding that a program is sustainable only to the extent that its cost doesn't crowd out other programs and consume the country's GDP in toto.  And that is doubly true if more than one government program develops an expanding appetite for GDP.

To make this clear to those who are still numerate enough to remember their first semester algebra, consider the following.  In the base year let A_H be the amount spent on a program, say, healthcare.  In that year this consumes a fraction f_H = A_H/A_GDP of the country's total output of goods and services.  Assume that during the next year we witness growth rates of r_H and r_GDP in their respective sectors.

At the end of that year we will have spent (1+r_H)A_H for healthcare out of a GDP that has grown to (1+r_GDP)A_GDP.  This says that our healthcare spending as a fraction of GDP is now f_H+ = [(1+r_H)A_H]/[(1+r_GDP)A_GDP].

For sustainability, this year's healthcare fraction must be no larger than last year's.  That means that f_H+/f_H ≤ 1, or substituing from above we must have (1+r_H)/(1+r_GDP) ≤ 1.  This requires that the numerator be no larger than the denominator, or that 1+r_H ≤ 1+r_GDP.  Subtracting one from both sides yields the final requirement, r_GDP ≥ r_H .  This simply says that the GDP's growth rate must be at least as large as that of the sustainable program in question; in this case, healthcare.

Since the first comparison of any government program is always to its fraction of the budget, with similar argument we see that the government's budget must also grow at least as fast as GDP.  With a healthy GDP growth rate such budget increases are not a problem.  However, with an anemic growth rate, taxes must be increased to grow the government's budget sufficiently to sustain all its spending programs.  Unfortunately, we then run into the Laffer Curve.  (The astute reader may also offer that some other programs be cut to accomodate more desirable programs in a sputtering economy.  But that may be hoping for too much.)

[9oct13 update]  And now for the real budget problem (and solution).

Change Climate! Change dammit! (updated 27sep13)

George Rebane

Well, another six years has passed since 2007 when the IPCC issued its last load of hooey piled high and dry.  In Stockholm they are now putting the finishing edits on this year’s hernia pack that updates the latest “peer reviewed science” on the earth’s climate.  And on Friday they will release the whole thing – Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) - including its 30-page ‘Summary for Policy Makers’ that will be the only part read by anyone.

In it they will not be able to account for the temperature record of the past 15 years, nor a lot of other climate related measurables like the record amounts of ice returning to the Arctic inspite of the constant increase in atmospheric CO2.  But it is expected that these government paid scientists and environmentalist ideologues will up their subjective certainty of manmade climate change to 95% from 90%.

Not known yet is the level of lying that will be included in this edition.  Two years ago Dr Rajendra Pachauri, bandleader of the IPCC, “told the Guardian newspaper that an independent review of the IPCC "found our work solid and robust." This is not so. The review, conducted in 2010 by a committee of the InterAcademy Council identified "significant shortcomings in each major step of [the] IPCC's assessment process." It said "significant improvements" were necessary—and criticized the IPCC for claiming to have "high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence." (reported in the 25sep13 WSJ, more here)

The world has been convinced that the UN’s IPCC is comprised of an unbiased group of qualified scientists studying climate change.  That stretches truth beyond its elastic limit.  “The U.N. has charged the IPCC with weighing the evidence on climate change in an objective manner. The problem is that numerous IPCC personnel have ties to environmental groups, many of which raise funds by hyping the alleged dangers of climate change. This relationship raises a legitimate question about their objectivity.”

The lamestream will, of course, stand up and deliver their usual knowledge-free salute to whatever is claimed in the forthcoming report.  And our central planners in Washington and Sacramento will use that copy to sustain and grow the stack of laws and regulations that already limit our liberties and cripple our country.  Contact your members in Congress; but then again …


[27sep13 update]  The IPCC Working Group did publish its Summary for Policy Makers with the expected conclusions as the preamble to the full version of their Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) that will issue later.

