Rebane's Ruminations

How Free is America?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 October 2015, not 30 September as previously noted.]

For over two centuries America has had the reputation as being exceptional in the freedoms granted its citizens and guaranteed by its constitution.  However things have changed over the last 50 years or so, and few Americans are aware of it.  Our personal and economic freedoms have taken a dive which has gone unreported by the left-leaning lamestream media, and therefore unknown to those who limit their news to such outlets.  You are fortunate that KVMR is not among them.

Recently some thought provoking studies have been published which put the United States into perspective with other developed countries, and the resulting picture is not pretty.  But the findings do go a long way to explain the economic and social degradation we experience in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Sandbox - 29sep15

[Apologies for the belated opening of the new sandbox.  Sure would like to hear a discussion about the relative merits of Heidi Hall and Cheri West, candidates for District #1 Supervisor.  Also, what can our BoS do to slow down the drain of liberties and our loot to Sacramento?  gjr]

Ruminations – 28sep15 (updated 2oct15)

George Rebane

The short term market is certifiably insane.  Yellen will not be able to avoid a rate raise forever, we all know that.  And yes, the centrally planned Chinese economy has predictably blown a tire (progressives call your office), but some people still believe that they are smart/lucky enough to bail just before Yellen ups the discount rate by ¼% and the market does its predictable swoon before going back to basics.  So in this anticipatory period the so-called range trading investors are playing the jittery game, and the algorithmic high frequency traders are making out like bandits milking the oscillating price patterns that they have discovered.  Come on Dr Yellen, do it!

The Donald has passed his peak, and is now on what we engineers call ‘the back side of the power curve’ – the higher he tries to kick his ‘RPM’ the lower sinks his ‘power’ in the polls.  Some of our commenters have giddily anticipated this, and I believe one worthy even nailed the top.  I predict that the trail down from Mt Trump will be even more entertaining than the climb up, save for the heartburn it will cause the Republican leadership wondering whether he will renege and go for a third party run.

Putin continues to toy with Obama.  This administration is so butt stupid on foreign policy that they continue to think that Putin is in Syria to help Assad or fight ISIS or … .  Putin’s geo-strategic move is to project Russian power into the Mediterranean and the Levant.  He needs to do this to become a permanent power player in the future of the region no matter who is in Damascus.  And the requirement for that is to get his stuff past the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.  Establishing bases in Latakia and Tartus satisfies that requirement.  He now owns the Syrian seaboard.  And Team Obama remains clueless, still attempting to tell Putin that he has made a “mistake” in putting together a coalition with Syria, Iran, and now Iraq while already entertaining the Saudis and the gulf states.

[update] Election Polling: When ‘Who Will Win?’ Beats ‘Who Do You Like?’  Microsoft's 'PredictWise' project has incorporated that question into its crowd-source prediction markets.  This is something of which I have been a long time proponent.  The main argument to support the thesis is that "asking people who they expect will win, instead of who they prefer, 'grabs a much larger slice of people’s experience and knowledge, including a whole range of idiosyncratic facts' that are otherwise impossible to quantify".  (more here)

[1oct15 update]  Elected NJUHSD trustee Ms Linda Campbell was censured by her colleagues on the Board of Trustees.   RR has been no fan of Ms Campbell’s, not only because of her uncouth public behavior, but more importantly because of her ignorance of public education that continues to punish Nevada County’s youth.  (more here and here)

[2oct15 update] Let me see if I got it right about the idiot in the WH.  Russia is bombing crap out of anti-Assad rebels that we support, and Iran is now using Iraq as a staging area for its ground troops to support Russia's Syrian initiatives.  And in response Feckless Lidder on Pennsylvania Ave goes on the air to "chastise" Russia for making a "big mistake" and being on the wrong side of history.  While no one mentions ISIS.  Whatever happened to the country formerly known as the United States of America?

