Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 31aug17

[Wow, the last one really filled up.  Here's some fresh sand to reignite a closer examination of the ongoing polls that portend so much about President Trump.  To that we can add the fascinating new cause celebre of diagnosing the man's mental health.  I personally appreciate readers' updates on local fire news.  Thanks.  gjr]

The Wall - Why Would Mexico Chip In

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 30 August 2017.]

Lately, among all the other lambasting of President Trump relating to a flood of new happenings, the notorious border ‘wall’ between the US and Mexico has again surfaced in the news.  The major points of interest in the wall should be how well it will work, how much will it cost, and whether Mexico would chip in to build it.

First, let’s disabuse ourselves of the political cartoons depicting a high solid wall with periodic armed watchtowers stretching across the mountains and deserts of the American southwest.  Anyone with an ounce, OK, make that two ounces of brains knows that the real issue here is border porosity.  There is not going to be a wall, per se, stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.  Instead, there will be added barriers of different kinds, new sensing devices, more border patrol observation posts, high tech drones with infrared cameras, and the inevitable vehicle patrols to stop the illegal entrants.  After all is said and done, our concern remains the resulting porosity defined by the number of illegal aliens, many carrying cartel drugs, who still make it through every year.

Mexico’s decision to contribute to the wall’s construction hinges on the effects of a porous border on their economy, the political optics already in place, and the country’s notoriously corrupt government.  Ultimately, as we all understand, it will come down to the money.

Democrats, as they see themselves (updated)

[This piece of Democrat worldview showcased in their booth at the recent Nevada County fair is both illuminating and informative.  They see and experience not what we see and experience, but tacitly admit that they have no "working Democratic message"   Also note that Republicans have "the power to prevent minorities from voting in more than two dozen Republican controlled states." - can't make this up.  Emphases in the original.  gjr]

IN SEARCH OF A WORKING DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE

Suggestions for Effective Communications @ Fair

“Try to find common ground and emphasize that regardless of differing perspectives, we all want this country to succeed. For example, we all want gun safety, whether we’re NRA members or not; availability to good medical care, whether we support ACA or not; a healthy environment, whether we view the Centennial Dam as the way to go or not. Find terminology that connects rather than separates”.

This quote is from the Directions for Volunteers at the Democratic Booth, and it goes to the core of the dilemma we find ourselves in. Even politically interested people seem unaware of the gradual changes that have turned the Republican Party from a basically positive force since its birth as the anti-slavery party and certainly through the Eisenhower years to a reactionary power committed to rolling back our social safety net and our infrastructure. The Tea-Party/Trump faction has gone even further and seems intent on bringing us back to the time of the robber barons of the 19th century.

It is simply not true to say that the current right-wing Trump Administration wants gun safety, good medical care available for all, and a healthy environment with clean air and water for people as we can see from their actual policy choices.

The facts are that Republican policies over the last decades have been to weaken and work against affordable health-care, a well-functioning social safety net, good environmental policies, infrastructure investments, and have worked on behalf of large corporations and against lower and middle-class Americans, and we need to be steadfast in pointing this out at every turn. We should do this in a factual and controlled manner, but accepting the lies of right-wing wishful/knowingly false thinking puts us at a huge disadvantage where uncommitted voters may conclude that even Democrats believe there is no real difference between the two parties, affirming the general and widespread disinterest for politics by average voters in this country.

Both Democrats and mainstream media have been very neglectful in not seriously challenging the blatant myths and untruths peddled by the right-wing that has taken control of the once decent and honorable Republican Party, and now our beloved country. I believe that our primary message should be that the right-wing now controlling our country is fundamentally different from not only Democrats, but traditional Republicans as well. In fact, many of the main principles from the 1956 Republican Party Platform are remarkably similar to those of Democratic Party Platforms during the last many decades. So when people complain that “we are so far apart” it is not the Democrats that have moved substantially. It is the Republican Party that has been hijacked by forces that are committed to destroying the very fabric of the civilized and advanced society that both parties built up over more than a hundred years, including the Progressive Era, the New Deal Era, and the Civil Rights Era.

I believe this is the message that all Democrats should be able to agree upon, and I also believe it is the one that has the best chance of overcoming the advantages the right-wing currently has with control of all branches of government, unlimited corporate funding at their disposal, and the power to prevent minorities from voting in more than two dozen Republican controlled states.

