Rebane's Ruminations

Common Core Town Hall

When you have no case, abuse the plaintiff.  Marcus Tullius Cicero

George Rebane

The well-attended town hall meeting reported in ‘Common Core Unexamined’ took place last night in the GV Elks Lodge featuring speakers Sandra Stotsky, Ed.D., Brad Dacus, and Lydia Gutierrez, M.Ed.  Dr Stotsky served as one of two credentialed education experts on the CC Validation Committee, Mr Dacus is an attorney and president of the Pacific Justice Institute, and Ms Gutierrez is a 20+ year teacher and is also a Master Teacher for the UCLA Mathematics Project.  Their presentations ended with an extended Q&A with the audience.

Here are the major points that I took away from the evening –

1. The CC standards initiative is a brainchild of and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, currently to the tune of $250M.  The standards concern themselves mainly with literacy and STEM education.

2. CC purports to be the nation’s first “college readiness standards”, prescribing the specifications for curricula that will prepare our kids for a college education which will serve them in tomorrow’s technology driven workforce.

3. CC is not a coherent state led initiative, but it is actually promoted and ‘supported’ by the federal government through a program of grants to qualifying states.

4. CC was put together within a short (six month?) time window by a committee of 17? – almost entirely from the ‘testing industry’ - under the aegis of the Gates Foundation without debate and/or consultation with parents, teachers, educators, school boards, industry, … . Since the GF is private, there is no requirement for it to report on the deliberations that led to the issued standards.

5. CC was ‘validated’ in an equally short time frame that omitted the usual multi-year period of testing and evaluation that previously adopted educational standards have enjoyed.

6. The two accredited experts on the CC Validation Committee – Drs Stotsky (lexicographic literacy) and Stanford’s James Milgram (math) – refused to validate the standards and resigned from the 29-member committee.  They wrote about their concerns in ‘Lowering the Bar: How Common Core Math Fails to Prepare High School Students for STEM’.

7. Opposition to CC is now non-partisan and growing, even among the 45 states that initially adopted it.

8. There exist no coherent CC testing procedures or test standards for CC curricula.  The recommended testing approaches are designed for computer delivery and grading.  The tests will be ‘dynamic’ in that successive questions will be delivered on the basis of the student’s answer on the current and previous questions.  This makes rating, ranking, and other forms of comparing students’ accomplishments difficult to impossible.  However, it does support achieving higher aggregate test scores.

9. Fed funding will initially come through the residual No Child Left Behind appropriation which only requires high test scores in the states’ adopted testing programs (here, of course, CC).

10. Parents have the right to opt their kids out of having to take CC assessment tests, although they must still participate in the CC curricula offered by the various school districts that are teaching to the standards.

More later.

Public Pension Punishments in a Progressive Posterchild

George Rebane

Illinois is a one of many states (e.g. California) that highlights the evils of progressivism applied wholesale.  It is worth holding up as an example of the latest problems with the trillions of dollars of unfunded public pension liabilities (much covered on RR) that are plastered over the nation’s fiscal landscape.  Today the state, a leader in corruption and crime, remains in a deep hole of public pension debt from which it hasn’t been able to dig itself out with past tax increases.  So now it’s time to raise them again.  (Here are some Illinois rankings published by their own Chicago Tribune.)

At issue is the replacement of the state’s flat income tax with a progressive version like we have in California – the more you make, the higher tax rate you pay.  And as in California, this has already caused an outmigration from the ranks of the state’s high earning residents.  But that makes no never mind to the public service employee unions like SEIU who are now being joined by some of the most misguided Christian clergy on God’s green earth.

Common Core Unexamined

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 April 2014.]

Some years back the National Governors Association, realizing that America’s workforce was rapidly losing out in the global job markets, concluded that the country needed a new approach to K-12 education.  Its efforts to that end produced what today is known as the Common Core national educational standards (more here).  By educational standards they mean to prescribe a common basis for what things a kid is supposed know when they complete each grade.