Time to Live Forever?

George Rebane

A number of emails, articles, and recent announcements came together that made me again revisit the notion of man’s dream of physical immortality.  What if there were developed a pill that would genomically and/or proteomically rejuvenate a person, and taking such a pill every so many years would keep him going indefinitely?  It seems to me that such a pill, or even a more complex rejuvenation procedure, would put the continued existence of humanity at risk.

A friend and former colleague, Dr Keith Dutton, just informed me that the company that he coufounded – Lively - was successful in closing a second round of funding, and is now off to the races.  Lively offers a system that enables single older folks to continue living alone and maintaining their independence over a greater span of their life, thereby fulfilling a basic desire by all of us to maintain the homeostasis of normalcy for as long as possible.  Nevada County probably has a lot of customers for such a system.

Then there’s all the buzz on how education delivery is moving online (see RR posts on MOOCs and all the universities starting to offer their curricula over the internet).  The more important part of that is the efforts of older workers and even retired people who are enrolling in these courses to keep learning more stuff, develop additional skillsets to sell in the workforce, and to continue the never-ending pursuit of fulfillment.  The age cutoff for retiring from a stimulating life seems to be rapidly disappearing.

My old pal Dr Larry Press at CSUDH (professor of information technologies) has been a longtime promoter of all things internet and networking.  His blog is a good resource for keeping up with the latest in everything from network applications to distance learning.  Apropos to living a longer and much more productive life, Larry’s 23sep13 entry introduces us to FutureLearn, a collaboration of a group of UK universities.  “Their slogan is 'Learning for life', indicating a focus on students who are not seeking credit and degrees. That audience may turn out to be more important than traditional university students -- more lucrative and more beneficial to society.”

During these pre-Singularity years the pursuit of life extension (cum immortality) is reaching the entrepreneurial levels of business activity.  Early evangelists like Ray Kurzweil are now being joined by start-ups like Calico (California Life Corporation) which Google has announced as its latest business venture (more here).   Actually, since Kurzweil joined Google, their investment in Calico is probably his doing.

Ruminations – 20sep13 (updated)

George Rebane

The pressure from the local Left mounts on Sheriff Keith Royal who is slated to introduce Sheriff Mack during a major speaking event in Nevada County on 18 October next.  While Sheriff Royal has given no explicit support to the constitutional sheriffs movement, of which Sheriff Mack is a founder, just that he has agreed to introduce Sheriff Mack has enraged our progressive platoons.  It will be most interesting to see how our politically astute elected lawman handles this conundrum as he looks forward to standing for the office again next year.  (Judi Caler of ROAR emailed this announcement today on the upcoming event.)

Government schools registered yet another new performance low.  This morning NPR announced that California’s reading scores for 3rd graders are in.  Another significant yearly drop.  In San Joachin County scores dropped from a dismal upper 30 percentile range down to around 33%, and Sacramento county suffered a drop from 46% to 42% of these youngsters who had learned to read.  The significance of this is that if a student does not learn to read by the 3rd grade, the likelihood is low that he will ever become a literate person.  And we continue to pump out millions of illiterates every year into a workforce in which they simply have no chance to qualify for a job.  The progressive educators celebrate these results because these ignorant legions do add to the growing cohort of reliable voters for the Democratic Party.

Why not join the funding of Obamacare with the funding of the nation’s other ‘entitlements’?  Isn’t that what Obamacare really is, another entitlement?  Why treat it separately when the deficit reduction debate heats up in a few days.  Entitlements are the 800lbs gorilla of mandated government expenditures, and keeping them whole gives no hope for reducing deficits, let alone approaching a balanced budget.  I have no idea why the Republicans have not made that obvious connection instead girding their loins to assault Mount Obamacare as a separate objective that is also happens to be this administration’s holy grail.  Throw that damned cup into the bin with all the other spending programs that are driving the country into the mud.