By Richardt Stormsgaard 

[update] And here’s how the Alt-Left wing of the Democratic Party sees the world.  As made clear by the husband/wife team of Distinguished Professor (I kid you not) Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dhorn, founder of the Weather Underground of the 60s, who are still there in the spirit and enthusiasm of today’s young communists who continue to dream of “free love and free land, free food and free housing, (and) dancing in the street”, and await their opportunity to co-opt or join Antifa to again mount the barricades and make it so.  Here is a snootful for your reading pleasure.

Max Tegmark, welcome aboard!

George Rebane

The Singularity must really be near when we have MIT physicist Max Tegmark climb aboard with the spate of science and industry luminaries who have recently discovered that intelligent machines will someday surpass humans, will systemically displace human labor, and (in a TBD form) will become the dominant lifeform on Earth.  Dr Tegmark has just published his epiphany in Life 3.0, and joins Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, … in spreading the news of the incipient Singularity to the general public.  Of course, none of them dare call it Singularity; for if they did, then it would instantly identify them as Johnny-come-latelies.

For those of us in the field, as recorded herein, the possibility of Singularity has been known for at least thirty years (and more decades in science fiction).  And science savvy entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) and Jeff Hawkins (founder of Numenta the developer of hierarchical temporal memory) have long staked out businesses that are pioneering the only branch of computer science that promises to deliver the Singularity – systems that are capable of learning from vast amounts of data present in their ‘environments’.  Here I don’t want to revisit the ‘learn vs program’ debate on the path to super-intelligence other than to say that the ‘program school’ of computer science has woefully been the dragged anchor, diverting resources from the ‘learn school’ which now finally dominates the field of AI.  All of the above people and technologies have been introduced and discussed here over the years (see RR’s Singularity Signposts section).

Deep learning is the label given to the latest generation of massive artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have learned to do amazing feats requiring intelligence and cognitive processing.  Most of these feats already far surpass humans’ ability to do the same tasks.  And what is happening today in the field of deep learning will literally blow your mind, in the sense of blowing it away as redundant, in the event that you decide to compete with it in the workplace – this brings to mind the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man (here).

Companies large – e.g. Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, … - and small are racing to integrate deep learned AI into their operations and products at breakneck speed.  The heads-up companies are launching in-house education and training programs to introduce deep learning to their technical and management staffs.  As an example, I can modestly cite my computer scientist son-in-law Roland Fernandez at Microsoft Research who has co-developed and operates that company’s online course in deep learning (q.v.).

What the sclerotic (‘programming school’) side of computer science did not realize for some decades, with some still in their benighted darkness, is the message Dr Kurzweil has been telling (preaching?) to people for years – that technology is advancing exponentially.  The programmers could not conceive that very soon there would emerge computers and databases that are large and fast enough to implement ANNs with thousands of layers that learn to ‘instantly’ manipulate millions of parameters in tasks like voice understanding, image recognition, medical diagnosis, concurrent large cohort control, and on and on.  And that’s just today.

For more on Professor Tegmark’s new book, I bid you read the excellent review ‘When Machines Run Amok’ by Frank Rose.

Male/Female Brains – different?

George Rebane

Here’s the latest little piece of reportage on a very uncomfortable topic for progressives – clinical and physiological differences between men’s and women’s brains.  In ‘Do Men and Women Have Different Brains?’ with tagline ‘A controversy sparked by a Google memo brings up an old question: What role does biology play in personality and behavioral differences?’ we have a report of researchers Dr Daphna Joel, et al at Tel-Aviv University gingerly tiptoeing through the tulips in their ‘Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic’ to conclude -

Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.

This conclusion does its best to buttress the politically correct assertion that cognitively men and women are essentially identical, and most certainly clinically so, thereby seeking to debunk once more ex-Googler James Damore’s notorious memo (here) about men/women's cognitive and behavioral differences in the workplace.