The ‘Climate Change’ pot bubbles

George Rebane

This little update is primarily to continue the record of recent columns, commentraries, comments, and other contributions to the bubbling pot of preventable global warming (PGW).  As documented in these pages, I wrote a response to a Union piece by a couple of physicians making the usual outlandish claims for the existence of PGW, which they, as is common these days, confounded under the label ‘climate change’.  Other pro and con columns followed the initial piece, the most notable con pieces by skeptics Bob Hren and Norm Sauer (here, here, and here).

However, for some reason my 8sep15 counter – ‘Bad time for making draconian public policy’ - to the Drs Newsom has drawn particular and ongoing ire from true believers, of which I am unabashedly proud.  The most recent in this sequence was from the Klistoff couple in Grass Valley.  I present it italized below as it appears on The Union’s blog (here)

A hoax?  Really?

George Rebane’s acrimonious commentary regarding Bill and Christine Newsome’s open letter to Congressman LaMalfa is a sad example of many right-winged opinion pieces and letters published in The Union.

There seems to be an undercurrent of anger mixed with presumptuous and pedantic platitudes that do nothing to foster mutual understanding of the issues being discussed.

But now apparently, these articles suggest the existence of an international conspiracy among climate scientists claiming their research is falsified in order to obtain grant money. Wow!

Is this what Congressman LaMalfa is suggesting when he claims there is political manipulation of climate science? What is the evidence for this? Some even claim there is “global cooling” and that climate change is a hoax. Really?

Take a look at the world’s glaciers and ice caps. Is their rapid rate of melting consistent with global “cooling”? Where is the data to back up this claim?

The scientific evidence for climate change, influenced by human activity, is overwhelming. American and International scientific organizations unanimously agree. So what is the political agenda of those who claim it is a hoax?

Alex and Ronda Klistoff, Grass Valley

I responded to the above with a letter-to-the-editor that was emailed on 26 September 2015.  It has yet to appear.  (Presumably The Union editor will supply it with a title.)

True believers in preventable global warming (PGW) denigrate the science and data that counters public policy nostrums designed to sacrifice economies on the altar of human salvation from a promised heat catastrophe in the making.  As commentaries in these pages record, skeptics continue to cite detailed and compelling science to contradict that the PGW ‘debate is over’.

In their 26sep15 letter Mr & Mrs Klistoff cite my 8sep15 “acrimonious commentary” responding to the 29aug15 OV column by the Drs Newsom, and summarily dismiss major contributors to the ongoing PGW debate.  All true believers live with the comfortable knowledge that government funded research is unbiased, untainted by money, with findings true and pure as the fresh driven snow.  However, research and researchers that have ever had even a smidgeon of industry funding are forever tainted beyond redemption.  And doubly so if these counter any ‘science’ which for them is already beyond debate.

Those of us who have spent many years doing R&D with the government know that faith to be misplaced.  Government agencies also have agendas, and dispense their monies to advance those agendas.  Therefore for those who consume research, it is ever ‘Caveat Emptor’.

George Rebane, Nevada City

MANN’S “HOCKEY STICK:” A DOCUMENTED HOAX

[This commentary by Norm Sauer is destined for The Union in the ongoing exchange with Michael Mann on ‘climate change’.  Mr Sauer, who sits on The Union’s editorial board, has given permission for RR to post it in the interval until things get sorted out with the newspaper.  It appears below as received.  3oct15 update:  The Union did finally publish this piece in today's edition.  gjr]

Norm Sauer

My Other Voices article of September 22, 2015, entitled “If you control carbon, you control life,” questioned the scientific validity of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick.”  Dr. Mann published an OV article in The Union the next day complaining my statements that his contrived hockey stick ignored the Medieval Warm Period are a “falsehood,” and “a distortion, half-truth, or plain untruth.” 

I take this opportunity to buttress the documented truth of what I wrote.

The search for truth starts with understanding that if the Medieval Warm Period existed before the industrial revolution then the man-made global warming (MMGW) theory of CO2 forcing sudden warming in the twentieth century is baseless because our recent warming is not unusual, unique, unnatural, nor green house gas related.

