Rebane's Ruminations

Single-Payer Siren Song

George Rebane

If you don’t do numbers, the numbers will inevitably do you.

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 31 May 2017.]

With Obamacare crashing and burning everywhere across the land except in the leftwing media, the Republicans are still tangled up with their promised ‘repeal and replace’ legislation.  In response, the Left has doubled down, alternating between claims that Obamacare is working fine, but then calling for a badly misnamed ‘single payer’ nationalized healthcare.  Under single payer, it is the multitudes of taxpayers who pay the government to provide healthcare for those who need it.  And it’s the opinions about single payer that divide the folks who pay and those who don’t pay taxes, including the many who also depend on government checks.

As Congress tries to get its act together, the healthcare debate in the hustings is growing louder by the day.  But before people get too worked up rehashing their dogmas about the future of America’s healthcare industry, I invite everyone to consider the answer to this –

What right does any American have to draw on his neighbor’s pocketbook to pay for the repair of his health, the preservation of which he may or not have taken any prudent steps to safeguard?  At this point I’ll spare you the horrendous stats that describe the behaviors with which we Americans knowingly and willingly damage ourselves.  So what kind of healthcare would you accept knowing that you, and not me, will pay the price?

On Healthcare – one mo’ time

George Rebane

Before any serious discussion of America’s healthcare ensues, we must first come to grips with the answer to this question –

What right does any American have to draw on his neighbor’s pocketbook to pay for the repair of his health, the preservation of which he may or not have taken any prudent steps to safeguard?  (At this point we can cite the horrendous stats that describe the behaviors with which we Americans knowingly and willingly damage ourselves.  Take what you will, knowing that you, and not me, will pay the price.)

In this light Rebane Doctrine recommends the following (neither comprehensive nor sufficient) attributes for our healthcare industry.

• Patients choose their own physicians and participate in their own medical decisions to the extent that they and/or their supporters can afford the care.
• No one has the right to demand another to pay for his healthcare.
• The spectrum of health professionals is expanded greatly to allow practitioners of all skill levels and training to participate in delivering health related services.
• Tax policy is reformed to permit both private and institutional health savings accounts that belong to individuals and their designees – e.g. family healthcare account.
• Tax policy supports the founding of non-profit healthcare service corporations (NPHSCs) for the poor that are owned and operated by for-profit companies.
• FDA policies on drug acceptance greatly simplified, especially for the release of drugs and treatments for cases in which the standard of care provides no relief from certain death.
• Health insurance can be sold as any other product that comes under the aegis of the Constitution’s ‘commerce clause’ (Art 1, Sec 8, Clause 3).
• Catastrophic care will be provided by private charities or NPHSC’s where available. Where such care is not available, the federal government will provide for hospice care to alleviate end-of-life suffering.

Memorial Day - 29 May 2017

George Rebane

We again gratefully contemplate the terrible price paid by those who gave their all so that America may remain the land of opportunity and the home of the free.  The words and photo from Memorial Day - 30 May 2011 still apply, and this video will explain the cost.

Scattershots – 28may17 (updated 31may17)

George Rebane

Keep hearing about CBO’s assessment of the Trump budget and healthcare reform among other things.  The lamestream is reporting the office’s assessments as coming down from the mountain on stone tablets.  No one seems to remember that the CBO has an abysmal record in forecasting anything, especially if it has to do with the future.  They always underestimate the cost of liberals’ spending programs and overestimate the cost of conservative attempts to scale back government.  But such reporting works for the Democrats since the recent generations, especially the millennials, are innocent of any such knowledge – their unionized public schools somehow forgot to teach them about such realities of the Deep State.

Another lamestream hysteria du jour is the whole affair headlined as ‘Kushner’s attempt to set up back door communications with the Russians’, as if that was some kind of high crime or misdemeanor.  Again, the average voter has no idea that historically such confidential and clandestine communication channels with foreign governments – especially our potential enemies and close allies – have always been the norm since George Washington was president.  It is through such back channels that the real terms of any publicly announced agreements are worked out which never see the light of day until the meetings of the higher ups are announced to publicly seal the deal.  If Team Trump did not promote such initiatives to establish contacts, they would have been remiss.  And we don’t have to circle that ‘Russia sought to influence America’s election barn’ again.  Of course they did, so do we every chance we get to serve our national interests in other countries.  The only thing that keeps the current lamestream generated hysteria going is our deep and abiding national dumbth.

Trumponomics will succeed only if the nation regains its ability to once more grow its economy at a 3% or higher rate.  The economic poohbahs in their wisdom have pronounced such a reprise totally unfeasible.  In their criticisms they seem to forget that tax reform, rolling back regulations, cutting government spending, and sunsetting stifling laws/regs do have a stimulating effect on new investment and productivity.  However, those factors have never been taken seriously, let alone implemented, by socialists.  Such measures are literally outside the ken of the Left, and their mention instantly evokes cries of ‘catering to the rich’, ‘increasing income inequality’, and again ‘putting it on the backs of the poor’.  The only thing that has been a bit disappointing about President Trump’s fiscal and budgetary initiatives is that they ignore the requirement to address the two budget-busting gorillas in the room – SS and Medicare.

[29may17 update]  The nefarious Deep State; still don’t believe we are ruled by it?  I give you Dr Francesca Grifo, EPA’s Science Integrity Officer.  From the record of her efforts and activities, this woman’s sole purpose appears to be the elimination of science and scientific inquiry as the basis for EPA’s policies and regulations.  She is the equivalent of the Soviet political commissars who were appointed to shadow every civil office and military command from the days of Stalin to Brezhnev to make sure that all policies and actions were ideologically correct.   Our federal government’s bureaucracies are riddled with thousands of Grifos who were installed by hard left elected officials and bureaucrats, and are now indelibly embedded in the bowels of government where the real work of socialist planning, command, and control takes place.  These people march to drums foreign to America’s best interests. (more here)

In today’s Union we have two gentlemen of the Left lecturing us on the realities of single-payer healthcare and the generation and consumption of fake news.  Mr Robin Wallace, a true believer in the success of Obamacare, cheerleads us to embrace SB562 (‘Californians for a Healthy California) now wending its way through Sacramento (here).  He cites the CBO, aka The Gang that Can’t Shoot Straight, as having blessed the travesty that has been visited on our healthcare industry.  And he demonstrates his ignorance of Canada’s single-payer system as the paragon we should follow (more here).  He also seems to be deficient in the adequacy of Medicare which he claims is a working “single payer health insurance program for those over 65” – wow!  Columnist George Boardman likens the Right’s ascription of fake news to pornography – “they know it when they see it” – which is not true (here).  Fake news makes itself known only after being consumed, not at the time of its release.  But more remarkable is Mr Boardman’s rejection of media bias, countering the recent Harvard study that found overwhelming evidence for it.  He bases that on his belief that a news report’s “tone isn’t bias”.  Which is somewhat astounding because given two reports that both accurately cite the same facts, their ‘tone’ is the prime, if not only, means of showing their individual bias.  Obvious examples abound, and I’d be happy to supply a few for those still tone deaf.