Dr Joel and colleagues attempt to convince us through their research that there is no discernible difference in the observable FUNCTIONING of the male/female brains.  What I’m willing to bet the ranch on is that if the raw MRI data gathered by the team were appropriately labeled, that a deep learning algorithm could be easily developed that would have no trouble telling the difference between the sexes’ brains.  Furthermore, I believe it would be very difficult to get government funding to do a similar body of research gathering only EEG data to submit to a deep learning program, because the results will most likely turn out to corroborate what Nicholas Wade documented in A Troublesome Inheritance (here).  And that is a big no-no.

iGeners – when you thought it couldn’t get worse (updated 26aug17)

George Rebane

Time for a short update on our generational tailspin.  A new body of research has just been published on iGen, the latest generation of Americans.  iGeners are the young people born in the 1995-2012 interval.  They are the ones following our infamous millennials born 1977-1995 whose aggregate predilection toward dumbth we have been following for the last several years (here, here, here, here).  Well, it turns out that the latest bunch out of the womb are giving the millennials a run for their money.

Dr Jean Twenge (psychology professor at San Diego State) has been doing the research and published her most recent findings in iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.  Actually, “the generation after the millennials loves smartphones, avoids books, craves safety and doesn’t tolerate intolerance” reports Christine Rosen in the 23aug17 WSJ (here).

These young people, in the aggregate, have an interesting departure in their values and worldviews than those who came before, including an “aversion to adulting”.  In their tolerance of almost everything else, what they are more likely to do than their predecessors is “to support restricting speech”.  Here they seem to have a pretty draconian bent, opining that professors who even utter one incorrect (intolerant, insensitive, …) word should be summarily fired, and students who also trip up in a similar vein should be expelled.  According to Dr Twenge, “This is the dark side of tolerance; it begins with the good intentions of including everyone and not offending anyone but ends (at best) with a reluctance to explore deep issues and (at worst) with careers destroyed by a comment someone found offensive and the silencing of all alternative viewpoints.”

iGeners are now the generation of snowflakes that totally embrace ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and such.  For them these are “not fringe ideas but those embraced by the majority of iGeners.”  In their daily round they prefer virtual relationships to real ones, they read less than even their predecessors, and most certainly less than the so-called GenXers and Boomers.  And here’s the kicker – their academic skills lag behind those of millennials “by significant margins” and they are “less informed” about current events.  By any comparison they make the “dumbest generation” look smart.

So here is what the one-two punch of union public schools and social media have produced in a progressive politically correct world.  According to Dr Twenge’s research, the iGeners are not a happy bunch.  “On the contrary, the more time they spend online, the worse they feel.”  The iGeners are “at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression  and suicide skyrocketing since 2011.”  And this cohort of new voters will determine your civil rights, disposition of private property, generation and distribution of wealth, and how America will deport itself among nations.  All of this complex output promises to be based on even less input than evinced today by the millennials.  Oh my.

[26aug17 update]  And then there is this timely and apropos contribution from Ramirez.

Sandbox - 25aug17

[Well, that last sandbox sure got smelly in the end.  My bad for letting it linger.  Perhaps we can try to raise the level of discourse on this one.  Would love to see some dialogue on 'Trump divorces GOP Congress' and its implications for legislation and 2018. gjr]

Scattershots – 21aug17 (updated)

George Rebane

Remember how all the country got gruberized on Obamacare into such a state of dependancy that to this day no one has been able extract them from that calamitous benefit?  Well, turns out that ol’ John got caught doing some fraudulent billing for consulting work he was doing for Vermont.  But not to worry, the state’s AG will not pursue the MIT healthcare bamboozler under the Vermont Civil False Claims Act if Gruber just promises to go away and not ever come back.  He’ll just wait until the next Dem is in the White House ready to get the gruberized version of single-payer onto the books. (more here)

We enjoyed the Nevada County version of the eclipse this morning.  Jo Ann and I prepared our instrumentation to witness the celestial spectacle - I with my two sheets of paper with one having a pinhole in it, and she with a more interesting multi-image display on her sheet of paper with her Colander Camera.  I also noticed that our trees eagerly participated in the event by casting countless crescent filled shadows as the moon covered more than half the sun’s disk.

NASA’s attempts to present live coverage of the solar eclipse were priceless exemplars of government in action.  It was hard to imagine how many more ways one could screw up the presentation of a simple and predictable event for which there was an infinite time to prepare.  They could have done better contracting out the production to a teenager with an iPhone on FaceTime.  As an alternative to images of the proceeding eclipse, the NASA bureaucrats were convinced we wanted to see talking heads spewing endless repetitions of pabulum from different parts of the country, including the launch of some camera-equipped weather balloons, which event was televised by only showing the back of the heads of two NASA worthies while they watched and marveled at the balloon’s ascent of which the viewers saw nary an image.  You can’t make this up.  Two and a half centuries ago our Founders were familiar with this kind of bureaucratic mis-functioning, and therefore gave us a Constitution that was supposed to give government a minimalist role in the lives of a free people.