In the 1990s many scientific articles referred to the Medieval Warm Period lasting from about AD 800-1300.  This was followed by the Little Ice Age from about 1300 to 1900.   These were scientifically undisputed facts.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) was created to officially work on the global warming issue.  Its first progress report in 1990 on Page 202 showed a graph (see below) in which the Medieval Warm Period was portrayed as clearly warmer than the present.

By 1995, seeking to include CO2 as a cause of warming, the IPCC report started with the Little Ice Age to show a long slow period of increasing temperatures.  Chapter 8 of the scientific report stated: “No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed] to anthropogenic causes.”  Politics prevailed. This statement was removed from the final report.  The non-scientific Summary for Policymakers read: “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.”

By 2001 the IPCC Summary for Policymakers had what it wanted: Mann’s “hockey stick” claiming that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over nine hundred years, spiked upward in the twentieth century, and the 1990s was the warmest decade in at least one thousand years. (See chart below.)

The problems with Mann’s study were many.  First, the hockey stick focused only on temperature trends in the Northern Hemisphere.  Second, the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were completely dismissed.  Third, the hockey stick was formed by crudely grafting the surface temperature record of the twentieth century onto a pre-1900 tree-ring record which grafting was innately scientifically flawed.  

As mentioned, McIntyre and McKitrick’s assiduous studies concluded Mann’s argument for CO2-caused MMGW was “a carefully worked artificial creation”.

In 1999, a study of tree rings by Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University produced a sharp and steady decline in temperature after 1960.

In 2003, Drs. Baliunas and Soon, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, contested the hockey stick conclusion in a publication in Climate Research.  After reviewing more than 200 climate studies, they confirmed the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were worldwide phenomena not limited to the European and North American continents.  Moreover, they found many parts of the world showed the medieval warmth to be greater than that of the 20th century!

In 2006, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a study concluding little confidence can be placed in Mann’s concluding the 1990’s was likely the warmest decade in the last 1000 years.  (NAS, Temperature Reconstruction for the Last 2000 Years, June 2006.)

Then,  in 2009, “Climategate” revealed leaked emails of East Anglia University’s CRU.   ( For actual emails see Sen. James Inhofe, The Greatest Hoax, 2012, Appendix C.)

An email from Phil Jones, a CRU climatologist, to Dr. Mann and others dated November 16, 1999, mentions Dr. Mann’s “trick” to hide Briffa’s 1960s’ temperature decline.

Emails of March 11, 2003 between Dr. Mann and Jones, show their displeasure about Baliunas and Soon’s publication in Climate Review.  Jones’ email threatened to shun Climate Research until “they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”   Echoing Jones, Dr. Mann responded to punish Climate Research by encouraging “our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”

Documentary evidence indicates Dr. Mann is not a disinterested scientist.  He views substantive challenges to his work as heresy.  Unlike Dr. Mann, true scientists welcome criticism and debate as an essential to scientific progress. 

Dr. Mann launched a petty and invective OV article calling me a liar. He’s wrong.  His “hockey stick” is a documented hoax.

Scattershots – 25sep15 (updated)

George Rebane

Cheri West, senior aide of Assemblyman Brian Dahle, has declared her candidacy for the District #1 supervisorial slot that will be vacated by Nate Beason next year.  Jo Ann and I only know of her, but don’t know her personally.  She sounds like a worthy candidate to oppose Heidi Hall, her very progressive opponent who is already well known in Nevada County.  Looks like it’s time to start thanking Nate for his service, and manning the ramparts for Ms West.  In socialist California, folks like us in the backwoods are among the last who don’t believe that ‘More government is better.’

Apropos to the Pope’s visit, I find it hard to understand how the Left can say that capitalism harms the poor and underprivileged, when it and it alone has been the system over the centuries that has reduced hunger, destitution, and ignorance in the world.  Early adopters of capitalism are the countries that have prospered.  An easy test is to examine the countries that have most ruthlessly suppressed capitalism – how are the poor and underprivileged doing in those lands?