[more update]  Everyone is properly worried about the North Korean fat kid going ballistic and exploding an EMP nuclear warhead over the western US.  And the sumbich may actually do that.  Now that we have a real president and SecDef, it’s time to reveal to them a tenet of Rebane Doctrine that we should immediately put into effect to enforce UN sanctions, resolutions, and provide for our own national security.  After we do the little planned exercise of shooting down (presumably with a THAAD) one of our own ballistic missiles as a test, we should announce that thereafter we will be parked in the East China Sea with our THAAD destroyers to shoot down every NK test missile of opportunity that exits their air space.  There is no better way to achieve the threefer of demonstrating our commitment to defend ourselves and our allies, enforce the will of the international community, and confirm our ability to do so using their threatening test missiles as targets.

Another measure of Trump’s recent overseas success is that the EU finally got the message about spending enough to defend themselves instead of continuing the 70+ year practice of letting it all fall on the shoulders of the American military.  Angela Merkel made a speech in which she described her epiphany –

“I have experienced this in the last few days, and that is why I can only say that we Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands - of course in friendship with the United States of America, in friendship with Great Britain and as good neighbors wherever that is possible also with other countries, even with Russia.  But we have to know that we must fight for our future on our own, for our destiny as Europeans."

Thank you Mr President.

[31may17 update]  ‘My Coming Out Story’ is another throbbing and sensitive piece in the 29may17 Union by columnist Hilary Hodge.  This lady enjoys a prominent weekly sojourn in the newspaper’s op-ed section wherein over the last year she has spent an inordinate amount of space recounting her personal joys, trials, and tribulations of lesbianism.  These heartfelt offerings, methinks, need to be ensconced in the paper’s self-help or modern psychology sections.  In any case, it’s often hard to tell whether such columns are laments or celebrations of her sexuality, or simply lamentable celebrations.  She is a good woman and no doubt deserves her audience, but need they congregate on the op-ed page where one expects to find discussed the more mundane issues of politics and policy?

Scattershots – 25may17 (updated 26may17)

George Rebane

Former President Obama willfully violated Americans’ 4th Amendment rights for years by authorizing and executing large-scale surveillance on all electronic communications by our intelligence agencies (primarily NSA). He did this in the face of protests from the FISA court from which by law he is supposed to seek authorization before conducting such ‘wiretaps’. No matter how you look at it, that was a sustained criminal activity. From Zerohedge we learn that “These new discoveries come from a recently unsealed FISA court document dated April 26, 2017 and center around a hearing dated October 26, 2017, just days before the 2016 election, in which the FISA court apparently learned for the first time of "widespread" and illegal spying on American citizens by the NSA under the Obama administration.”

With the lamestream predictably silent on the matter, let’s see what recourse occurs under our corrupted justice system. (more here)

Algorithms rule. That long-known truth is finally recognized bigtime in the public media. RR readers have been apprised for years of the power and seminal role that algorithms play in sustaining modern civilization. The most recent revelations and information on algos is featured this week in the WSJ which is a running a week-long series on algos and AI in different sectors of industry and commerce (more here). The growing problem is still to find people clever enough to design the algos that can be implemented in fast computers connected to very large databases. We don’t do such a good job at turning out enough of them, and other countries are beginning to play catch up in their academia. All we can do is hope that their central planners continue stifling the entrepreneurial juices of their people faster than our leftward bound government stifles ours. That’s a hell of a strategy for us to count on remaining competitive in the global markets.

The Manchester bombing confirms something that no one is talking about in the media. Salman Abedi, the Islamist killer, was already on the UK list of suspicious people who should be tracked to see if/how their radicalized behavior progressed. More than that, it turns out that Abedi not only had a supportive network but also a bomb making shop in his home. (more here) What did the UK authorities know about all this – nothing. The obvious thing that this investigation again corroborates is that the UK police and intelligence services are overwhelmed with the literally thousands of Muslim suspects that they have to track. The number of potential terrorists in UK’s native-born and imported Islamic population is so large today that devout killers like Abedi abound. More importantly, they are so numerous that it is politically too sensitive to publicly admit that the domestic terrorist threat has become existentially unmanageable. In short, no matter what happens in Mosul or Raqqa, ISIS and other Islamist terror organization have already infiltrated the lands of the infidel to levels that dramatically changed the way we are forced to travel, do business, and entertain ourselves. In the interval the progressives’ drumbeat against ‘Islamophobia’ is heard across the land, impacting any remaining policies with which we may still defend our civilization.

[update]  The French brain drain.  Isn’t socialism wonderful, and more socialism even more wonderful?  The situation in France is now so bad that there is a national effort ongoing to reach out and convince the country’s emigrated and escaped educated classes to return to their homeland.  Why did they leave?  If you have to ask, then you haven’t been paying attention to what has happened to that bastion of collectivism in the west.  The French government has been ingenious in the way it has stifled enterprise and entrepreneurship.  Back in 2015 Emmanuel Macron, then economic minister and now president, already attempted to fashion a siren song for the French intelligentia on foreign shores (here).  No luck.  Now two years on the problem has gotten so bad that it is making news in the world’s prominent media outlets like the WSJ (here) and BBC (here).  And today our own socialists (now indistinguishable from Democrats) are doing everything possible to bring that European dream cum nightmare to America.