Since the old wasn’t working all that well, these new standards began to catch on with certain politicians and educators.  Then the federal government threw its weight behind Common Core, identifying its adoption by a state as having qualified for new No Child Left Behind grants.  And before most people knew it, Common Core standards were quietly taken up by most states in one form or another.  Today only five states have not signed up.

But that is just the beginning of the story.  Academic standards make up only one leg of the three required to complete what we might call an educational system.  The other two are the curriculum that would support achieving the standards, and the assessments and evaluations, or standardized testing for short, that would tell us how well the students were meeting the standards.  Initially, the curriculum remained for each state to draw up as they saw fit, and most left it to local school districts.

Ruminations – 22apr14 (updated 27apr14)

George Rebane

The recent DoS attack on Typepad has made reading and commenting tough on RR and countless other blogs on that service.  In this interval I have had a chance to put some serious effort into one of my other lives – investor in and technical consultant to a rapidly growing financial engineering start-up that develops and licenses decision support products to the investment advisory community.  My job is to continue inventing new products, and help solve thorny technical problems as they arise that involve a lot of equations, data, and coding.  The work is actually the sweet spot of what I’ve done all my life – I get to ‘push squigglies’ and not worry about sales & marketing, facility issues, staff relations, hiring, regulatory & legal matters, financing & cashflow, …, well, maybe a little bit.  But I do get to worry a lot about why a certain solution is not converging, and how to deal with some pretty ugly looking probability distributions that impact serious decisions.  So as we are taught – the Lord giveth as He taketh away.

Well, it looks like the move to dividing California is neither treasonous nor dead as our progressive pundits have continued to assure us.  I have no idea where the initiative to form the new state of Jefferson out of northern California will go.  But I and everyone who is paying attention understands what the prime motivation is behind this effort.  The main drivers of splitting the state are unequal representation, divergence of interests and values, and overreach of government (state and fed) into people’s lives.  Yuba county is the latest to join the already declared counties for forming a new state.  Nevada and Placer counties are being actively recruited by organizations like the Norcal Tea Party to also join the movement.

As long preached on these pages, people like to live in smaller communities populated by others who believe and act more or less like they do – i.e. ideologically more cohesive communities with the ability to effect local control.  In its present configuration California is way too big even if we forget that it is heading toward an economic basket case under the perennial leadership of a cohort of corrupt collectivists determined to achieve the social, economic, and political objectives summarized under Agenda21 (see RR A21 category for more).

According to an email from its former executive director Chuck Shea, CABPRO is back in the hands of the Board that had allegedly resigned.  Mr Shea and his supporting former Board members have withdrawn their lawsuit asserting their leadership of the organization.  Readers were informed of the controversy here.  No word yet on what the structure and direction of the revived CABPRO will be.  In the interval we are enjoying a peace that passeth all understanding.

[update]  “Back-door gun control” is what some are calling the ongoing massive ammo purchases and orders by Homeland Security and other government departments that has now exceeded 2.5 billion man killing rounds.  Their latest is the addition of 25 million shotgun shells including 5 million deer slugs.  The ongoing government purchases that have no stated ending has caused an historical shortage and usurious price increases of ammunition for civilian markets.  For a government that expects its social policies to instigate civil unrest, all this makes sense – constructively disarm the public while adding guns and gun-toting personnel to government ranks.  DHS alone fields an army of over 100,000 armed agents which is the equivalent of about seven Army/marine divisions.  And the nation’s numbnuts are being told that all of this is to protect them from terrorists.  More here.

[23apr14 update]  AB32’s wraps have finally been completely removed.  The state’s clean air act is in fact the wealth redistribution and voting buying scheme that many of us predicted here from the outset.  Carbon cap’n tax law had the other purpose of driving businesses out of California that hire the poor and lower middle class so that more may be added to the transfer payment rolls that progressive politicians direct toward their constituencies.  “California seems to be the place where bad ideas go to live—and reproduce.”  The Sacramento scumbags led by state senate president Darrel Steinberg have some not so surprising ideas where the AB32 tribute monies should be spent (more here).

[27apr14 update]  A correspondent emailed me an insight by a physician who finally explained the unsavory odor that we experience every time more of Obamacare is revealed.  However, it was really Nancy Pelosi who first put her finger on it or in it when she pronounced the new socialized healthcare act as a member of things that have to be passed before their contents can be ascertained.  The now confirmed and propitious pairing is, of course, Obamacare and stool samples.

