Rebane's Ruminations

Those Unedjicated Conservatives

O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!  Robert Burns

George Rebane

RR reader and indefatigable champion of all things progressive, Mr Ben Emery, posted a link under 'So You Wanna College Degree?' to a video that he advises is the progressives' viewpoint on the dumbing down of America, a persistent topic in these pages.  The video – ‘Dumbing Down America For Political Gain’ – features a conversation between an obviously very progressive correspondent/host and his guest, a lawyer who is in violent agreement with everything posited.  It is a must see interview for all conservatives harboring the hope that 21st century America is still located on one planet.

Among the axiomatic truths floated is that the US public education system has been and is under the control of moneyed conservatives who have destroyed the nation’s ability to transmit knowledge to the next generation.  Why have they done such a dastardly thing?  Why, to expand the legions of hamburger flippers and other low-wage workers, so that America can successfully compete with third world workers in making things like tennis shoes - in short, to bring such profit making enterprises back to these shores where presumed margins would be higher.

And to achieve that goal requires that fewer people go to college to learn all those critical thinking skills that higher education in the humanities teaches people.  In the process the conservatives have created a cadre of unedjicated and compliant voters who will maintain and expand the power of the greedy capitalists.  The objective here is that the conservatives want to minimize the number of liberal voters in the country, the voters who represent the real intellectual capital of America.

You can’t make this stuff up, it is what they sincerely believe.  Thank you Mr Emery!

Farm Bill Gutted, Compromised, and Castrated (updated 30jan14)

George Rebane

I don’t even want think about Obama’s SOTU speech last night, it was a five star non-starter that served only one purpose, to act as cover for the Republicans’ caving on the 2014 farm bill that will soon become law of the land for the next five years.  The bill came out of the joint Senate/House conference, and Speaker Boehner rushed it through a vote less than 48 hours after the ‘conference report’ was issued – thus exposing his lie that all House legislation will enjoy a 72-hour period that would let all House members read legislation before being asked to vote on it.

The bill demonstrates the strength of the progressive Democrats, and the commensurate desperation of the congressional Republicans.  In conference the Left got literally everything they wanted, throwing the conservatives a zit on the butt of an elephant as cover with their constituents.  Re-election is the strongest bipartisan motivator, and the Repubs could not see their way clear to defend a principled opposition with the country’s electorate, especially given the level of national dumbth which draws its ‘truth’ from supremely effective Democrat demogauges and their lamestream echo chamber.

State of the Union - we wait with trepidation

George Rebane

NPR woke us up this morning with another cheery report of California’s progress in education and unfunded public employees’ pension liabilitities.  We are now told that latest testing shows three out of four fourth graders are reading below grade level.  And the solution to that is, …, wait for it, more of the same.  We need to increase school funding to enable the same districts with the same curriculum and administrative mavens to have the same unionized teachers do the same ol’ same ol’ while expecting better results.

And in city halls like Sacramento’s there is now the possibility of serious gnashing of teeth and rending of garment – just kidding, they don’t give a big rat’s ass.  It seems that CalPERS has just told Sacramento that its unfunded liabilities are now over $1,000,000,000.   The double dummies who have run town hall for the last ten plus years paid no never mind to the increase in pension benefits they installed after the turn of the century, and instead decided to do nothing on the revenue side of funding such pensions.  I’d love to see some of the memos that went back and forth between CalPERS and Sacramento discussing the need for additional revenues and the decision to just forget about it.

Oh yes, the same stuff is going on with teachers’ pensions according to the latest from CalSTRS.  Basically, here the unfunded liabilities tote up to over $71B with current annual payments required at $4.5B/yr and growing thereafter.  The solution announced by the Senate Democrats ignores this and instead proposes to spend an additional $200M annually to start early education for 4-year-olds.  Now anyone who has informed themselves even a smidgeon on pre-kindergarten government education programs knows that there is no evidence over the years for any lasting benefit from such programs.  (In fact the bigger picture of government training and education programs over the decades demonstrates that they have been TOTALLY ineffective.  The only good training the government provides is in its military.)