[26may17 update]  The WSJ series on algorithms and quants concludes today with Jason Zweig’s article ‘How to be Your Own Quant’ (a quant is a quantitative analyst in the investment field who today develops and uses computer executed algorithms for securities trading).  At the end of the article Zweig includes a little directory of all the other articles in the series and their links.

Sandbox - 25may2017

[I accede to the semi-popular demand that RR should reinstate the Sandbox.  So once more the repository for the sundry, the specious, and the surreptitiously studied sobriquets is open for business.  And once more I invite my learned readers to embrace Churchill in their rhetoric, no matter how sweet or sour they choose to serve it up.  gjr]

The Sandbox Quandary

George Rebane

The new home for the Sandbox announced in ‘Sandbox Sayonara’ did not stick. Mr Todd Juvinall has asked me to take it back. In the interval since its departure RR readers have done a yeoman’s job of keeping their comments relevant to my posted commentaries, and have strayed only through reasonably connected threads. But with each passing day, it becomes clearer to all of us that there should be a place on RR where arbitrary topics of interest can be brought up with the intention of launching a new discussion thread on the topic.

Quite often in the past, Sandbox threads sprung up on topics that I recently posted on, and sometimes on topics on which I was in the process of writing my commentary. In the latter case my belatedly posted commentary on an ongoing Sandbox thread had a hard time attracting that thread to be continued under my post. This caused me heartburn because I’d like to see RR continue to develop with relevant discussion threads contained, as much as possible, under my commentaries. This so that RR provides a searchable record of commentaries with related discussions in their comment streams, instead of readers’ contributions inserted all over the place, especially in ‘topic-less’ potpourri of the sandboxes.

My druthers for returning the Sandbox to RR is that readers, at least the regular ones, remain aware of my recent and new commentaries, and shift their in-progress discussion threads to the proper commentary comment streams. When introducing such a new thread or continuing an existing one that now has a posted ‘home’, this shift can be easily done with a simple comment in the current Sandbox in which the commenter simply states that his continuation of the Sandbox thread is in the comment stream of the new and relevant post. As a courtesy, the reader can even include the new commentary’s URL/link. The same can be done when a reader decides to revive the subject/topic of an already posted commentary. Again, just state the revived topic of your comment and say that, in its full glory, it is posted under a recent RR commentary – and give them the URL, por favor.

Anyway, that sure would reduce my work and present RR in the structure that I have in mind. Would dearly like to hear from readers who want the Sandbox returned. Would the above protocol work for you? Do you have a better one? Thoughts?

 

Scattershots – 20may17 (updated 21may17)

George Rebane

It’s ALL in the algorithm.  Most of those who have the means to pay attention and are doing it know that AI is now on the march everywhere.  And suddenly everyone has concerns about AI taking human jobs – what difference a mere ten years makes.  Here we have talked about all this under the rubric of the pre-Singularity years in which we live.  Recently the tech crowd has had another reason to get excited about the latest algorithmic leap that will enable machines to get even smarter and faster.  The advance is called Sparse Fourier Transform (SFT) developed by (now Dr) Haitham Hassanieh and introduced in his award winning MIT doctoral dissertation.  So why get excited?  Well, the SFT computes the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) several times faster for most realworld data inputs like pictures, audio, data patterns, etc.  The FFT is one of civilization’s champion algorithm for improving our quality of life in everything from the music we hear to the movies we watch to the MRI images that diagnose our ills.  It’s also in the basis for enabling GPS and doing all kinds of real complex things that make possible leading edge military systems.  But the huge amounts of data now being thrown at FFT algos makes their ‘fast’ ability suddenly not seem so fast any more.  Enter Dr Hassanieh and his SFT which can extract meaningful information out of datasets several times faster than the FFT.  This will now allow big computers to really do new and marvelous things, and even make possible some mind-blowing apps on your smartphone.  Soon this stuff will also be in the public news.  (more here and here)

French brain drain.  Political analyst and former Paris correpondent for the Daily Telegraph, Philip Delves Broughton, reports that the relative nobody Macron recently became president of France simply because he had little or no competition as a center candidate given voters an alternative to the more risky Marine Le Pen.  As an ever more socialist state, over the last couple of decades France has driven its best brightest to foreign shores.  Broughton goes on to hopefully observe that “France’s brain drain has deprived the country of political talent.  Maybe Macron’s reforms can coax them back.”  His short piece (here) on this important social phenomenon should be a lesson to the rest of the developed countries, including the US, who continue to be swayed by socialism’s sadistic siren song.

China is suddenly stacking up its strategic metals and other commodity inventories.  And it’s doing that way beyond any reasonable projection of its normal industrial needs.  In the past countries have done that as preparation for war or as insurance against sanctions that may be imposed on them for planned bad behavior.  Its increasingly aggressive acts in both China seas must portend something that hopefully is not evading our intelligence services.  Stratfor synopsises its China update - For the past three decades, cheap exports and government-led investment have sustained economic growth in China. And in doing so, they have ensured political stability in one of the world’s largest and most populous countries. But leaders in Beijing understand that that model is unsustainable, and they have therefore begun to develop a new economic model, one built on consumption, an expanded services sector and technological innovation. The move from the old to the new will test the Communist Party’s will to reform and shake the very foundations on which its legitimacy stands.  When you sense your own weakness, you bolster domestic support by raising up foreign threats against which a united stand is necessary.  In the meantime China is actively reaching for world hegemon status by announcing its plan to (re)open overland commercial transport conduits across Asia to Europe and the Mideast along the lines of the fabled Silk Road.  Their antipodal approach here is stereotypically inscrutable. (more here)

[update]  That progressive ‘academics’ have essentially ruined today’s humanities and are making inroads into the hard sciences is known to most well-read people.  English columnist and novelist James Delingpole, who also contributes to Breitbart, recently penned this little piece (here) on the latest peer-reviewed hoax pulled on a gender studies journal.  “Gender studies is a fake academic industry populated by charlatans, deranged activists and gullible idiots.”  It’s a fun but sad read that also presents a new angle on what causes climate change.  And here’s what’s cooking at the American Mathematical Society to straighten out math education and answer that burning question, “What does it look like when everyone’s needs are valued?”  This read is guaranteed to cross your eyes.  Both pieces were brought to my attention by RR readers.