Last Wednesday we taped the fifth edition of ‘Breaking Bread’ at the NCTV studios.  The topic of BB5 was the Trans Pacific Partnership multi-lateral trade agreement.  Eric Tombs hosted the show which will air this Sunday and then be available online.  I was one of Eric’s guests in that discussion.  The remarkable conclusion was that we all had problems finding any good parts to the secretly negotiated agreement, especially how it will aid America’s small and medium sized businesses.  Each of us thought that this was a genuine example of corporatism for the benefit of central planners and the big business interests that are trying to become super-national entities with their own laws and courts that supersede the legal rights of sovereign nation states.

The Public Citizen takes a dim view of the TPP.  The official story is given here on the US Trade Representative’s website.

BTW, NCTV is now fighting for its life.  There are plans for going forward in a new format, but everything is up in the air until the existing board decides how it will exit.  The official word on the subject is given on the station’s website; stay tuned.

[update]  Reader Michael Anderson informs us (here) that Sheriff Royal has announced that he will not be introducing Sheriff Mack on 18 October.  Apparently Sheriff Royal called Jeff Pelline to confirm this decision who then posted it on his blog (here).

Ruminations – 18sep13 (updated 19sep13)

George Rebane

RIP Lavabit.  Lavabit has demonstrably been one of the most secure email services on the internet.  It is now closing its doors much to the consternation of the feds who have not been able to hack into Lavabit’s emails and servers.  And this story is worth a consideration to all Americans who pay lip service to maintaining our freedoms.  According to the report in Xato.net Lavabit’s founder and CEO Ladar Levinson refuses to play along with the feds in opening up his email service to government spying.  The exact nature of the government threat has yet to emerge, but the high hard one is clear -  “The message here is that US courts can force a business to subvert their own security measures and lie to their customers, deliberately giving them a false sense of security.” (H/T to RR reader)

The damage by teachers unions is more severe than even I had anticipated.  This especially in California where the CTA has f&*#ed over the young people of the state for some decades now.  California teachers get paid at the highest rates in the country, and they produce students that rank among the lowest in literacy and numeracy in the nation.  But the story doesn’t end there,  as academic Jonathan Jacobs writes ‘As Education Declines, So Does Civic Culture’ in the 16sep13 WSJ.  He strongly underlines and extends the message that Charles Murray (Coming Apart) has delivered (covered much in these pages with more to come).

The bottom line is that we’re turning out millions of 2x4s with faces painted on them.  These students can neither read, write, cypher, nor reason.  And it all comes together in the workplace where “… employers attest, as college instructors will too if they're being frank, that many college graduates can barely construct a coherent paragraph and many have precious little knowledge of the world—the natural world, the social world, the historical world, or the cultural world. That is a tragedy for the graduates, but also for society: Civic life suffers when people have severely limited knowledge of the world to bring to political or moral discussions.”

Liberal history book guts second amendment.  As a footnote to the above, leftwing academics continue to do their share in supplying students a distinctly ‘progressive’ perspective of what went on before that got us to where we are (more here).

Played out daily in the public round is the truth of ‘a nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.'  (Thomas Jefferson)

Bush2 ended the financial crisis before Obama took office.  As pointed out by an RR reader (here), let’s circle that barn again and take a careful look at what happened before that cold, garbage strewn January 2009 morning in Washington.  Stanford professors Keith Hennessey and Edward Lazear give a succinct accounting of the events and their aftermath (here).  But as we now know, this was a crisis too good to waste in advancing the American socialists’ agenda and fundamentally transforming the nation.

Ending on a high note and a conundrum for collectivist ideology, it turns out that long ago humans evolved brains built for charity.  This has been obvious to the celebrants of American exceptionalism for a couple of centuries or more, now science weighs in with some clinical evidence.  ‘Hard-wired for Giving’ presents the research story (here), but the bigger thrust is that we really don’t need the government gun to make us care for our neighbors and countrymen.  We did it before socialism, and we can do it again if the feds would back off a mite on their forced redistribution programs.  But that is not the progressive view, and the sheeple (see above) are quickly receding out of the reach of reason.