[update]  President Trump has pulled the plug on Operation Choke Point.  You remember the 2011 Obama program to sic his DoJ on businesses he didn’t like, from gun shops to coal-fired power plants.  And oh yes, he also pulled the plug on the Federal Advisory Panel on Climate Change.  Seems these guys have been mixing a bit too much conclusive politics with tentative science.  For some reason our friends on the Left don't seem to acknowledge such things as accomplishments of this administration.  (more here and here)

President Trump’s speech made several things clear on Afghanistan; one of them being that he realizes we need to keep troops in world hotspots for a long time if we are to maintain our position as the world ‘white hat’ hegemon.  But what no one seems to have picked up is that we are again in the business of fighting a tactic – terrorism – and no longer an enemy – fundamental Islam - that uses terror as one of its tactics.  Fundamentalist Islam never came up in his speech.  Do we again believe that so many young people all over the world give up their comfortable lives and willingly sacrifice themselves in the name of something called ‘terrorism’.  I don’t think so.  We will never successfully fight an enemy that we cannot recognize. 

 

Sandbox - 21aug17

[So much going on - today's solar eclipse (protect them peepers), growing echoes of Charlottesville, President Trump reveals what next in Afghanistan, and Islamic terror now regularly arising out of indigenous populations, and more ...  gjr]

The conundrum of culturally cohesive communities (updated 22aug17)

George Rebane

Cultural cohesion has been the propensity of humans living together for millennia and perhaps longer.  The clear and simple dictum is that people like to live with people who share their social values and view the world pretty much as they themselves do.  The benefits of such communities is both manifest and manifold because it engenders mutual trust and even affection as it lets people work without having to constantly watch their backs, and therefore specialize, knowing that there is a reliable clientele for their product or service.  Promoting this paradigm has been one of the foundations of RR and part of my personal belief system (more here).

People with limited ability to nuance concepts mistake the promotion of cultural cohesion with a childlike understanding of simple black/white alternatives.  For them, if you like cultural cohesion, then you are probably a racist who doesn’t tolerate the existence of other cultures.  It’s as simple as that.

Add to history, and not take from it (updated 17aug17)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 August 2017.]

The Charlottesville clash is metastasizing across the country.  In these look-alike demonstrations, the Civil War and all that it entails has become the latest collision point of several ideological and political agendas.  For those able to handle historical nuances, our Civil War was not a civil war, but a War for Southern Independence, or more neutrally, the War Between the States.  In a real civil war, each side wants to wind up in control of the entire country.  But since time is short, we’ll call it a ‘Civil War’ in the sequel.

That in 1865 the South, among its other objectives, wanted to perpetuate slavery is today enough to charge anyone, who wants to retain reminders of that bloody conflict, with a long list of additional social sins.  For example, to defend the continued acceptance of statuary, paintings, plaques, and other symbols that memorialize that conflict in the South, is to be cast as a white supremacist who longs for the day when the blacks can again be enslaved.  And the promotion of American nationalism immediately equates with the hidden objectives of white nationalism – in short, such people are identified simply as rank racists.

So, to assure that these symbols of social injustice will disappear from our land, our politically correct factions outdo each other to demand removal of all such blatant displays of our despicable past.  Hence, we see statues of Confederate leaders and soldiers being toppled, and hear new cries to take down Civil War paintings in state houses and heroic facades from their exteriors.  And in the exercise of exquisite chutzpah, the Council on American-Islamic Relations joins in the demand that every Confederate memorial in the US be torn down.

The reasonable underpinnings for these progressive and alt-left sentiments are hard to understand.  Where do we stop destroying and removing symbols of past ages that conflict with our revised and ever-changing cultural tenets; where do we stop blotting out reminders of the inconvenient eras that really happened; and with warts and all, that are still a part of our history?