On the VW scandal.  Today we learn that VW’s monkeying with its cars’ pollution control software is a well-trod path in the auto industry pioneered years ago by GM.  This doesn’t excuse the bastards for doing it, but it does shed light again on the ongoing collateral damage from progressive governance.  Car makers regularly game the system in various ways to satisfy the likes of the EPA and CARB in their butt stupid assertions that pollution controls don’t impede performance.  Anybody with a half-assed engineering education learns in his freshman year that that is horse pucky.  It’s part and parcel of the progressive mantra that tax rates don’t affect business decisions/performance.

Large multi-national car makers have now become corporatists.  They can make cars that uphold the environmentalists’ BS while being tested and still deliver performance on the highways.  This is a wink-wink relationship that works as long as no one looks too carefully behind the curtain.  And then some wonks at the University of West Virginia didn’t get the message and looked behind the curtain; the rest now is history, both settled and still being made.

The same goes on with business tax rates and certain companies that dutifully tell their progressive legislators that all is well with higher taxes.  Why?  Because they own the market segments where they can pass the added tax costs on to the consumers who dutifully pay higher prices while being told by the same politicians and unionists that the corporations are making obscene profits (when the profits remain unchanged as promised).  What really happens is that the poor middle class and welfare schlubs take it in the shorts without a clue as to how they are being milked.

[update] Gun-free Australia’s crime rates are soaring after law abiding citizens were forced to surrender their arms.  As usual the butt stupid politicians are at pains to explain why homicides, assaults, and armed robberies are up – armed robberies up 44%, in Victoria state alone homicides are up 300%.  Over the previous 25 years all national crime rates were dropping until their liberals decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for mandated repurchases of legal firearms from its citizens.  It probably would have done no good to remind the idiots down under that now only criminals have guns, and the bad guys all know it when they walk into a house or a store.  Up here we are still unclear on the concept, as the Left does its best to abrogate the Second Amendment through an increasing pile of ever more byzantine regulations on gun ownership, accessories, ammunition, and usage.  And check out the crime rates in our Democrat controlled cities where draconian gun laws are in effect.  (H/T to RR reader and correspondent.)

 

Muslims in Government (updated 25sep15)

Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous. Quran 9:123

George Rebane

Republican candidate Dr Ben Carson set off the most recent political dust-devil predictable with his response to whether he would support a Muslim becoming President of the United States.  However, the question of devout Muslims serving in governments is an important issue today when radical Islam and Islam colonizing the west have become the world’s most destabilizing socio-political forces against which secular humanism and collectivist ideologies are not only helpless but actually abetting.

To examine this issue we must first look at man’s belief systems regarding his cosmology and ideology.  By cosmology we mean the entirety of his picture of existence ranging from the structure of the universe(s) to the humongous Planck scale ocean of quantum events in which we all swim and derive our being.  Cosmology also subsumes or is subsumed by a person’s religion.

By ideology we mean a person’s set of structured tenets that describe his vision or preference of a particular socio-political order that guides, controls, and informs human activity on earth.  Here we divide such ideologies into loose categories of collectivism – e.g. communism and socialism of the international or national kind – and classical liberalism as bequeathed by our Founders and clarified by, say, Frederic Bastiat’s The Law.

Over the years RR has been fortunate to be a forum for the arguments from heartfelt adherents of a wide range of ideologies and cosmologies/religions embraced by its readers and commenters.  And as such, these debates again underline that a devout person’s religion trumps his ideology – God’s plan and druthers supersede that of Man.  In all nations with a religious citizenry allegiance is paid to ‘God and country’ in that order.

Sandbox - 23sep15

[Exciting days - the Pope pays a political visit to the US, China's Xi Jinping is lecturing American business in Seattle while waiting for his turn to bamboozle Obama, and Hillary swings wildly to the left with new price control proposals while 'the outsiders' winnow the Republican field.  gjr]

Bought and Paid for Politics – Our Fault

George Rebane

Was just thinking about today's more than interesting, long, and expensive election season we all are suffering through.  And the money part kind of stuck with me.  We know that money drives politics.  What drives politicians may be up for debate, but you can’t go too far off base assuming that power, fame, and fortune come in close to the top of the motivation heap.