Administrivia – 21apr14

George Rebane TypePad has been under the most intense ‘denial of service’ attack for the last few days, and therefore RR has not been available for either reading for comment. They claim to be making some headway in “stabilizing” their servers, but who knows. Since everything was down, including their system site, they have been using Twitter to get the word out on their status. Here is the URL - https://twitter.com/typepad .  And here is some info they’re now putting out on their own site - http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/response-to-downtime.html .

I add my apologies to TypePad’s for the misfortune they/we have had visited on us by the scum that often takes human form.

HE IS RISEN!

George Rebane

As Christmas is the promise, Easter is the fulfillment.  Oblivion vanquished, rejoice!

A confused op-ed by The Union publisher

George Rebane

The Union’s new publisher, Jim Hemig, gave us his understanding of today’s media landscape.  In his 18apr14 op-ed he compared “the difference between a journalist and a blogger.”  His point was that a journalist, especially if he works for The Union, has available all kinds of sources for reporting news and uses them to present a “balanced” view in the published product.  Hemig then let us know that “bloggers often don’t have such integrity.  They only share one opinion: their own.”

He later goes on to also paint the entire online community (here we’re talking about a global resource with practically infinite content) as somehow speaking with voices that are intrinsically and ubiquitously biased, claiming that “if you really read The Union … you will find it is a balanced and a much fairer place than anywhere on the Internet (and definitely in print).”

Now I am not familiar with Mr Hemig’s background and may well be underestimating the gentleman, but this op-ed piece does give me pause as to what kind of publishing and journalistic talent our newspaper is currently brandishing.  First of all, he grossly errs in posing the initial question, putting in doubt his understanding of the structure of today’s information media.  To wit, a blogger is a person who publishes a weblog or blog, and can be a journalist, commentator (like me), affinity group (e.g. gardening) editor, or simply a family member maintaining a family information and communication repository (e.g. on Facebook).  And a journalist is just one type of wordsmith from the many who can publish his work on one or more kinds of media outlets – print newspapers and magazines, TV, radio, cable, documentary videos, online news outlets (Reuters, AP), blogs, … .  Comparing the difference between journalists and bloggers is at best failing to distinguish between the content provider and the outlet medium.

The Rebanes are long time subscribers to both the print and online editions of The Union.  The newspaper itself is a run-of-the-mill small town publication that often displays its best efforts in sometimes humorous, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes even infuriating ways.  We cannot characterize it as a career fulfillment workplace for anyone who works in the news industry.  Nevertheless, it is the most read news outlet in our community, and it is the best print medium we have and the best that our dollars can support.

The good news is that for most local thinking people The Union is but one of a hundred sources from which they regularly get their news and commentaries that offer competing viewpoints.  The paper should be considered within this perspective, and our criticism of it should not be done in the context of putting it next to the big guys like the NYT, LA Times, or Washington Post.  Most certainly the claims of any news outlet for being fair and balanced – be it Fox News or MSNBC – should be taken with a block of salt, and that includes the breast beating of our little Union.  Not every story is or can be ‘fair’ to all concerned, and most certainly every news item doesn’t come with a hidden ‘balance’ that a journalist or commentator must always dig out and reveal.  The world is not built that way, but it can be painted as such by people pushing this agenda or that – and everyone has an agenda, which reality is easily verifiable from a perusal of the so-called world class media.

In sum, The Union is Nevada County’s cosa nostra (‘our thing’) in news, let’s enjoy it as it is, and just smile when its management tries a little puffery to rebut its often gratuitous critics.

Mexico Toughens Stance on Autonomy for Southwest US

George Rebane

Mexico City, 6 May 2024 – Mexico’s president Juan Carlos Echeverria announced in his Cinco de Mayo celebration speech in San Diego that Mexican forces that have staged over the last six months along Mexico’s northern border would be further reinforced.  Tensions have increased since Russia announced that it was providing additional combat air units and advisors to Mexico under the two countries’ far reaching mutual aid and defense pact signed last year.