Then as we look at the ways how municipalities will solve these problems, can everyone spell ‘Chapter 9’?  Cause more of it’s a’comin’.

So here we are, waiting for our president to lay out the tenets of his redeclared class war tonight, telling us how he will dash and weave through the intricacies of a recalcitrant Congress and a bureaucratic labyrinth, with handfuls of executive orders to stamp out income inequalities and dispense social justice near and far.  According to polls, at least half the country believes Obama to operate somewhere between incompetent and rogue.  The other half will no doubt look with continued hope for more of the much promised change.  The watchword will be ‘inequality’, and the plan of action calls for it to be stamped out once and for all.

After the Soviet and Chinese solutions to egalitarianism became apparent, Kurt Vonnegut wrote about it in a chilling short story – ‘Harrison Bergeron’ (1961) - that was also made into a TV special now lost in the mists of time.  In today’s WSJ Bret Stephens pens a Vonnegut inspired column that contemplates how we could progress toward such a future, given the cadre of entrenched progressives among Washington’s electeds and that completely dominate its bureaucracies.  Tonight we will hear Obama’s attempt to marshal them all to action.  Trepidation, you again abide in our midst.  

Bookends to Income Inequality (Addended)(updated 27jan14)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript to my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 January 2014.]

The class warfare drums have been dusted off and are again starting to pound ever more loudly across our land.  It is time to put Obamacare and the economy behind us, and focus on the nation’s real problem – income inequality.

Why wouldn’t China …?

George Rebane

It occurred to me that given China’s expressed geo-strategic goals and its relationship with the US, were I in charge of China’s foreign policy, why wouldn’t I want to fund every progressive cause and liberal politician at work in America.  Doing so would leverage all of China’s other domestic and international initiatives in its military, commercial, and social sectors.  Getting monies to such leftwing organizations and thought leaders here would be a cinch through third party intermediaries.  US institutions, both for- and non-profit with whom China deals globally, could be ‘given’ monies through legitimate joint venture deals that would then be funneled to leftwing efforts ranging from K-street, through econuts, to PACs funding left-minded legislation and politicians.

Such investment by China would be a force multiplier because it would strengthen and enable the natural tendencies of existing leftwing organizations and people to –

-    Increase the regulatory burden at every turn on American corporations competing with China, and create more numerous and expensive hurdles that small and medium sized businesses must clear;
-    Promote the legislative and litigious gridlock in the judicial system by supporting all manner of tort laws and tort lawyers in the name of the environment and consumer protection;
-    Drastically reduce spending on America’s military, thereby guaranteeing its quick retreat from serving as the world’s ‘white hat’ hegemon while China continues its military build-up for west Asian expansion;
-    Further accelerate the demise of America’s educational system and the dumbing of its information-free population through leftwing academics (e.g. Common Core) and teachers’ unions;
-    Through established leftwing class warfare initiatives and issues (e.g. income inequality), promote an intensified polarization of the country’s population and the decrease of its workforce participation as socialist wealth transfer programs increase and multiply;
-    Promote ever higher minimum wages, and revivify union memberships leading to fewer jobs and greater tendency to invest overseas and to offshore jobs;
-    Weaken the US through ‘financial reforms’ sufficiently to knock the US dollar out of primacy as the world’s reserve currency, thereby smoothing the road for the renminbi to assume that role.

This list could be longer, but you get the idea.  The thought also crosses my mind that they may already be doing that since they have a legitimate and established ‘Fifth Column’ in residence here.  In any case, the basic premise seems to be an easy call for Beijing, and it would tie well with their geo-strategic goal to bring China back to all its former glory and more.  And all without firing a shot.

Did you know? – 18jan2014 (updated 20jan14)

George Rebane

This launches the sometime series of things that I did not know, or was not fully aware of the details.