Today campaigns cost way too much and last too long, especially given the attention span of the typical voter.  Two plausible reasons for this are 1) voter dumbth, and 2) constant need for content by the media.  The more contentious, controversial, and confusing they can make the candidates’ messages, the more there is to report, analyze, dissect, and goad to keep the election pot boiling, and the more ads can then be sold.

Preventable Global Warming is a Tricky Business (updated 23sep15)

George Rebane

[Brian Hamilton, editor of The Union, emailed me that this piece was bit too long for their Other Voices columns, and invited me to shorten it.  I felt that a better alternative to abbreviation was to write them a letter-to-editor that cited Mr Paul Berger's dismissal of my previous OV column, and which also pointed to this post - look for it in The Union.  Thanks for your interest.]

The Preventable Global Warming (PGW) season is here again with another spate of conferences, new laws and regulations, media events, and VIP visits, all happening in short order to reignite public apprehension that man’s neglect will soon cause a worldwide catastrophe.  To prevent the calamity, timely intervention in human activities on a massive scale is now required.  However, some considerable number of people remains skeptical of the PGW arguments and its prescribed remedies.  The public debate about PGW today reaches from the highest levels of government down the lowest grassroots as witnessed here in our little community.

PGW is an extremely complex issue both in the technical and political sense, and made more so by the several confusing interchangeable names we use and don’t differentiate – climate change, global warming, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), … .  In this limited space I’ll try to shine a little light on some of the particulars.  First, every reputable skeptic acknowledges that climate change is always going on, and during the last couple of centuries the earth has again warmed.  Over longer timespans the earth has been much warmer (think Greenland) and much colder.

Sandbox - 18sep15

[Aren't the market mavens wonderful?  They ascribe its latest dive to Yellen's keeping the interest rates unchanged (as I predicted), citing that this contributes to market uncertainty.  Well, it apparently didn't contribute to market uncertainty when it was uncertain whether the Fed would raise rates in September, but now that it's certain that they won't, it contributes to uncertainty.  How do these turkeys continue to draw a paycheck, and who believes a word they say about markets or the economy's future?  Most certainly the Fed has destroyed whatever credibility it once had - as posted here - in knowing enough about the economy to predict its direction (note their sterling job on forecasting the recovery).  So what do you think they now base their decisions on whether/when to raise interest rates?  gjr]

National Dumbth Polarizes Us

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 September 2015.]

Those who pay attention know that today we are a divided and divisive nation.  And we can’t blame it all on the usual partisanship that makes its appearance during election seasons, which always serve to pour salt into already open wounds.  Over the last week I was struck by California’s standardized test scores, and the efforts parents have to mount to get their children an education from our public schools.

The results are in from elementary, middle, and high school grade levels, telling parents and teachers how well the kids learned in the new Common Core curriculum environment.  And the results are not pretty.  Statewide over 55% of our students don’t meet grade level literacy standards, and two out of three don’t meet the math standards.  Worse yet, almost three out of four 11th graders fail to meet the math standards – these are the same young people who want to enter college or the workforce.  Nevada County’s performance pretty much mirrors statewide scores; we are hugging the lowest quartile when compared to other counties.  (more here)

A more rigorous condemnation of our public schools’ failures is hard to imagine, but the efforts of Mr Alfonso Flores of Anaheim, a parent, teacher, and decorated war veteran, illuminate how firmly are the mechanisms of failure baked into our public schools.  The problem, of course, starts and ends with teachers unions which have fought tooth and nail every effort to improve our kids’ education.  Mr Flores has been a leader in using the state’s ‘parent trigger’ law, passed in 2010, to replace incompetent teachers and school administrators.  The nationally reported experiences he relates about how teachers unions hobble the proper functioning of schools would curl your toes the wrong way.

Sandbox -12sep15

[I note that in these free forums our liberal friends have problems discussing issues that involve things other than ad hominems. 