Negotiations with the newly formed Reconquista Party have stalled over the status of Texas and Utah in a post-autonomous Aztlan which is to be comprised of the present states New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.  The negotiations have traveled a rocky road over the last ten months that started after the Reconquista Party sent their Commission for the Liberation of Aztlan to Washington with a list of demands for a new autonomous region in the southwest United States.

Demonstrations by various Hispanic and immigrant activist groups have grown from peaceful gatherings protesting violations of human rights and outright repression of America’s Spanish speaking population to violent encounters with local police and country sheriffs.  Things took a definite turn for the worse last July 4th with the concurrent bombing of three power distribution stations which left most of western US without power for almost two weeks.  Washington still claims it has evidence that the strategic selection of targets and the coordinated attacks were carried out by Mexican nationals trained by their military with help from Mexico’s allies.

Typhoon Tarnaev – one year on

George Rebane

Today there have been many observances and rembrances of the explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon that killed three, injured over 260, and blew the limbs off 16 of them.  People were gathered at these planned events to celebrate their “show of defiance and resilience” in the face of this tragedy.  NPR this morning assured us that nowhere would the source and purpose of this disaster be mentioned.  It was to be a focused and positive city-wide celebration of healing, of how tough the citizens of Boston could be when confronted by such unstoppable natural disasters.

On this day we will not revisit the real cause of those explosions; neither will we examine the event’s larger context.  We will not speak of the global terror that radical Islam spawns.  We will not speak of the constant killings that are committed in the name of that religion, and the cultures it grounds worldwide (14apr14 Abujah, Nigeria – 71 killed, 124 wounded).  We will not speak of the ignorance and hate that are taught in its madrassas.  We will not speak of its age old and ongoing treatment of women as sexual and reproductive chattel.  We will simply think of such occasions of medieval murder and mayhem as we would of any other incomprehensible act of God.  And there we will be in complete agreement with the Islamists, because they too believe they are carrying out acts of God.

That we no longer nurture or care for our own beliefs may be the surest sign that our culture has no beliefs to care for and defend.

A Takeaway from Bundy Ranch (updated 19apr14)

George Rebane

When tyrannies make the laws, all opponents of tyranny are then seen and treated as criminals.

The ownership and control of our public lands is a mess, both legally and constitutionally.  Save for military bases (an arguably constitutional provision), why does the federal government claim ownership – laughably in the name of ‘the public’ - of large parts of the country?  Save for preserving certain particularly scenic locales as public parks, why do states need to own land?  (I find federal ownership of land for parks and recreation to also be constitutionally unfounded.)  Yes, there are reasons for state governments to share control of ‘infrastructure land’ that contain navigable rivers, flood control dams and levees, and water reservoirs, but owning thousands of square miles of open range, mountains, and forests, the case for such has no reasonable constitutional basis.

(Recall the definition of ownership, you ‘own’ something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you wish.)

Due to the Bundy Ranch gathering of citizens concerned with the jackboot behavior of various fed and state agencies, the BLM has decided to withdraw in order to regroup and replan their next assault, because they apparently expected none of what happened – e.g. consider the set aside of a little ‘First Amendment Rights’ pen for the few people who might show up to quietly protest as permitted by their betters.

I was heartened that this event finally demonstrated what can happen when citizens ‘just say NO!’, both in their courage to unambiguously state that a limit to overreach had been broached, and also by the rapid gathering of supportive citizens who were willing to take an unknown risk against militarized government units armed with machine guns, snipers, and helicopters.  I hope that this might set an inspiring example for locals all over the country to resist the next diktat that comes down from above to perfunctorily limit more of what/how/when people can do, say, wear, eat, build, travel, stay, read, watch, learn, work, recreate, worship, display, spend, receive, join, … .  If the Bundy standoff can serve as the starting point for Americans everywhere to change their recently inbred docile acceptance to one of critical examination and consideration before compliance or its rejection, then this will have been a productive milestone on the road back to liberty.  (Nevada County electeds please take note.)