[21may17 update] President Trump’s speech in Riyadh – I think he hit it out of the park. He called out that civilization was fighting “a crisis in Islamist extremism”, and invited all Muslim countries to join in the fight to exterminate its terrorist agencies beginning with ISIS. He pointed out that Iran was fundamentally everyone’s enemy in its support of Islamic terrorism and its intent to dominate the Mideast as its new hegemon. I can’t fathom the omni-obeisant Obama ever coming close to making a speech like that and calling it like it is. And in the aftermath for the first time we are beginning to hear the notion of taqiyya (here) in conjunction with proponents of Islamic terror.  Taqiyya, a concept familiar to RR readers, is specific brand of lies and dissembling which is forgiven Muslims if used to promote the spread of Islam. Now let’s see how well our president does on this historic tightrope of a trip as he travels to Jerusalem.

The pot pot keeps boiling

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 May 2017.]

We live in confusing times when much of what we hear is manufactured or fake news that overwhelmingly serves to polarize us.  It’s hard to tell whether the late-night comedy hours or the news programs are leading the stampede to put out the ever more unprecedented and outrageous.  Nationally we are embroiled with a constant tirade of Trump trashing, recently focused on Comey’s firing for allegedly not pulling FBI investigations of Russia’s impact on last fall’s election and of selected members of Team Trump.

The manufactured allegations continue to be cited as accomplished fact that require only a bit more evidence to bring Trump’s administration to an early end.  Few understand that Comey’s dismissal in no way affected the ongoing investigations.  And no one seems to recall that there’s never been any evidence about Russia’s impact, nor even identification of any feasible means by which Russia could have impacted the election.  But when such news is fashioned out of whole cloth, none of this matters, especially when your audience is made up mostly of sound-bite citizens.

Here in Nevada County, believe it or not, we have the local, and perhaps more sophisticated version, of manufactured news – we do most of it in our newspaper’s op-ed pages and the local blogs.  Marijuana is hands down the county’s major cash crop, and we have traveled the rocky road to legalizing its production, distribution, and consumption over the last several years.  How MJ is regulated in Nevada County continues to be a hot-button issue that divides us.  Our county supervisors’ recent formation of a citizens advisory group, or CAG, generated some heat about its make up, and unfortunately motivated one of our prominent voices on the Left to help widen our differences with his erroneous reporting and just plain snark.

The War is On (updated 20may17)

George Rebane

The War on Trump – yes, I believe that it’s now a full-fledged war in which the objective is to remove a duly elected sitting president - is steaming full speed ahead.  Yesterday’s clarion claim that the president had “shared sensitive intelligence” (supposedly the name of a middle east city) was modified today to have really been secret “code words” according to NPR.  The whole thing was sourced to unnamed WH officials who were also supposed to have contacted the CIA and NSA to give them a heads-up on the Russians’ Oval Office visit.  Now understand, no one has presented evidence that the president did anything wrong.  In fact, three senior officials “trotted out” by the White House – National Security Advisers McMaster and Dina Powell (for strategy), and SecState Tillerson – who were actually in the room, all denied the story calling it “false” and “It didn’t happen.”

But that makes no never mind to those dedicated to the destruction of this presidency.  All the miked politicos and talking heads continued lecturing the nation on what should and should not be said by the president, and what damage such revelations would do to our intelligence apparatus and relationships with allies, and on and on.  The careless listeners heard that such revelations actually happened; in no such breathless reports was mentioned that there still was not one shred of evidence on which to base the manufactured hysteria.  One Democratic MoC even called for another special prosecutor to be immediately commissioned to discover if Trump had committed an impeachable offense.  The hysteria of accusations and CYA statements by politicians of all stripe that now blanket the news cycle knows no end.

To illustrate the extent of the froth on this stormy sea, one worthy’s looney logic presented conclusive evidence of wrongdoing based on, McMaster’s and Tillerson’s statements denying that “Mr Trump disclosed any sources of US intelligence services or those of US allies”.  He claimed the allegation must be true since neither gentleman specifically “denied” that any city name was mentioned, therefore it must have been mentioned – say what?!  By that logic, since the mention of secret agents’ names were also not specifically denied, it must be true that such names were in fact also revealed by Trump.  And once allowed, this ‘logic’ of guilt by omission has no end to it.

Is that the end of this volley?  By no means, since tonight’s pile on is Comey’s allegation that last February the president asked the FBI director in private to halt the investigation into former National Security Adviser Flynn.  Somehow Comey failed to share that little tidbit with anyone else until conveniently after he was fired.  But now the Dems are screaming “obstruction of justice” and demanding that another special prosecutor be named.  Soon the main reasons for Washington’s gridlock will be the shortage of cops on the streets to direct new special prosecutor traffic.

Will we ever get back to fixing healthcare, tax reform, regulatory reform, filling federal appointments, revisiting our trade policies, immigration reform, … ?  Not if Team Chuckie has its way.

[20may17 update]  Again political cartoonist Ramirez communicates concisely.

The Global Warming Religion Revisited

George Rebane

We are told the Internet is forever.  So this is another missive I want to put in that time capsule to inform both my progeny and future cyber-archaeologists that George Rebane lived in the Post-Intellectual Age of Ignorance and was not party to, but merely an observer of, the hysterics camouflaged as science that then swept the globe.  This posting is merely a matter for the record, an effort to drive another stake in the ground of reason.  My previous writings on ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’, and most importantly on the preventable manmade component of global warming are a matter of record in these pages (e.g. here, here; also Download Climate Change Format_22jan08 and Download Climate Change Revisited).

A friend and RR reader recently sent me some links to videos of renowned physicists Freeman Dyson (Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study) and Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever discussing global warming.  Their calm words debunking the “pseudo-scientific” support of preventable manmade global warming (PMGW) are clear, concise, and comprehensive to an intelligent inquiring mind.

Both acknowledge that the belief in PMGW has assumed a mantle usually worn by religions, and therefore is now the compelling 21^st century religion that is every bit as vindictive to and intolerant of countervailing thought as are the orthodoxies of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  Science advances on the twin principles of falsifiability and Occam’s razor (q.v.); rejecting both of these, PMGW sits sclerotic behind a moat of politically mandated ignorance.