The censoring of free speech on college campuses is much more pervasive than the lamestream has led us believe.  It turns out that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has been keeping tabs on the shenanigans that liberal dominated academe has been practicing.  In 2007 FIRE found that three out of four colleges and universities in the land explicitly proscribed students’ and faculties’ First Amendment rights.  The situation has gotten better.  Today FIRE reports that the 2013 fraction has been reduced to about three out of five.  These diktats are all to be interpreted by the accusers who might claim to being offended on account of what they overheard someone say about sex, race, age, religion, national origin, color, marital status, pregnancy, disability, or status of veterans.  My question is why stop there when you’re on a roll?  Anyway, I didn’t have a clue that such a large majority of campuses were down on free speech which the Constitution guarantees us exactly because it may be offensive to someone else, but not in the ivied halls where enquiring minds are hobbled as they gather to discover and debate.

California’s Cap & Trade law is following the Pelosi Principle to the letter.  State Senate president Darrell Steinberg is starting to worry out loud about all the undiscovered effluent that the “quarter baked” legislation is beginning to disgorge.  Well, the Democrats did get a glimmer of the crap they had cobbled together when early on they kind of forgot that the passed ‘Global Warmings Solutions Act’ (aka AB32) should really be referred to the ‘California Air Pollution Reduction Act’.  Of course, both names are ludicrous.

But the real disaster for the Dems (and the rest of us) was the discovery that AB32 is driving businesses out of the state.  During strong denials of the same, the scumbags opened up the carbon credit markets to out-of-state participants that today reach as far as Quebec in order to let the state’s desperate businesses find cheaper avenues for making their mandated protection payments.  Now, of course, this means that the state will not get the projected monies for projects having nothing to do with ‘green’ or ‘global warming’ (e.g. high speed rail to nowhere) – we all (save the local leftwing lackeys) knew it would be another slush fund for liberal politicians buying votes.  When voters get stupid, they pay through the nose, except when they’re the transferees of transfer payments.

[Added]  Reader Greg Goodknight has a considerable opinion piece in today's Union that covers global warming and Common Core among other topics.  Hope it's not paywalled.

‘Humanity in Jeopardy’ (updated 29jan14)

George Rebane

I was going to report on the just released results from the Index of Economic Freedom that celebrates its 20th year.  In it the dire news is that the US has dropped out of the top 10 of the 186 countries rated – we are now 12th and continuing to go down (more here and here).  In that report I would lament the eternally dense liberal mind that in its collective application is doing everything possible to reduce our freedoms and ability to have an economy which supports broad-based generation of wealth.  I would also point out the undisputable global evidence that it is the poor that suffer most in countries lower in the IEF rankings.

But in this last great century of Man we have bigger problems facing us as a species huddled on the third planet revolving around a no count star in an unexceptional galaxy.  I was drawn to Max Tegmark’s report of the same title as reported in Ray Kurzweil’s newsletter (here).  Dr Tegmark of MIT is a physicist who, I was advised by a reader, just published Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2013), offering a new theory on the sum and substance of our cosmos.  But as we learn from his 13jan14 report, he wants to alert us to a much larger and proximate concern - our ignorance of and inattention to the impending Singularity.  (Regular RR readers should be very familiar with the topic featured in the Singularity Signposts section.)

In the developed world we are seeing the impact of the pre-Singularity effects every time we open a newspaper or turn on the news.  Our own country is following an increasingly insane path in how we amplify these effects through taking another turn down on our educational system (cf Common Core) – dumbth abounds and continues to spread – and tighten the screws on wealth creation through ever higher taxes and regulatory pile on.  The declared aim of our progressive elites is to herd more and more of these low-information, increasingly un/deremployed sheeple into the voting booths so as to enable them to accelerate the process.

Scattershots – 12jan2014 (updated 15jan14)

George Rebane

NID Rate Increase.  Our local water utility, Nevada Irrigation District, has decided to boost its water rates over 33%, or over a third in the next five years.  We are NID customers, and we protested the rate increase in writing before the hearing on the matter last Wednesday.  Niether fish nor fowl, NID is somewhat of a mystery utility in these parts.  Through its murky operations of power generation, recreation management, and control of all ground water in a tri-county area, it does deliver good quality water in a reliable manner.  Of course it should, since we here in the Sierra ‘make’ our own water which is the envy of the rest of California.