Finally, a little ‘pojetry’ –

The time has come, progressives say
    to speak of many things.
No not of Obama, the here and now,
    or what the future brings.
But of the past, the then and there,
    of Reagan’s sins and Bush laid bare,
    and the shape of Clinton’s wings.

[19sep13 update] ... and a little food for thought.

We are told NOT to judge ALL Muslims by the actions of more than a few Islamic lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.  Makes you wonder ...

Sheriff Mack to speak, Left’s undies knotting up (updated 18sep13)

George Rebane

The NC Republican Women Federated have been working hard to bring Sheriff Richard Mack to speak in Nevada County.  Today The Union ran a piece on the 18oct13 affair to be held in the GV Vets Hall.  Sheriff Mack is the founder of the nation’s constitutional sheriffs movement and a celebrated public servant to most conservatives.  You can find out more about the man’s thinking on his website here.

As predictable as the sunrise, our designated reader sent me a copy of the first of what promises to be many hyper-ventilations by the local Left to somehow diminish the scheduled speaking engagement, or preferably to ban it altogether.  The big insult to these open-minded progressives is that Sheriff Mack will be introduced by our own elected Sheriff Keith Royal.  Now isn’t that an outrage if I ever heard of one?

As pointed out regularly in these pages, it is always the looney Left that wants to proscribe anyone and everyone who doesn’t agree with their message.  Why is that so one-sided?  I’d be quite happy to have them invite Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, Maxine Waters, Rev Sharpton, Rev Jackson, Rev Wright, Bill Ayers, …, hell, even Harry Belafonte up here to speak.  I would definitely be in the audience to hear what they had to say.

[18sep13 update]  Apropos to the asymmetry pointed out above, the comment stream to this post is also illustrative.  In there we see the notion of selective enforcement of laws taken up.  Our progressive commenters are all in a lather about the intentions of certain local sheriffs to enforce only laws, regulations, mandates, etc they consider constitutional or have a proper legal basis.  These commenters treat this notion as if it was invented yesterday by the so-called ‘constitutional sheriffs’, and as if it has not been long practiced by all governmental executive offices during the history of our republic.

Today’s egregious end-runs by POTUS and various state governors of their respective legislatures that has raised hue and cry across the land does not even come up on their radar.  That Obama publicly stated he will constructively legislate through his agencies and bureaus (both criminal and regulatory) does not concern these worthies one whit.  And that the President has already brought untold misery in job destruction and economic malaise nationwide is not their concern as he has promised to continue this policy for the remainder of his term.

Reading these commenters and their lines of argument is truly an education in the study of our polarization and the widening gulf that divides us.

Administrivia – 14sep13

George Rebane

Readers have noticed that RR has again become a target for spam comments; they appear to be mostly ads from different services/vendors.  In an attempt to fight this intrusive nuisance I have limited comments to a thirty day period following the date of my post.

Several readers have suggested that I leave TypePad for a more capable blog server (e.g. Wordpress), and I’m prepared to do that.  But, given other ongoing projects, I have not found a sufficiently easy way to make the switch.  Since RR is a substantial body of work over a seven year period (almost 2,000 posts and over 37,000 comments), my plan would be to leave the TypePad blog intact and simply shut off the commenting.  From the new blog I will still want to link to TypePad entries, and give my readers the ability to do the same.

In any event, things would probably move faster in this direction if I could find a service to scrape RR of its contents and put it on a DVD in a searchable format.  I would even make this material available on/from the new blog.  Ideas/thoughts?

Finally, I take this opportunity to thank all RR readers for frequenting these pages, commenting and contending, and putting up with the inconveniences.  It’s the readership and their use of this forum that keeps my putting the hours into this enterprise, hours that, no doubt, could be more productively used elsewhere.  Again, thank you.