Do we follow the presumably sincere and heartfelt sentiments of ISIS and the Taliban who vandalize and destroy historical artifacts they consider hateful and even blasphemous to their God?  According to the tenets of their culture, such monuments and artifacts are an affront to the very foundation of our universe.  What about removing all evidence of the Roman Empire, a regime that conquered, ravaged, and enslaved so much of the world?  And was it not the Arabs in the first millennium who opened up the African slave trade along that continent’s east coast; do we also tear down the symbols of Arabic faith and glory?  And then throw in the Judeo-Christian scriptures and manifold artifacts abetting slavery.  To complete the job here in our foothills, hydraulic monitors were used in the Sierra to wash away entire mountain sides, polluting rivers and spoiling the livelihood of farmers in the valley below, all in the fevered search for gold.  Should we also remove these proudly-displayed symbols of exploitation and destruction erected in gold country towns that now memorialize that history?

Scattershots – 15aug17 (updated 20aug17)

"The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office."  Will Rogers

George Rebane

In 'By Whose Rockets' Red Glare' I doubted NK's ability to do the engineering development and testing of the missiles they have been launching.  Now it looks like others are beginning to agree and find evidence of where those critical missile components came from.  I don't feel alone anymore ;-)  (more here and here)

Senator Pocahontas Warren (D-MA) proclaimed proudly today that the Alt-Left has won and that her wing of the Democratic Party is no longer a wing, but today forms the “heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”  This has been visible for most of us for the last several years after Barack Obama won the presidency.  It now remains for the local grassroots idiots who have maintained the ideological constancy of their party to swallow hard and fess up.  All the movement that they have attributed to the Republicans moving right has been simple bullcrap.  The Republicans are still composed of independent thinkers who can’t come together sufficiently to repeal and replace Obamacare.  Such unanimity is not found among the goose-stepping Democrats.

A ‘Charlottesville …’ commenter is puzzled about who in America are the ideological descendants of Stalin and Mao, and asks whether Democrat luminaries such as Comrades Bernie, Lizzie (aka Pocahontas), Nancy, Mad Max, … might be included in that group.  Let’s make the answer very clear – YES!  While they don’t yet dare put Marx/Engel’s Manifesto on the table and assemble to sing the Internationale – “the standard of the socialist movement since the 19^th century” -  in tight four part harmony, they are doing the next best thing in their vigorous work to create an ever expanding leviathan that will answer the demands of the compliant mob voting in a pure democracy to sweep all dissent from their path.  You see, it’s got nothing to do with race or even anti-Semitism, for Marx, Engels, et al were lily white, and (along with the USSR’s ideological intellects) they were Jews.  But since the Left has never been able to openly debate their ideology, their perennial redoubt has been to simply accuse their opponents of being racists and anti-(fill in the blank), and then retire from the field.

And here’s a significant quicksand trap that can catch the unwary today.  A leftwing mantra is that ‘Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.’  Now who again defines hate speech?  The debate on this is long-running and no less important now than it was 50 years ago.  Here are some thoughts from reason.com entitled ‘‘No Free Speech for Fascists’ Is a Truly Terrible Idea’.

[17aug17 update]  Riskalyze hires new CFO.  I don't say much about Riskalyze in these pages.  But longer time RR readers know a bit of my role with Riskalyze - we started the company in our dining room back in 2011.  In any event, the company continues to be the leader in its fintech sector, and has been growing like a weed.  Since Riskalyze is now regularly covered in the press, here's more.  https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2017/08/17/auburn-based-fintech-company-recruits-cfo.html?

[19aug17 update]  Ramirez again explains it to us.

[20aug17 update]  The lamestream (e.g. CNN) accepts Southern Poverty Law Center’s expanded list of ‘hate groups’ (here is their “Hate Map”)  Today that list is expanding with the names of conservative organizations that range from simply being conservative to those who also publish events in the expansion of Islam in the west.  Included in their hate list are “Christian Identity” groups and any group that is critical of the government.  The schism continues to deepen, while the most on the Left diminish this division by still referring to the now expanded groups as being ‘fringe elements’.  More and more it turns out that Senator Pocahontas’ claims about the new Alt-Left ideological center of the Democratic Party appear to be true.  I wonder what is the largest fraction of a population that can still be labeled as being on its fringe.  (more here and here)

On this matter Rush Limbaugh noted that “black people and white people who were never slaves are fighting white people and others who were never Nazis over Confederate statues erected by Democrats,” and added that “somehow it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.”