Today the mob hysteria has gotten so bad that PMGW adherents will believe nothing beyond the politically inspired psalmists in the Climate Consensus Choir celebrating a new age that began when the PMGW debate was pronounced to finally be over.  From that day onward, according to the acolytes, only the philistines and greedy purveyors of profit remain unrepentant in refusing to sacrifice their all for Gaia.  As a scientist, I proudly wear that philistinian badge while absorbing the obligatory slings and arrows from my frenetically faithful brethren.

So here are the above referenced videos.  Pour yourself a tall one, put your feet up, and pay attention to these renowned representatives of sanity, reason, and science – Professors Giaever (here) and Dyson (here).  And for those for whom the debate is over and/or those whose comfort in such matters derives from consensus, please readjust and tighten your blinders before exiting.

Compelling Camouflaged Corporatism

George Rebane

Corporatism is the classical scourge of capitalism wherein privately held corporations, either alone or within associations, join with government to create business environments (e.g. markets) that reduce their risks from competition, natural anomalies, and economic turbulence through enactment and enforcement (by the government gun) of favorable laws, regulations, codes, fees, etc that serve to guarantee their survival and profits.  Although not limited to large corporations, corporatism inevitably becomes their executed strategy as their marginally managed size makes them vulnerable to more nimble competition at home and abroad.

The nearby photo (apologies for the quality; it was quickly taken with my phone; inc.com didn't do much better, but doesn't connect the dots) is of a paid ad in the 12may17 WSJ containing an open letter to President Trump from the grim array of large corporation signatories beseeching him to keep the US in the recent Paris accords that presume to combat preventable manmade global warming.  When we read the bulleted reasons for why it is in our interest to remain bound to those accords, it should become clear that these arguments are meant to convince and comfort the nation’s light thinkers.  All of them are specious in the sense that they outline actions and business practices which the corporations could undertake on their own without any need for the Paris accords.

But a deeper consideration reveals that these ‘benefits’ to the undersigned, paid for by the consumers, will only accrue and make sense if they are executed within government mandates fashioned to mangle markets so that the big guys are afforded a sufficiently deep and wide regulatory moat behind which they can risk such compliance investments that would make no sense within freer markets.  For example, “(Enforcing the accords on everyone) benefits American manufacturing as we modernize to new, more efficient technologies.”

Well then, if our manufacturing will truly be ‘benefitted’ by modernization and integration of “more efficient technologies”, then why not do it regardless of the Paris accords and enjoy the rewards?  And therein lies the lie, because the benefits will accrue to the undersigned ONLY if expensive constraints are imposed which their (smaller and/or more efficient) competitors can ill afford.

The same line of revelatory reasoning can be applied to each of the other seemingly salutary “several ways” claimed in the letter.  The overarching rationale for these cumbersome corporate giants to support the anticipated fruits of the Paris Agreement is to increase their own survivability and competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving global economy in which they face stark limits to growth and profits without government as their enforcement partner.  Such a broad appeal to light thinking represents the finest practice of compelling camouflaged corporatism.

“THE LAST ONES”

[This little essay on the children of 1930s and 40s was sent by a RR reader and correspondent.  He shared it with a number of us who join in an ongoing dialogue about the times and events.  It is posted as received.  gjr]

By Denise Eyherabide

Born in the 1930s and early 1940s, we exist as a very special age cohort.  We are the “LAST ONES.”  We are the last, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with fathers and uncles going off.  We are the last to remember ration books for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves.  We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans.  We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available.

We are the last to hear Roosevelt’s radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors.  We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.

We are the last who spent childhood without television; instead imagining what we heard on the radio.  As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside until the street lights came on.”   We did play outside and we did play on our own.  There was no little league.

The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like.  Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.  Newspapers and magazines were written for adults.  We are the last who had to find out for ourselves.

As we grew up, the country was exploding with growth.  The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow.  VA loans fanned a housing boom.  Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work.  New highways would bring jobs and mobility.  The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.  In the late 40s and early 50s the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth to its new middle class.  Our parents understandably became absorbed with their own new lives.  They were free from the confines of the depression and the war.  They threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.

We weren’t neglected but we weren’t today’s all-consuming family focus.  They were glad we played by ourselves “until the street lights came on.”  They were busy discovering the post war world.

Most of us had no life plan, but with the unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide we simply stepped into the world and went to find out.  We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed.  Based on our naïve belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we went.

We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future.  Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this experience.  Depression poverty was deep rooted.  Polio was still a crippler.  The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 1950s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks.  China became Red China.  Eisenhower sent the first "advisors" to Vietnam.  Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.

We are the last to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland.  We came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease.

Only we can remember both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.   We experienced both.

We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better... not worse.

We did not have it easy.  Our wages were low, we did without, we lived within our means, we worked hard to get a job, and harder still to keep it.  Things that today are considered necessities, we considered unreachable luxuries.  We made things last.  We fixed, rather than replaced.  We had values and did not take for granted that "somebody will take care of us."  We cared for ourselves and we also cared for others.

We are the “LAST ONES.”

Laffer’s Logic Laughs Last

George Rebane

President Trump’s tax reform proposals have reignited debate over the curve made famous by economist Art Laffer.  The nearby figure illustrates its most popular version, although as a more thorough discussion reveals (here), there are more sophisticated versions that reveal the variation of the state’s tax revenues as a function of increasing taxes on economic parameters such as labor and (monetary) capital.  We remember that Laffer’s end points are accepted by all, save perhaps by the most rabid Left.  If the government doesn’t tax or taxes very little, it gets no or low revenues; if the government takes almost all or all the wealth that you earn/create, it also gets very little or zero since then you will cease wealth producing activities.  It’s the middle ground of tax rates where the debate should concentrate, since obviously the government does levy a considerable tax on us, and in return does take in a ton of money.

The Left’s most recent volleys against the Laffer Curve are based on the notion of their eternally (infernally?) received wisdom summarized in the proposition that ‘lowering taxes never pays for itself’.  This implies that the only way to ‘pay for’ extracting lower than current tribute from the population is to eliminate a concomitant amount of government spending (a thinly disguised reference to the wealth transfer ‘entitlements’ for people who get more than they give).