The New Class Divide (updated 14sep13)

George Rebane

            On Wealth - First create, then spread.

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 September 2013.]

As promised, this commentary continues the examination of a new class divide in America that has arisen over the last 50 years.  The supporting data for this comes from multiple institutional and government studies done in the last decade or so, and is compiled in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by the country’s preeminent sociologist and author Charles Murray.

Last time we looked at the rise of a new upper class, its characteristics, and how it has sought to separate and stabilize itself in a transforming America.  You can review that commentary on KVMR’s website archives, or be linked to its transcript from my website Rebane’s Ruminations.  Today we turn our attention to the more worrisome component of our dividing society – the newly emerged lower class.

Murray identifies this lower class as characterized by “differences that affect the ability of people to live satisfying lives, the ability of communities to function as communities, and the ability of America to survive as America.”  In his book he compares and contrasts the classes in terms of two synthesized American communities – Belmont and Fishtown.  The upper class, who live in the country’s Belmonts, comprise about 20% of the population.  The lower class, who live in the Fishtowns, comprise about 30% of the population.  The remaining 50% is somewhere in the middle and shrinking in size, currently losing most of its members to the lower class.

Ruminations – 11sep13

George Rebane

9/11 - Today some of us remember that we are at war with a civilization whose belief system – evil by our standards - cannot survive along ours in an open and inter-connected international community.  And yet others believe that 11 September 2001 happened because of some fundamental misunderstanding between two peer cultures – an unfortunate mistake that is primarily the fault of America.

Last Sunday Nevada City held its annual Constitution Day Parade featuring all kinds of floats, people with banners and in costume, bands, and vehicles serious and silly.  It was a warm, late summer day for our community to celebrate the document that makes possible our society, and to give voice to all manner of ideas the expression of which the Constitution guarantees.  A fine day to celebrate our freedoms.

The Nevada County Friends of the Military (under Fred Buhler’s lead) assembled a march unit that consisted of four vehicles, two of which pulled trailers, and veterans that made up an honor guard and outlier.  On one trailer was a replica of a small bamboo cage with a ‘prisoner’ inside that the North Vietnamese used to punish American POWs.  The float and its honor guard drew a reverent applause as we proceeded down Broad Street.  I was privileged to pull that float.  Jo Ann marched with the NC Tea Party unit.

Our hard pressed ‘designated reader’ emailed me coverage of a local leftwinger’s (FUE’s) blog post and comment stream that took selected participants in the Constitution Day Parade to task.  It seems that the FUE was concerned that the parade has been “politicized”, and excessively so according to his lights.  The infraction was enlarged by the participation of the older generation who attended in excessive numbers, and seemingly with all the wrong politics.  Fortunately, some commenters were able to explain to the FUE that a seminal function of such parades is for people to express their diverse politics as part and parcel of celebrating the document that makes such public expressions possible.

I took away from that yet another example of and confirmation that it is the Left which continues its efforts to silence the Right for its politically incorrect beliefs, the number of which grows by the day.

Two anti-2nd Amendment politicians recalled in Colorado.  Hallelujah!  State senators Giron and Morse felt the ire of the voters for their anti-gun initiatives. Many Coloradans see such legislation as one more reason to feel that Denver (with its heavily progressive out-of-state immigrant population) no longer represents the longheld beliefs and values of the state's less densely populated regions.  I look forward to this kind of activism spreading across the land as evidence that more and more freedom loving people are beginning to pay attention to the rising autocracy of collectivism.

The Larger Train Wreck Still Looms

As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron. - H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

George Rebane

Two things.  While we are busy worrying about protecting frogs and lizards, and the whereabouts of Obama’s absent Mideast policy, I keep hearing the strains of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ‘Sixteen Tons’ in the background getting louder by the month - “… if the right one don’t a getcha, then the left one will.”