Jo Ann and I protested the rate increase, not on some material grounds that they don’t need the increased revenues, but because they have not made the case for such a huge increase.  They simply cited the usual increase in costs, and the need to pump up their rainy day reserve again.  Their attempt at being open and above board was supposed to be fulfilled by disclosing their 2013-15 budget. (here)

So You Wanna College Degree?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 10 January 2014.]

Did you know that college enrollments in the country are dropping?  For all the hullabaloo about American students placing well down on the list in the world’s youth smarts, it turns out that today fewer of our high school graduates are going to college to prepare themselves for the workplace.  All this in spite of the administration’s touting college as “the ticket to the middle class”.  As an aside, older listeners will remember when high school provided that entry point for almost all Americans.  But today it seems that undergraduate college is the new high school for the remedial work that students require to adequately read, write, and cypher.

But the real reason for declining college attendance is that it no longer provides reliable value for its enormous costs which have been rising much faster than inflation, and more importantly, much faster than the difference in salaries earned by high school and college graduates.  In fact the salary differences have been decreasing by ten to twenty percent during recent years, while the cost of college has gone up over 16% since 2006.

Ruminations - 8jan2014 (updated 9jan14)

George Rebane

Another one of my errors in judgment has been exposed.  According to former SecDef Gates in his forthcoming Duty, I am remiss in having been overly kind to Obama in assessing his dedication to his job and the duty of his office.  Gates knows better, and his views are being well publicized in outlets such as the Fiscal Times (here).  Nevertheless, I think the man has delivered a most measured and gentlemanly criticism of this administration and Congress.  From the excerpts I have read, the media is over-crediting the extent of his criticisms.   Gates’ book comes out on 14 January.

Speaking of Obama and the legacy he will leave in 2016, what if the Republicans again gave Americans the chance to vote for Romney and Ryan.  Will we as an electorate have learned from our devastating mistake in 2012?  Then we re-elected a man who was demonstrably ignorant in economics, foreign affairs, and constitutional law – a man with no executive experience or legislative accomplishment, in addition to a “sealed” past and an extraordinary ability to lie that is only exceeded by his propensity to do so.  And we have reaped what we sowed.

Against the Romney/Ryan ticket the Dems will run Hillary, who despite her past titles, comes with no discernible accomplishment, equally absent executive experience, and baggage that demonstrates her ability to make critical decisions and handle the ‘3pm phone call’ – forget about her handling the ‘3am phone call’.  The alternative to Hillary may be the buffoon from Central Casting – Wrong Way Joe.  Anyway, it’s worth a thought.

And speaking of the constant crapola coming out of the White House, Obama’s shills are hyping Obamacare’s early performance, “crediting it with spending miracles.”  The problem is that according to federal actuaries none of it is true – “the new law had a minimal impact on overall national health spending growth through 2012.”  Nevertheless, its paid “boosters are taking credit for trends that began long before the law passed.”  And some wags observe that “maybe Obamacare should also get retroactive political credit for the germ theory of disease.”  (more here)

[9jan14 update]  Everybody hear the latest about that filthy capitalist enterprise Walmart?  Well, it seems that the bastards have an employee health plan that beats the pants off of Obamacare.  It is much cheaper and provides more than three times the services than are available under the new limited access nationalized healthcare.  It’s just like the greedy corporatists to always show up well-intentioned government programs, just because these are poorly thought out, designed, and implemented.  Is there no shame left in the world?  (more here)

Socialists’ Welfare Merry-go-round (updated)

George Rebane

Government can improve our lives only if it takes more of our money and liberties.  Collectivist tenet

We woke up this morning to NPR’s dutiful support of the Dems’ initiative to extend unemployment benefits beyond their current 99 weeks limit.  The network devoted a supportive segment of its news for that legislation, and then added on a longer editorial piece, seasoned with income inequality references, that highlighted first person interviews with two longtime unemployed single women which were quite heart rending.  In this election year, these offerings were clearly meant to divert further consideration of the liberals’ mismanagement of the nation’s economic recovery since the summer of 2009, along with the reminders of DOJ and IRS scandals, the Benghazi massacre, ongoing foreign policy disasters, and the munificent blessings of Obamacare.