Let’s think about what this proposition asks us to believe.  First, it implies that our current tax structure or rates are miraculously already at the ‘Revenue Maximizing Point’ in the figure.  Any reduction of these rates will cause us to ‘slide backward’ on the curve and yield lower revenues.  Second, and more remarkably, it requires us to believe that regardless of where we are on the mid-region of the curve, raising taxes always yields more government revenues.  The latter additionally appeals to the Left’s carved-in-stone shibboleth that tax rates have no significant effect on economic activity.

Both beliefs are empty of supporting evidence.  The first assumes a hubristic Ptolemaic stance that is totally unreasonable given the difficulty in determining the RMP for a complex economy.  The second belief is insane on its face – always raising taxes to gain more revenue must needs collapse somewhere along the way since arriving at wholesale confiscation of earned wealth ultimately stops its creation.  The above cited piece in Forbes does a good job of explaining the matter to the intelligent reader.

Team Trump’s economic advisers correctly take the more humble Copernican view that we are located nowhere special on the ‘Laffer hump’, most certainly we don’t know our exact location regarding the RMP.  But given the existentially high taxes we have been paying, and the historically anemic performance of our economy since the bottom of the Great Recession, it is reasonable to attribute a higher likelihood to the idea that we are to the right of the RMP.  This advises that reducing taxes will indeed generate more government revenue by stimulating added economic activity that will generate more taxable wealth that in turn will increase revenues even at the then lower tax rates as part of a reformed overall tax structure.  At this point it is at least worth a try.

The stasist and statist Left, of course, will have none of this.  Why?  Because it will be another widely visible contradiction that gives lie to their long-held model of human behavior – from an ideological perspective it will serve to reveal their man behind the curtain.  And that’s a no-no, regardless of how their ill-informed minions must fare under an ever-bloating leviathan.

Ruminations – 10may17 (updated 14may17)

George Rebane

Comey is fired, and as pundits on both sides are now discovering that it was for the reasons apparent to (almost) all of us on RR last July (here, here, and here for openers).  Those who still think the dismissal of this well-dressed doofus will affect ongoing FBI investigations are just whistling past the graveyard.

‘To Set Prices, Stores Turn to Algorithms’ (9may17 WSJ)  Well, no sh!t Red Ryder.  Another belated and breathless discovery by under-educated journalists (and editors).

‘A Philosopher gets Pilloried’ reports on Professor Rebecca Tuvel being attacked by her ultra-left colleagues in academia for daring to generalize inquiries based on accepted specific questions such as “why society is increasingly willing to embrace people who identify as “transgender,” even as it rejects those who identify as “transracial.” Why laud Caitlyn Jenner while vilifying Rachel Dolezal ?”  Read the article to see the next level of what may only be called rabid insanity that lies at the heart of the attack she is currently under.  Jillian Kay Melchior of Heat Street notes that “it’s her opponents on the progressive left that this saga should really frighten. Their reaction suggests their ideas can’t withstand even the most basic critical scrutiny. Such fragile principles (of the Left) aren’t persuasive or enduring.”

[update]  The Canning of Comey Cauldron boils over.  Liberals, nationally and in these pages, have again evoked their ‘gruberized American voter’ audience for which they are playing all versions of ‘Comey was fired to stop the FBI from discovering dirt on Trump’.  You really have to believe that the electorate is stupid to float that one since Comey was not a material participant in or contributor to the FBI’s ongoing investigations, merely the politically clumsy head of the bureau who couldn’t keep his foot out of his mouth.  That both Republican and Democrat MoCs demand the continuance of these investigations has settled the matter in the minds of the more discerning.  But that makes no never mind to leftwing worthies ranging from Chuck Schumer to some of our own commenters – the national Dump Trump chorus must not skip a beat.

Pot Panel Lists to Port.  The county’s panel to recommend its new marijuana ordnance was completed by the Supes yesterday.  Republican Chairman Bob Hren and other conservatives pointed out the obvious list of the 14 originally accepted panelists that included nary a person from the Right.  In response, the BoS decided to appoint two more to the panel, one of whom is Mr Don Bessee, Executive Director of the Northern California chapter of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, RR reader, and frequent commenter in these pages.  We hope that Mr Bessee will keep RR readers up to date with the panel’s doings, and maybe even contribute a byline commentary now and then on his views about the arrival of legalized RMJ in Nevada County.  (more here)

‘The Left’s War on Free Speech’ has a long history which is neatly summarized by WSJ editorial board member and national columnist Kim Strassel.  It is published in the April 2017 Imprimis of Hillsdale College where she spoke earlier this year.  There Ms Strassel not only highlights the tremendous damage that the Left is doing to our national wellbeing with their vitriolic and often violent opposition to free speech in our public forums, but also provides some important remedies still available to those Americans who hold our Constitution dear.

[11may17 update]  NPR is prominent among the lamestream outlets in keeping up the now obligatory daily Trash Trump narrative of progressive politics.  This morning it did a thorough job in reporting on another Republican MoC’s townhall, this one in New Jersey.  The audio recorded the totally one-sided comments by the audience marbled with the loud boos, shouts, and hisses from the audience that drowned out the congressman’s words.  The NPR correspondent’s copy again represented the gathering as comprised of a typical cross section of America, instead of a hall packed full of carefully selected, organized, imported (as needed), and ideologically homogeneous crowd of leftwingers.  The beat goes on.

We all know why the Dems are screaming for special prosecutors for every imaginable investigation that may involve President Trump, don’t we?  What better taxpayer funded circus to continue dunning the administration as operating under the shadow of potential criminality while diverting America’s attention to what the Republicans actually accomplish between now and the 2018 elections?

RR has long advised its readers that the ACLU is a leftwing institutional mouthpiece.  With the current post-election rabid radicalization of what is now the Alt-Left, ACLU has compliantly shifted its public stance to where it is unabashedly the voice of progressivism.  This shift is described in the most delicate of terms by Wendy Kaminer and Alan Dershowitz, two of ACLU’s former board members, in their ‘Where’s the ACLU When You Need It?’  There we read how “its new guard reflects the left’s turn against liberal values and toward progressive politics.”  Of course, the grassroots progressives know nothing of this as also confirmed by the outpourings from our own local liberal leftwingers.