Systemic unemployment and unfunded liabilities.  The rampant rise of the first will make it impossible to pay off the second.  With the latest data coming in, it looks like both of them will getcha.

The employment data just reported was beyond sad (more here).  One could tell that by just watching the administration and their media acolytes' desperate spin on the news from the Commerce Department.  Longtime readers will recall that RR has long warned of what is happening in these pre-Singularity years.  I even went as far as to stick my neck out some years back predicting that by 2020 the country would have 70 million unemployed (pooh-poohed universally).  Turns out I was wrong – that number will be much higher.  How high?  Well, some economic pundits are putting those already sitting on the employment sidelines at 90M and rising; it all depends on how you tally up America’s workforce.  No matter, the fraction of that workforce working or looking for work keeps dropping (see chart), which is the only thing that let’s Team Obama keep crowing about the 7.3% unemployment rate (it would be almost 11% if all the folks in the workforce at the beginning of the recovery were still looking for work).

It’s hard to tell how many jobs the private sector has eked out under Obama since most of them have been part time jobs, and now that he’s redefined the full time work week to be 30 hours, the situation is more complicated.  But it does well serve his intentions for the country.

(For those wanting to review some quantitative aspects of how productivity, GDP, and workforce numbers relate, please reread ‘The Real Jobs Problem – Shhh!’.)

Then we come to unfunded liabilities, bankrupt cities, and Chapter 9 – again topics long discussed here before they became a political concern, and now a public concern.  Investment maven Bill Mauldin has a recent compendium (‘Unrealistic Expectations’) on the subject from the financial industry's perspective, and it turns out worse than any politician either knows or wants to talk about.


I have lifted the nearby histogram that summarizes the monetary and fiscal devastation that faces us today.  For more numerical detail and the broader picture, please read Mauldin’s article.  But the bottom line is that without sustained economic growth rates in the 5+% range, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that these unfunded liabilities will be extracted from taxpayers in the coming years.  The nominal amounts will simply be paid off in worthless fiat money.  And for today’s politics and the ever sinking level of voter cognition, that’s OK.  Who really understands things like discount rates, fiat money, deficit, national debt, GDP, unfunded liability, … ?  The gold-plated workable solution for successful politicians is not to talk about it, while promising more taxes on the rich and corporations to make things right and fund their monthly palliatives, aka checks.

And better yet, let’s talk about Syria instead.

Your data coerced and co-opted

George Rebane

The Guardian, NYT, and NPR report the latest disclosures from Snowden’s cache of purloined NSA documents.  It now appears that the feds are decrypting reams of internet data from Americans in an “opportunistic” manner.  This means that they just gratuitously grab it, convert it into clear text, and then store it for later analysis just to see if it might contain anything of interest to them.

But that’s just the ho-hum news that we’ve been hearing for months (years?) now – so what else is new?  To me the real news is that the feds have convinced certain big data collection and handling companies on the web to not only turn over data to the government, but also share with them their encryption processes; and here’s the big one, to insert ‘back doors’ and ‘trap doors’ into the security programs of these companies.  These software devices allow the NSA to access and manipulate the manner in which security measures are embedded in data transmission systems that such companies operate.  (a snootful here and here)

Fundamentally, all these firms are customer service companies, and they all trumpet how they keep their customers’ data secure.  Now we know that some of these companies lie to us when they say that.  For them to have started opening up their software to NSA, it sure appears that they were coerced to do so.  Why else would they compromise their integrity which is the keystone of their customer trust relationship?  (At BizRate.com a decade ago we were early collectors of consumer data, and the loss of trust would have put us out of business literally overnight.  Even the appearance of that was a big concern to us as various organizations and institutions approached us for data.)

Under such circumstances it would be more than interesting to know what ‘offers’ Big Brother made to these companies that they could not refuse.