As to resolving the grazing on public lands matter, I expect that the feds will be back after an appropriate media propaganda blitz that will demonize the Bundys and others who may have similar thoughts.  Here we can hope that this will raise the country’s awareness of the public lands issue, and after appropriate debate, lead to a resolution that gets the feds out of the land management business and, perhaps, shuts down a tax consuming bureaucracy.  Important and exciting times ahead.

[19apr14 update]  Contrary to the somewhat bombastic interpretations of our progressive constitutional pundits, the legitimacy of federal retention of vast tracts of western lands is being called to question by lawmakers in western states (more here).  The historical legality of such federal retention which I and a number of other observers have criticized is now coming to the attention of some of our conservative political leadership.  The bottom line is still that the feds have usurped the states’ intended rights to own and control (i.e. dispose of as they will) public lands within their borders, and a progressive judicial system has made mockery of the clear original intent of the Constitution in this matter.

Perhaps now a reasoned debate can start on the most appropriate process through which we can erase the overwhelming amount of the western red areas in the above map.  To be sure, the big government collectivists will fight tooth and nail to retain as much central control of domestic policies in Washington as possible.  America’s historical standards of liberty and self-determination demand the devolution of such central controls to the states and counties where the people live.

Your life savings will bail in SIFIs

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. - Sir Walter Scott

George Rebane

Remember those banks and other financial institutions that were ‘too big to fail’?  Well, the IMF has confirmed that the world of global finance still has such enterprises so that if one goes down, it has the tendency to pull others down, resulting in worldwide chaos.  In the past – recall 2008 – governments put billions of taxpayer monies into such banks to keep them solvent as they started to be stiffed on the loans and other risky commitments that they had made.

Regardless of all the happy dancing in the Rose Garden about increased employment and improving economy, what’s really happening is that the global economy, including America’s, is in a mess.  As a result, governments all over are worried sick about the size of future bailouts which promise to be huge compared to the amounts paid out a few years back.  Their reaction to this really tells the true tale of what is going on in the world’s fisc, and it ain’t pretty.  Catastrophe looms.

In response, the mavens at IMF have come up with a couple of ‘improvements’ to make things better in the future.  But don’t hold your breath about anything becoming better for you.  First, institutions too big to fail will no longer be labeled so obviously.  Instead, they will be called Systemically Important Financial Institutions, or SIFIs for short.  All that means is that each SIFI finds itself in a row of dominoes made up of other SIFIs and lesser banks, so that no SIFI is going to go down alone.

Who is that man?

"... with the whole world full of fools, there is none who thinks himself one, or even suspects it."  Gracian #201

George Rebane

The news comes pouring in daily of Obamacare’s manifest incorrigible faults and the stream of palliative executive orders designed to rescue it.  The longstanding cases of this administration’s corruption and scandals are not going away in spite of the recently launched diversionary pyrotechnics about income inequality and discrimination against women in the workplace.  The federal government’s rogue departments and agencies continue recalcitrant.  Systemic unemployment and welfare rolls grow to record levels while the nation’s ability to defend its interests wanes as unpayable national debt climbs toward the stars - and the list goes on.

What President Obama has done both domestically and internationally during his years in office can be only characterized as being 1) insouciant while terminally incompetent bordering on imbecility, or 2) a clever traitor who has every intention of reducing the US to second world nation-state peerage, dependent then on a strong global government to define and succor our economic and security needs.  There no longer is any discernible middle ground.

Being generous by nature, I give the man the benefit of doubt, and hold him to be the former as he achieves the ends of the latter.

(This brief summary is posted as a public service to RR readers who may have missed the unifying thrust of the commentaries critical of the administration that decorate these pages.)

Con-Con and Common Core

George Rebane

RR, in its long suffering and dedicated effort to continue the posting of announcements of public import, your attention is invited to the following two.