Merrick Garland as the new FBI Director, so suggests Sen Mike Lee (R-UT).  What a great idea.  As a former federal prosecutor, the man is very qualified for the job.  And his nomination by President Trump should either quiet the Left’s narrative that he’s trying to monkey with FBI’s investigations, or put an enjoyable twist in their knickers to see how they will then attempt to continue that line of propaganda and fake news releases (e.g. Comey asking for more resources for Russia investigation which were denied).  In any event, Judge Garland’s nomination should put a cork into the demands for special prosecutors.  It would be hard for Team Chuckie to deny the professionalism and objectivity of Obama’s candidate for SCOTUS and oppose his confirmation.

[14may17 update]  Garland for FBI Director gains momentum.  Now Senate majority leader McConnell is picking up on Judge Garland nomination (here).

Calling all California’s Closeted Communists

George Rebane

The insanity of permitting/inviting people known to believe in the abrogation of the US Constitution and the government upon which it is founded is now beyond doubt.  The Democrats in Sacramento are either terminally stupid or no longer seek to hide the existential truth that they want to do away with America – or according to their preferred bullshit phrase, “fundamentally transform America”.  Communism was and still is a socio-political ideology whose basic aim and organizing principle is to achieve a worldwide collectivist government that controls all resources, production, and consumption by a compliant population that altruistically benefits humanity through its class memberships, and most certainly not through individual enterprise exercised by a free people in a liberal society.  (see also here and here, and Bob Crabb's version here)

Sacramento’s recent initiative to permit communists to hold public offices in California is just the latest corroboration of the progressivists’ hate for everything good that America has stood for and accomplished in its short history.  Previously established evidence along the same lines includes their precipitous destruction/dilution of American culture by promoting the influx of unnumbered illegal aliens, their subsequent legitimization, and their contribution to our ‘multi-culturalism’ by ensconcing themselves in unassimilated conclaves.

The next destructive objective is already visible in our Left’s refusal to acknowledge the global threat of the perhaps not so radical Islamists.  They have made this clear in their virulent opposition to any reliable means to vet the intentions and background of foreigners seeking to enter the country as immigrants or visa holders.  And any notion of basing immigration policy on America’s interests – say, workforce needs and/or social costs – is simply anathema to a politically correct liberal.

Communist governments have filled the historical record as the deadliest of all scourges for their own citizens.  Not counting war-related casualties, these collectivist tyrannies have slaughtered over two hundred million of their own.  By any measure, the imposition of human misery continues overwhelmingly in countries under the control of collectivists of every flavor ranging from communists through the various thugocracies to fundamentalist Islam.  And our Left is hellbent on driving America down one of these roads.

E Unum Pluribus

George Rebane

That fractured Latin exemplifies what the Pew Charitable Trust reports (here) is a sentiment held by more and more Americans.  We have reported the ‘out of one, many’ movement for some years now under the Great Divide moniker.  While there have been many movements to reconfigure the United States over its almost 250-year history, the current one is unique in that it draws its strength from the radicalization of the progressive Left and their obsession with an ever-bigger government whose goal is to unite the world under one political leadership.

The Right’s reaction to what they see as the collectivists’ desire to abrogate our Constitution has taken various forms from the formation of new states (e.g. State of Jefferson movement to create North California) to the peaceful break-up of the United States into “smaller, more functional nations” that may or not be more loosely united under a TBD confederation.  Recently even elements of the Left have seen a benefit in states seceding from a Union that they view as not having progressed as progressively as required by their time table toward a one world government.

Scattershots – 6may17 (updated 8may17)

George Rebane

CA’s coming RMJ market.  As has long been proclaimed here, California’s recreational marijuana market will be dominated by the big guys.  And the remaining question is whether it will be oligopolized by the big guys, or will there also be room for the small (‘mom& pop’) operators under the RMJ laws Sacramento is now considering.  Unions have always thrived in autocratic environments, be they controlled by the government or mobster guns.  This explains the current lobbying by the Teamsters to create a highly structured, limited, and unionized process in California for producing, distributing, and retailing RMJ.

The Teamsters want to drive out the small guys and dominate the labor and legislative components of the big guys. This will increase the barriers to entry for the small growers while enabling a structured process that is easier to monitor and ‘manage’ by both law enforcement and unions, hence the cops are backing the three-tiered approach.

But the progressives, including their ACLU friends, have their undies tied in knot as they find themselves suddenly on the side of a free RMJ market with lots of growers, distributors, and retailers in all kinds of configurations providing consumers with lots of choices in quality and prices.  But controlling and skimming such a marketplace is hard with so many different players all over the place.  So look for the Teamsters and CA’s law enforcement to link arms and push through laws that rigidly structure the RMJ market.  This will guarantee the rise of large MJ warehouse grows, and some may even be built in Nevada County.  (more here)

Convention of States.  A reader gave me the heads up on Texas stepping up to the plate on joining the call to convene an Article 5 convention of states.  The real news here is the back story that the Left, formerly a big CoS backer, is now backing away from its support, alleging that the whole thing is a rightwing conspiracy to bring autocracy to the US.  The Right, led by people like our own Mark Meckler, has argued all along that the objective of the CoS is to return America to republicanism with a reigned in federal government and constitutionalism along the lines envisioned and bequeathed to us by the Founders.  Given that the Soros supported progressives are now abandoning their plans for conducting the CoS, I will have to reconsider my own support of this Article 5 initiative.  (more here and here)

‘Quantitative Investing – a crisis waiting to happen’, so argues MIT PhD economist Dr Richard Bookstaber in a new book The End of Theory.  Most readers know that all the big financial outfits have their skunkworks where a lot of securities data and trading algorithms are generated and studied.  And most of them also implement their algos in programmed trading schemes in which computers are the rapidly acting, final arbiters of placing trades.  Bookstaber says that such an approach, especially using algos to recommend stocks to retail traders, will ultimately derail the market through mass mania where everyone wants to concurrently either buy or sell – sorta like capsizing a boat by everyone rushing to the starboard or port rail.  However, the smart institutionals who trade algorithmically don’t publicize their algos and keep tuning them as market conditions change.