Without the now well-worn recounting of how Team Obama has stifled economic growth that produced the slowest recovery on record, we do remind ourselves that if workforce participation today were what it was before the recession, then unemployment would still be above 10%.  And, of course, that is where it really is when we look past the hokey employment numbers the feds publish.

But this is an election year, and vote buying from the ignorant and the too desperate to think straight is swinging into high gear.  The leftwing politicians’ job security formula is both staid and firmly established.  First, impede job creation and maximize the view that government, not the private sector, provides the good things in life.  Then as the (real) jobless ranks swell, with great ballyhoo introduce new welfare programs to help the unemployed while vilifying all opponents of added spending as uncaring of the nation’s poor and the unfortunate.  This will guarantee that more legions of the uninformed and the information-proof will vote for the same politicians and policies that got them where they now are, and keep them there.

If you are a leftwing politician, what is there not to like about this time-tested and proven approach?  After all, since we are a democracy, let the people speak.

[updated]  A new entitlement in the making?  Besides the attempt by the Dems to distract the country from the rank incompetence of this administration, the real objective here with the fifth year continuance of extended unemployment benefits could be to create a new entitlement category.  This would be the equivalent of being declared disabled and eligible for long term disability benefits.  In the case of unemployment, a former worker could qualify to be declared ‘chronically unemployable’ or ‘terminally untrainable’ or suffering from a broad-based ‘skills deficit’, or whatever … .

The point of the title to this piece is that the socialist politician is always looking to lock in another cohort of reliable voters.  That our friends on the Left attempt to equate the current unemployment benefits run with that of our last president is understandable.  We leave it for them to answer how many years of breast-beating “economic recovery” is needed before this president stops calling for the next “emergency extension” of benefits, and admits that we now need a brand new entitlement to handle those permanently unemployed for reasons other than physical or mental disabilities.  In short, that he and his private sector innocent team will not allow the American economy to create the jobs required to bring real unemployment down to the levels enjoyed under more enlightened public policies.  You see, they don’t have to do any fancy thinking on this – just get out of the way.

Scattershots on Cultural Change (updated 6jan14)

George Rebane

I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.

Today I mourn.  Stanford JD Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute informs us all how ‘The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’.  I mourn more deeply because it is at my alma mater where the coup de grace is being delivered.  UCLA has been the home of one of the nation’s flagship departments of English, but that has come to an end with a progressive and narcissistic turn of curriculum that today requires its majors to study not one whit of great English literature from the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton.  Instead, the students will now be exposed to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

MacDonald confirms that in present day humanities “the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferable his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.”  Displacing the classics will be the mandate that UCLA English majors instead will take three courses from the areas of –

-    Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies;
-    Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies;
-    Genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory;
-    Creative writing.

Walter Williams on the Great Divide

George Rebane

The Great Divide as a means to peaceably resolve the post-tipping point ideological polarization of the country is a major theme on RR and has its own category of related posts.  The thought of Dr Walter Williams, eminent academic, economist, and outspoken observer of the American scene, has often graced these pages.  At a recent Investors Business Daily conference Dr Williams gave his assessment (here) of where we are as a divided people and what we should do about it.  (H/T to reader)

My thoughts on the matter in a similar vein have caused some of the more rabid of the local left to call me a traitor, and for my expulsion from these shores.  The fear of the Left’s losing their meal ticket is palpable and totally understandable.  Nevertheless, Dr Williams and many people now see a negotiated partition of the country as the only reasonable and peaceful way forward which will halt the growing tyranny by the majority of the ignorant and least productive over the productive minority yearning to again enjoy the freedoms our Founders bequeathed us.

Please take time to read and reflect on the arguments presented in this short piece.