Con-Con or the Constitutional Convention as called for in Article 5 has become an item of some urgency for factions widely separated in their ideology and their view of our country’s future.  On the one hand we have national conservative leaders like Mark Meckler – President of Citizens for Self Governance – promoting the assembling of a constitutional convention of the states.  And on the other extreme there is George Soros, joined by hundreds of leftwing organizations and institutions, who are promoting the very same thing.  Both sides have widely differing agendas for what they think they will be able to accomplish during such a convention.  A main focus for both sides is the Second Amendment, approached for diametrically different ends.  The conservatives also want to revamp the Constitution to clearly “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government”, in short, a return to the kind of federalism envisioned by the Founders and much discussed in these pages.  (more here, here, and here)

It appears that 34 states, the required two-thirds, have already passed resolutions and given other formal nods to holding a con-con.  However, not everyone is happy with the possible outcomes from such an undertaking.  Both sides feel that they can control and limit the convention to favorably address just the concerns on their agenda.  The requirements for any significant change – from amendment to rewrite – are strict and require a level of co-operation and consensus among the states that today is not visible.  So one can reasonably argue that the most probable outcome of a con-con is a shouting match resulting in no agreement on anything.  However, there is a chance that one side or the other may actually prevail, and that’s the scary part.

Common Core.  Switching gears to the plague now afflicting the nation’s K-12 curriculum, there will be a town hall meeting on the subject here in Grass Valley on 29 April 2014 at the GV Elks Lodge.  Jan Collins (530-802-0865) is chairing the event and states that “there is growing grassroots opposition nationwide to the new one-size fits all curriculum, and its accompanying testing and collection of invasive personal data about our children and their families. Home schools, private, and charter schools may find they are affected as well.”  Anyway, mark your calendars and come hear the speakers, and get the latest info on what all the fuss is about; it’s important.  More about Common Core here and here.

Alert - RR commenting sign-in

Both Mozilla Firefox and IE bring up an alert window when you try to sign in to comment on this blog.  The alert advises that you are attempting to go to an insecure URL.  I have a support ticket started on this to inform TypePad, and will remove this post once it is corrected.  I invite readers to attempt commenting to this post and relaying their experience.  Thanks for the trouble.  gjr

Forecasting by Crowds

George Rebane

[This is the addended version of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 4 April 2014.]

Recently our government has had some problems forecasting events critical to the conduct of America’s foreign policy.  We seem to have missed the boat on calling the response of Iran in its nuclear weapons development, the reaction of Syria confronting our ‘red line’, Al Qaueda’s attack in Benghazi, Putin’s reaction to warnings about Crimea, and the list goes on.

Similar problems have been encountered for years by government and private sector economists and analysts in forecasting our economy’s response to various fiscal and monetary policies, and, of course, how people would react to new social programs offered by the feds.  The bottom line is that economists, analysts, bureaucrats, and politicians are always surprised by reality when it happens.

The art of forecasting such events and responses has been a mainstay of our intelligence community, and a lot of effort has gone into coming up with new methods and processes to improve the accuracy of forecasts.  Today this research has involved lots of ordinary people who are neither forecasting nor intelligence specialists.  The field is loosely described as soliciting ‘the wisdom of the crowd’.

It turns out that when you ask a lot of people to estimate some outcome, and then aggregate their answers, you wind up with a surprisingly good result.  This was discovered about a century ago when fair goers in England were asked to estimate the weight of a steer. It turned out that the average of the several hundred submitted estimates came within a pound of the correct weight of the well over a half ton animal.  Since then this has piqued the interest of researchers, and today there are several organizations using ‘crowd sourcing’ to forecast events.

'The Real Crash' - Summary Notes

George Rebane

I read Peter Schiff's The Real Crash (2013) last year and summarized its main findings found in Chapter 12 of the book.  Since I recently attended a conference where Schiff was the keynote speaker and posted on it - A Libertarian Lovefest ... - I thought I'd share this little missal with my readers who may just want to cut to the chase.  Anyway, I ran across the summary while rummaging around in my files, so here it is.