The watchword for the retail investor is not to be drawn in by ads promoting this or that new ‘AI-based’ sure-fire method for beating the markets and making a ton of money.  Two seconds of thought tells you that the last thing that anyone does, who discovers a working algo, is start selling it to the retail investors.  If it works, you trade your own account with it and keep it a big secret as long as it keeps working.  Only when it no longer makes money, a fate suffered eventually by all trading algos, it is then that you squeeze the last buck out of it by hawking it to the eager snuffies out there, using historical performance to imply that it is still working.  (more here)

‘Adulting’ is getting harder by the day.  That’s the new verb for encouraging young people to forsake adolescence and become responsible adults.  With the new millennials it’s even harder, since they have been educated under progressives’ tutelage from K-thru-college.  Today too many of formerly young adults are now old adolescents living with their parents, having no marketable job skills, and constantly demonstrating their ignorance and poor social skills to one and all.

Nebraska senator and former academic Ben Sasse describes this new generational phenomenon, and goes on to offer some suggestions for rescuing kids from a fate of rejecting adulthood in ‘How to Raise an American Adult’.  He cites “data from the Pew Research Center show(ing) that we crossed a historic threshold last year: ‘For the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household.’ Fully one-quarter of Americans between 25 and 29 live with a parent—compared with only 18% just over a decade ago.”  The Left, including our local lackeys, deny all of this while accusing messengers of such news of practicing inter-generational hate.  Progressives, of course, must engage in this denial because these not yet adulted people form the core of their convincible and compliant constituents.

[8may17 update] We almost missed a most beautiful and breathtaking soiree today at the home of Ms Ann Wilder who is a major supporter of Music in the Mountains.  Arriving tired after a long pull from the coast yesterday afternoon, we thought of just kicking back and slowly unloading the RV today.  Well, two things intervened, one of them a definite surprise.  Jo Ann reminded me that we had committed to attend a special MIM luncheon that also featured the virtuoso artistry of Ms Natsuki Fukasawa, concert pianist extraordinaire in an intimate setting.  (we are pictured with her)  Ms Fukasawa is an International Steinway Artist and the featured artist in this year’s MIM SummerFest 2017 at our fairgrounds, where among other offerings she will play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 accompanied by the MIM Symphony Orchestra.  

After the wine and puu-puus, and before the food was served by Antonio’s Catering, we were enthralled by Ms Fukasawa at the keyboard with selections that started with an awesome tone poem by Liszt (that really did have ‘too many notes’) and ended with a concert arrangement of ‘Over the Rainbow’.  These framed a delightful lecture on how Rachmaninoff came to compose his second piano concerto - he had just come out of a critic induced artistic funk. And then she played selected piano parts from the concerto, one of which required us all to ‘sing’ the familiar main theme from the first movement that is denied the piano, but which actually dominates the ‘melody line’.  And it all happened in front of us on Ann Wilder’s beautifully restored world class concert Steinway of the legendary genre with a massive base register that makes you feel you're sitting in a high vaulted cathedral assaulted by a couple of hundred large diameter pipes.  I was privileged to sit with her during lunch and can testify that she is a genuine person with wide interests and a very impressive woman.

It was bunch of goddam bees that almost made us miss the lunch.  They had arrived during our absence and swarmed into a huge mass on one of our fruit trees near where we stage the trailer.  Let me just say that this foreboding mass measuring about 18 inches in length and 6-8 inches in diameter made naïfs like us not want to get too close.  So this morning we got in touch with an expert bee keeper who came over and told us a bit about such bees.  Now understand that we love bees and had said a little prayer for their arrival this spring to pollinate everything in sight.  Only we had not counted on the Good Lord’s sense of humor in supplying an ample supply of bees.  Long story short, the mass of bees was not a hive but only a huge swarm looking for a new hive to establish while avoiding the regulatory hurdles that Nevada County puts in the way of home builders.  The bee keeper put an open box as a temporary (decoy) hive into which he shook the mass of bees (demonstrating that in this stage of their search they are not “defensive”), and the rest in due course dutifully followed into the container that now contained their queen.  Tomorrow they will be relocated into a real hive to continue doing the necessary work in keeping California’s ag businesses in the black.

Panorama of Progressive Potholes (updated 5may17)

George Rebane

We’re on a little RV trip to the NorCal coast with friends.  This gives us a chance to sample the extent of care that California’s infrastructure has enjoyed under decades of leftwing leadership in Sacramento.  Our roads are an absolute mess, the posterchild of which is the Pacific Coast Highway or State Highway 1.  This is the state’s premier icon roadway that has been a tourist draw for decades, providing endless picture postcard views of the rugged coast punctuated by scenic beaches.  The highway now is approaching ‘tank trail’ status familiar to combat arms veterans from their training days at army and marine bases with impact areas.  When you decide take Hwy 1 today, make sure your tires and shocks are in good condition.

Sacramento’s most recent bamboozle response to this was SB1, the gas tax and registration fee increases signed by Gov Moonbeam, now as mindless as his progressive pals in the state’s legislature.  Past increases in such taxes and fees have landed overwhelmingly in the general fund where they are used primarily to pay for underperforming state agencies and hold back the realization that the gap between payments to government retirees and the ability to continue these, as reflected in the plans’ unfunded liabilities, is rampantly growing.

Nevertheless, the state’s solidly liberal majority is ignorant of and blind to the fiscal fiasco in which California is now helplessly thrashing.  The people who do headcounts tell us that the exodus of productive middle-class Californians is also on the upswing from the dull roar which we have experienced since it was clear that the state’s recovery stats were mostly cynical propaganda.  The proximal cause is Agenda21 driven housing costs which have vaulted out of reach the ability of workers to own homes.  And there is no sign that the draconian anti-development regulations will ever be rolled back to let the market determine what kind of houses will be built where.  Stack and Pack in unaffordable urban areas remains the only game in the state.

In the meantime, the functional idiots in Sacramento are again talking about making fossil fuel use illegal for energy generation and transportation.  After all, when it comes to diving for the bottom, California must maintain its hard-earned leadership position.  The profusion of ‘potholes’ populate more than the state’s highways and byways.

[5may17 update]  Enough Californians are not convinced about SB1 really going to fund infrastructure repairs that they are supporting an initiative filed by assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Orange County) to repeal the latest bamboozle.  The Left, along with its usual suspects, continues to tell people that this time the money will actually go toward road repairs etc.  The initiative will require a supportive petition signed by at least 365,880 voters; but the bad part is that we will not get to vote on it until November 2018.  Do your part and send in $5 to support the petition drive.  (more here and here)