So now we are assured that even our most private data transmitted between our financial institutions and legal counsel is open to the government.  We are told not to worry because it is all done for our safety and security, and I’m confident that some such activity is indeed necessary given the technical sophisticates in the employ of radical Islam and other geo-strategic adversaries.

But I’d sure like to know more about how the NSA et al really parse and partition the data they surreptitiously lift from us, how they assure that some lame brain bureaucrat from another agency does not get his hands on it for use against us in non-security situations.  From the general ineptness, incompetence, and perfidy rampant in government operations, the chance that such data sharing will be done is almost certainty.  What could or should a well-intentioned government do to put our minds at rest, instead of telling us to ‘suck it up and live with it’?

Igor Birman for Congress

George Rebane

This morning Jo Ann and I drove to Folsom to attend Igor Birman’s announcement of his candidacy for Congress from California’s 7th congressional district.  We were not the only Nevada County residents to make the trek.  Even though we can’t vote for him, many of us who live up here see Igor’s candidacy as adding to the conservative cohort from our state that can help bring our country back on course.  (Igor’s website)

Igor Birman has been Congressman Tom McClintock’s chief of staff, and is one of the youngest to hold such an important job in Washington.  Igor was born in the USSR and got out when his parents took advantage of the window that President Reagan created with the agreement to let Russian Jews emigrate from a land in which they have been third class citizens for generations.  While I have a definite affinity with Igor’s odyssey – my parents also escaped communism when I was a youngster (cf My Story) – we support Igor’s candidacy because he is very smart, has high moral standards, and recognizes way better than most the tragedy that socialism cum collectivism brings into human lives.

Some years back Tom McClintock introduced us to Igor, and since then he has become our friend, often spending meal times at our house during which we have delved into some very interesting topics of state and national interest.  Igor’s job in Washington has always brought perspectives to bear on the topic that are accessible only to one who knows and operates in the belly of the beast.  Igor’s understanding of the nation’s problems, especially in public education and its contribution to systemic unemployment in a shrinking workforce, is thorough and deep.  His overall ideology and politics also make him a desirable candidate for the tea party faction of the Republican party.

Congressman McClintock delivered an eloquently bittersweet introduction to Igor, acknowledging the loss of an extremely valuable aide while celebrating his promising and needed candidacy for Congress.  I am heartened by the potential of adding Igor Birman to the team of conservative northern Californians comprised of Doug LaMalfa, Tom McClintock, and Dan Logue (who is running for the 3rd congressional district seat) – the four horsemen of socialism's apocalypse.

Reason and Rationality (updated)

George Rebane

California’s Siskiyou County is the latest jurisdiction in the land to voice its opposition to the growing de facto condition of regulation and taxation without representation.  Their stated desire to secede from California is but another cri de coeur in the growing national chorus that laments growing statism.  The success of such movements is unlikely, but the clarity of the delivered messages should not be dismissed.

As Charles Murray has pointed out in Coming Apart (reported here), it is an established part of human nature that people like to live with people who are more than less like themselves.  One of the prime reasons of that is that living with people whose behaviors you can predict more or less reliably is both efficient and gives comfort.  This strong tendency has given rise to distinct cultures, and contributed to the richness and diversity of our world.  It is such a valuable part of human life that wars have been and continue to be fought over the preservation of cultures – in short, people with cultures worth preserving are often willing to sacrifice all in such preservation.

These ideas are foreign or invisible to those of the Left who see the salvation of Mankind in the homogenizing of the world’s cultural differences (witness the great social experiments in cultural homogenization in the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, …).  In these pages I have yet to see a liberal reader who understands the Great Divide.  They all seem to restrict their thinking to hip level reasoning as they start spouting the usual slogans about racism, etc.

Nobelist Daniel Kahneman (along with the late Amos Tversky) devoted their careers to the study of human rationality.  Their findings demonstrated that humans are not reliably rational critters, that the ‘economic man’ was more of an academic fiction than a mathematically predictable agent.  Kahneman and other behavioral economists “call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and their values.”