The above little cartoon from a correspondent reprieses a years-long tenet of RR regarding Islam.  Our liberal readers continue to believe that this all originated and resides in the fevered minds of the county's knuckle-dragging Right. gjr]

The Left’s Climate Scientists on Parade (updated 11sep15)

George Rebane

It is clear the Left’s “climate scientists” can be anyone with the politically correct attitude toward AGW.  It is a different matter for the AGW skeptics, their bona fides must include a degree in climatology for openers, else they are dismissed as not qualified to speak on the issue of anthropogenic global warming.  This aspect of the global warming debate comes into focus this Saturday at the GV Peace Lutheran Church as reported by The Union and the Auburn Journal.  There the leftwing League of Women Voters will assemble a couple of worthies to discuss, “How can the actions of our leaders impact our climate?”

Heading the marquee is Dr Tom Suchanek (pictured), he has a BS in zoology, MA in ecology and evolution, and a PhD in biology.  He has been on the government tit all his life studying “coastal marine ecology”.   Joining him will be geologist Dr Diz Smith advertised as a "former energy industry leader”.  (H/T to Russ Steele for digging out Dr Smith's bio.)

It boggles the professional mind that the Left continues to assume the public to be so gruberized as to accept these people as some kind of domain experts in ANY relevant aspect of AGW involving physics, chemistry, data management, estimation theory, stochastics, complex dynamic systems, algorithmics, computational error propagation, finite element modeling, feedback systems design, …, the list goes on.  Such events should clarify the kind of ‘climate scientists’ that the AGW alarmists count in the UN’s IPCC "scientific consensus" that gives rise to ‘the debate is over’ hysteria which demands we immediately start doing very stupid things on a massive scale and worldwide.

So when it comes right down to it, if you are a skeptic with degrees and decades of professional experience in the climatology related physical sciences, mathematics, computer science, complex dynamics systems, probabilistics and stochastics, large scale computer models, data handling, algorithmics, decision theory, financial engineering, … with the ability to understand the seminal climatology literature, your skeptical assessments re AGW are not accepted.  However, if you’re a biologist or geologist or, God knows, maybe even a labor lawyer or piano tuner with a history of global warming activism, you are automatically qualified to be presented to the public as having sufficient expertise “to discuss (the) several aspects of climate change.”  Such is the state of the national debate, so go figger.

[11sep15 update]  A reader sent me this graphic from the Heartland Institute.  It correctly summarizes the current global sweep of politically driven 'science' and compares it to real science which is forever skeptical and has been vigorously suppressed wherever it dared raise its head.

Ruminations - 9sep15 (updated 13sep15)

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.  Oscar Ameringer

George Rebane

‘Black Lives Matter – but Reality, Not So Much’.  National columnist and keen observer of the social scene Jason Riley agrees with RR’s long-held position on the unmitigated crap that the liberals have been handing out to the black community about how valuable such lives are.  A look at the progressive programs over the last 40 years paints another picture.  Only the local loonies are unclear on the concept.

Our Designated Reader reports that the FUE continues to burnish his journalistic credentials claiming that The Union is biased 3-1 against AGW reporting.  The fact is that, starting with the 29aug15 Newsom column, the newspaper published two additional pro-AGW columns in quick succession – 5sep15 by Barbara Rivenes, 7sep15 by Edlin Patterson.  This left the score 3-1 against the skeptics of which Bob Hren’s 5sep15 piece was the only rebuttal until Russ Steele’s letter and my 8sep15 Other Voices joined Bob’s article.  Now with Todd Juvinall’s letter, the score is 3 pro-AGW columns vs 2 skeptic columns and 2 skeptic letters.  That seems pretty even-handed to me.  But don’t expect any change from the Lamestream Liar.

A sandbox commenter posts some words attributed to reader Mr Steven Frisch that so clearly illustrate the Left’s use of the Saul Alinsky paradigm – accuse the other of exactly what you are doing.  In the skeptics’ blogs (including RR) the ‘science’ behind the AGW hysteria is dissected and countered in detail.   And on the True Believer blogs all you find are ad hominems against those who present evidence of fraud and error in the disseminated and swallowed consensus science.  So what’s a Leftie to do in such a case?  Why, just accuse them of what you do.