1.    Main thesis – We consume more than we produce.  Therefore foreigners produce more than they consume.  They are the creditors and have pent up demand since they are living below their means.  Such economies will see a surge in demand while ours will languish/shrink.  Invest in companies that will benefit from this shift.  The US economy will crash.
2.    Sectors to invest in
    2.1.    Raw materials – they will drive more cars and buy more washing machines
    2.2.    Agriculture – they will eat more meat and complex foods
    2.3.    Energy
    2.4.    Manufacturing
    2.5.    Chemicals
    2.6.    Infrastructure
    2.7.    Utilities
    2.8.    Technology
3.    Countries to invest in
    3.1.    Australia – energy independent, export to Asia, strong banking system
    3.2.    Singapore – wealthy and high savings, freest economy, large exporter
    3.3.    Hong Kong – low taxes and regs, big China exports, “corporate Mecca”
    3.4.    New Zealand – shift from ag to mfg, big exporter to Australia and China (free trade agreement)
    3.5.    Switzerland – prudent and fiercely independent, home to thriving banks, insurers, pharma, and chemicals, not in Eurozone
    3.6.    Norway – global markets for its oil, fish, forests, and minerals; not in Eurozone, swinging away from a social welfare state
    3.7.    Netherlands – third largest ag exporter, has Europe’s largest natural gas field, good place for “euro exposure”
    3.8.    Canada – growing what the US is shrinking: manufacturing, mining, drilling, extraction, logging.  Poised to shift exports from declining US demand to increasing global demand.
    3.9.    China – “capitalism and democracy are not the same thing”, rocky road ahead but potential for tremendous growth, big US companies moving major operations there.
4.    Investment Strategy (“three legged stool”)
    4.1.    Quality dividend-paying foreign stocks in the right sectors (consider countries, currencies, sectors, individual stocks),  Euro Pacific Capital (brokerage company)
    4.2.    Liquidity and less volatile investments: cash (foreign currencies for liquidity, keep some dollars on hand) and foreign bonds (short maturities, non-dollar denominated, also convertibles), www.europacificfunds.com
    4.3.    Gold and gold mining stocks – Perth Mint Certificate Program, Euro Pacific Precious Metals
5.    Global decoupling from US economy is the big fear.  Our economic collapse “has barely begun”.  Before collapse is complete, “US bonds and the dollar will crash.”

Media Bias – Living in Separate Worlds

George Rebane

Recently the Media Research Center released two reports on how Americans are exposed to what is happening domestically and in the world.  The data in those reports show that most of us who depend on the lamestream and Spanish language outlets get a totally different picture of what is happening – mainly the leftward lean of these stations is obvious in what is not covered and what is brushed aside with a mention of a few seconds on Saturday night.

For example, Hispanics who restrict their news sources to Univision or Telemundo receive a fairy tale version of the Obama administration that has no domestic or foreign policy blemishes let alone gross screw-ups (more here).  They hear nothing of the NSA scandal, Fast and Furious, Obamacare’s shortcomings, IRS targeting of conservatives, Benghazi, or the fiascos in Syria and Ukraine.  Even the nation’s immigration reform picture is tailored for them.

Speaking of immigration reform, the rest of the lamestream led by ABC, CBS, and NBC have uniformly suppressed the news that “immigration enforcement has totally collapsed” (Sen Jeff Sessions R-AL).  The DHS reported that the administration, under DOJ direction, chose to release in the US over 70,000 illegal aliens with criminal records last year instead of deporting them as called for by law.  In its stead, Team Obama is crowing that it “deported” over 250,000 such aliens.   But no lamestream is picking up that these deportees were persons caught crossing the border and simply returned immediately to Mexico.  Such catch and return cases have never been included in the reported deportation numbers that formerly involved only illegal aliens who had successfully established themselves in some manner, and then discovered by ICE and deported after due process.

This list can go on indefinitely and is definitely lopsided when it comes to comparing the completeness of news coverage by right vs left-leaning media.  So when we consider what people know and believe, we are definitely of two separate worlds.  And this division does not even include those folks with little or no ability to assimilate any kind of news because of other cognitive deficiencies.  And they are the ripe pickings of Democrats and the progressive message.

It must be this cohort that the voter registration forms, pre-marked by some liberal worthy, were sent to as part of Covered California’s outreach to include voter registration with Obamacare sign-ups.  Apparently the political party of choice was ‘Democratic Party’ marked with a bold ‘x’.   See if you can find any mention of that beyond Fox News.