However being a rational person does not necessarily mean that he is reasonable.  The test of rationality involves assessing “whether a person’s beliefs are internally consistent”, in short do they reliably conform to a system of logic.  As Kahneman points out, “a rational person can believe in ghosts so long as all her other beliefs are consistent with the existence of ghosts”, in short “rationality is logical coherence – reasonable or not.”

This conforms to the ideas of utility and multiple logics which I have attempted to illustrate over the last years.  In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes numerous experiments and instances in which humans behave irrationally.  In this development he appears to be a supporter of ‘libertarian paternalism’ of the brand that Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, advocates.  Libertarian paternalism is a means of delivering public policy “in which the state and other institutions are allowed to nudge people to make decisions that serve their own long-term interests.”  (And it is, of course, some set of elites who determine our ‘long-term interests’.)

Perhaps nowhere have we seen such a massive demonstration of human irrationality as in the constituencies that voted for Barack Obama.  Here we are talking about women, the young, blacks, Hispanics, etc, all of whom have suffered under the Obama years as their financial fortunes declined after measurable gains and progress over the preceding 25+ years.  And given the evidence in their everyday lives and pocketbooks, they returned the man to office in 2012.  Stephen Moore in ‘Obama’s Economy Hits His Voters Hardest’ in the 4sep13 WSJ goes into the relevant numbers.

It is all of a piece when we consider the Great Divide in the context of our polarized nation.

[update]  Talk about reason and logic going beserk.  Today we attended Congressman LaMalfa’s frogs and toads public hearing at Nevada County’s Rood Center.  There are some yellow bellied, double suckered, single crested frogs or something similar that the US Fish & Wildlife Service tells us is threatened, and it needs a critical habitat and recovery area set aside for it that covers a good swath of the Sierra.  The hearing’s purpose was to inform the public on the progress of this newest endangered species initiative, and allow people to ask questions.  I’m sure that The Union and Yubanet will cover the details, so I won’t bother you with them here.

The public received assurances that the FWS isn’t going to do anything to restrict property rights or hurt the region’s economy.  It doesn’t have the power to do that, so all such damage will be done by other agencies that will subsequently cite the FWS ruling that the multi-toed, yellow-beaked, one-eyed toads need such and such acres for the critters’ recovery, and that will then require another list of things that we can’t do on the affected public lands and private properties.

The supes chambers were filled with people mostly very agitated about the feds continuing to turn the screws on us.  Public trust of the federal government doing anything productive in protecting species and the environment is pretty much gone.  Much of the testimony included citations of the decades’ long mismanagement of the nation’s forests – which now contain fuel densities that create Dresden type firestorms (that some idiots conveniently blame on AGW) – and protection of species (look up the miserable history of the spotted owl).

That progressives are dangerous to your pocket book and health is also highlighted by the Pacific Legal Foundation which has called our attention to (seatbelts please) the feds intent to list polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  This is beyond cynical, and again exposes the overall Agenda21 underbelly of progressive public policy initiatives.  The already protected polar bears are among the healthiest species in the world, now populating their ancestral habitats in numbers that are fivefold of what they were fifty years ago.

But the gratuitous listing of them as ‘threatened’ under the ESA will allow another tranche of land and water use regulations to kick in that will ratchet down more of the wilderness areas that are available for recreation and commercial use.  The broad spectrum stack & pack initiatives are visible under every bureaucratic rock that you care to turn over.  Meanwhile, the Left denies that any of this has been happening, but assures us that more of it needs to happen.

One of the more comedic moments at the Rood Center was when a member of the public held up maps that compared the contemplated frog and toad recovery habitats to the notorious A21 wildlands map that has been much debated for the last 20+ years.  The FWS folks had never seen or heard of it.  Again we saw Exhibit A that government is the employer of last resort.