The Cato Institute just published a massive comparative study of the EU’s welfare systems.  No country advertises that its welfare and entitlement programs range between the dysfunctional and the unsustainable (America’s leftwing lemmings lap up these lies by omission while continuing to worship at the altar of European socialism.)  The bottom line is still that, led by Denmark, all the EU welfare programs make weaning recipients next to impossible by the implicit marginal tax rates they impose on people exiting the program for a job.  And today all EU member states are scrambling to find ways to cut back their entitlement and welfare disbursements without bloodletting in the streets by Europeans who have grown quite comfortable with the status quo.  Cato compares their folly to ours, and it ain’t pretty.  You should at least read the Exec Summary of ‘The Work Versus Welfare Trade-off: Europe’.

The EUs Muslim migrant onslaught continues unexamined.  We’ve recently discussed its other details under my recent KVMR commentary, ‘The Great Cultural Divides of 2016’, but here is an additional thought that occurred to me.  It is remarkable how rapidly the globalists can embed the 'right to ubiquitous movement and residence' into a population that has for its entire existence lived under strict authoritarian rule where no such rights previously existed.  We see videos of Syrians, who have passed through lands where their life and limb are not threatened, demand to continue their progress toward more safe and salubrious destinations, there to start new lives.  They give no thought to the rights of the people through whose countries they tramp, or in whose lands they will plant their divergent and dysfunctional cultures.  And the west’s governments (including ours) are so riddled with globalists that there is no chance that the question of such assumed rights will be raised.  If someone from a failed state declares himself a refugee, then today he has an automatic worldwide right to your work and wallet.  And our addled leaderships continue to be surprised by reports that such insane welcoming policies and de facto recognition of migrants' right to transnational migration are motivating additional hundreds of thousands to begin their journeys northward.  When did territorial sanity and sovereignty die?

[11sep15 update]  I just put down the phone with Supervisor Nate Beason.  Now that Ms Heidi Hall has announced her candidacy for District #1 supervisor, I wanted to reinforce my previously stated intention to support Nate were he to run again.  On this call I urged him to go for his fourth term, and told him that Jo Ann and I are in his corner should he decide to run.  In talking to many people of my persuasion, I have not run into anyone who would not support Nate Beason in a race against our new socialist-in-waiting Ms Hall.  The last thing we need in these foothills is another leftwing lackey to launch their political career promoting Sacramento's internationally recognized insanity in Nevada County.  Nate said that the Beasons will announce their decision in the next week or so, and the phone call left me hopeful.

[13sep15 update]  Ferguson was a total lie from beginning to end - "Hands up, don't shoot!" was bullshit, and the 'protesters' were thugs hired and imported.  They were hired by MORE, the successor outfit to Missouri's ACORN, now bankrupt.  But then MORE stiffed the 'protesters' who are picketing to get their checks.  Another hard left organization MAU is urging MORE to pay up since the thugs did what they were contracted to do.  The full story is reported by NEWSMAX here.  At every turn the Left lets us know that they are not only stupid, but also just plain evil.  (H/T to reader)

Sandbox - 5sep15

[There is load of bad news coming down the pike on Obamacare in 2016.  Most widely read people know the travesty that new entitlement has been, and the worst is yet to come.  Our progressive readers have excused their happy dancing in the streets about Obamacare while citing how bad our healthcare system is in the eyes of the WHO.  The siren song for all socialists is the vaunted 'nationalized single payer healthcare system' of which all the fine exemplars are said to be doing just fine in the EU.  However, that is not the case, and already in 2008 Cato published their compendium of these single payer systems in Policy Analysis #613.  And since then things have gotten considerably worse in the lands of 'free health care'.  Worth a look before we order the confetti for the next Obamacare celebration.  gjr]

Man did it, and is still doing it! (updated 8sep15)

George Rebane

Our government-media complex is ratcheting up the hysteria about man-made global warming (AGW) to a fever pitch in preparation for this fall’s Paris conference on ‘climate change’.  Obama wants the world to see that the US will lead in reducing CO2 emissions no matter the economic cost, and Moonbeam Brown wants the world to also see that California will be way ahead of Obama.  The entire argument for massive increases in the scope, size, and cost of government called for in Agenda21 rests on the thesis – Man’s burning of fossil fuels is warming the global climate to life threatening levels in the near future, and forcing Man to greatly reduce or abandon fossil fuels will save us from the coming worldwide disaster.

Local liberal cadres have been cranked up to support the hysteria on a grass roots level.  Here in Nevada County our newspaper The Union is picking up the pace in its op-ed pages.  On 30 August the paper published an article by two physicians (the Drs Newsom of the Nevada County Climate Change Coalition) touting pro-AGW consensus science and denigrating its skeptics (or their term ‘deniers’) focusing on Congressman LaMalfa.  A few of us leaped into the breach to answer the Newsoms’ erroneous reporting.  I wrote a short letter addressing their errors, but my friend Dr Bob Hren wrote a longer and better piece which was published today (5sep15) in the Union’s op-ed section – ‘Climate change: some inconvenient truths’.  In his article Bob summarizes a few of the more egregious errors of data, fact and science purveyed by True Believers like the Newsoms.

A more comprehensive response to the AGW propaganda promoted by the Environmental Defense Fund was recently published in Forbes – ‘Top 10 Global Warming Lies That May Shock You’.  The heavily referenced piece was crafted by the skeptical Heartland Institute.

Meanwhile, Gov Brown and the California Democrats are doing their best to pass new legislation that will significantly take the state’s economy down another notch or two, driving out more employers and jobs.  As reported here in the 5sep15 WSJ, the “proposed state law would cut petroleum-fuel use by 50%, require utilities to get half their power from renewable sources, and increase energy efficiency in buildings by 50%—all by 2030, using 2016 levels as the starting point. A second measure would mandate an 80% reduction in state greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, from 1990 levels. … The bills are backed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who say that California must begin taking serious steps to curb its use of fossil fuels.”  See the above graphic from the article.  What the True Believers never tell us is from where does the electric power come that will replace fossil fuels’ use in transportation.  It most certainly will not come from wind and solar which are ‘some time’ sources produced by technologies not nearly sufficient to deliver the levels of steady power consumption required by even our growth-stunted future economy.

The Great Cultural Divides of 2016 (updated 7sep15)

'What happens in the Middle East doesn’t stay in the Middle East.'  WSJ

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary aired on 2 September 2015.]

Here’s a 50,000 foot view of the great cultural divides that will focus our attention in America and also in the European Union.  The EU’s promise of a unified Europe free of wars is under great strain both economically and culturally.  It turns out that Angela Merkel’s conclusion that “Multi-kulti does not work” is true, not only in Germany, but all over the continent.  And nothing has caused the Europeans to raise their ire more than the increasing flood of Muslims into their cities and countries.

The diaspora from the failed Islamic states that ring Europe on its south is turning into a life altering invasion of people who share few values with the Europeans beyond the desire to escape death and destruction.  These illegal aliens who are daily scampering onto the shores of southern Europe are called ‘migrants’ which is their word for our politically correct ‘undocumented immigrants’.  The European countries of entry don’t want the Muslims to stay, so the ‘immigrant’ word is out.  But they do want them to migrate north to the richer regions of the continent, so ‘migrant’ is an accepted politically neutral label for the desperate aliens who are quickly ushered northward by countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain.

Muslims have been emigrating to Europe for decades, and have made themselves conspicuous to the indigenous Europeans by their refusal to assimilate and their understandable desire to live in their own culturally cohesive communities.  In many countries these enclaves are now functionally sovereign in that they follow their own laws, maintain their own traditions, and forcefully reject any encroachment by the institutions of their targeted host nations.

We in America were once taught to abide all cultures which in our public forums subsumed themselves into the overarching ‘American culture’ – practice your own cultures when you are among yourselves, but become an obvious American when you gather in the town square with fellow Americans.  This is no longer taught to our young.  Today our schools celebrate America’s constituent cultures to the point where a common American culture has been banished and replaced by reference to a yet nebulous global culture.