Sandbox - 13aug17

[New sandbox for all topics save the Charlottesville/Google controversies for which your fine thoughts and other improvisations should be posted under 'Charlottesville - harbinger or just a temperature reading?'  gjr]

Charlottesville – harbinger or just a temperature reading? [updated 14aug17]

George Rebane

[This post invites the continuation of the lively comment thread on the expression/suppression of ideas that started in the 10aug17 Sandbox.]

So what happened yesterday in Charlottesville?  We know that a coalition of white supremacists got a permit to demonstrate against the relocation of a Confederate statue, and that leftwing counter demonstrators showed up to protest the protest.  Violence ensued – instigation unknown, results tragic.  Megaphones from all sides have now blared into action.  From the Left and lamestream, the answer to all questions is again unimaginably simple – it was once more the fault of the ‘rightwing racists’ who were egged on by Trump.

And the remedy for it all is even simpler – use government force to deny those deemed racist, nationalist, etc the right to demonstrate in public forums.  Even such good Christians such as Dean Ashford at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (here) and rightwing national commentator Erick Erickson (here) promote such a response to outlier thought and speech.

Before any left-leaning readers get their undies in a bundle, let’s first dispose of the race issue – RR, nor any of its readers to my knowledge, espouse the notion that one race or another is superior.  Counter arguments to this – such as ‘yes, but we know what you really think’ - have been made by leftwingers with bankrupt debating skills, and, no doubt, will be made by them again.  However, RR has strongly argued that cultures are not only different, but also of varying nature as to the quality of life they have provided and continue to provide for their adherents.

As stated here many times - I am a child, student, and defender of Western culture.  Western culture is not static, and has benefited greatly through its liberal mien, over the years by adopting ‘best practices’ from other cultures with which it has come into contact.  And I also believe that people all over the world, who have adopted major tenets of western culture, to that extent they have benefited and enriched their lives.  But today Western culture is suffering a purposed collapse, and the reactionary white supremacists are abetting this downward spiral.  Erickson’s wider appraisal is here germane –

The regressive ideas of the white supremacists in Charlottesville have no place in America any more than the censorious totalitarianism on display last week at Google. They are all from the same strain of secular uncertainty rising as Western cultural certainties collapse.

But to be productive, these debates/discussions should attempt to achieve a common understanding of what ideas can be professed, and by whom in public forums (which include the online media) and in the workplace.  To me the First Amendment prohibits the suppression of free speech, especially ‘speech’ deemed unpopular, by the government AND by citizens who are offended by such speech – that is simply the cost of doing the business of maintaining our American republic.

It is through the open competition of ideas that western culture flowered and continues to increase our enlightenment, and the enlightenment of all societies.  And it is through the suppression of peaceful competition of all kinds – including in the arena of ideas - that will sound the death knell of western culture.  (more later)

[update] Well, this little missive has drawn a bit of ire from our neighbors on our left.  I received an email quoting one of their leading intellectual lights demonstrating his knowledge of American history by taking to task the content of my opening paragraphs.   Thereof he claims that I have written “a bunch of alt-right revisionist, great divide driving, bastardization of American history.”  Fortunately, for the sake of expediency, the depth of his reasoning is both flawed and shallow.  Starting with the name of the 1860-65 conflict, the man has little knowledge of the century plus debate in the learned circles of our academe about the true nature of what the various factions of the South and North sought to achieve.  Here is a reference from Wikipedia citing the legion of authors who have discussed and debated the affair.  Given his age and many responsibilities, I really don’t know how to advise the man about remediating his education, especially concerning his views about the bastardization of American history.

[14aug17 update]  ‘Why were the police held back in Chalottesville?’ is being asked by people concerned about the conduct of the authorities during last weekend’s demonstrations.  Actually, there is a large faction in the country that is not asking, does not want to know, and/or already knows.  The answer to the question is not all that hard to puzzle out - just think about who benefitted from the police being ordered to stand down to let the counter demonstrators confront the white nationalist demonstrators.  When this Virginia town’s response is compared to what has happened in other towns like Berkeley, it is clear that Democrat authorities are now basing their use of police intervention on first satisfying their political agendas.  Strongly invite evidence to the contrary.

Our ERC gets dunned, again

George Rebane

The 9aug17 Union’s lead story was ‘Supes question ERC head’.  Our local business development agency – renamed Economic Resource Council to assuage the progressive palates – has had a sad history of under achievement, not all of which can be laid at its feet.  More than once the county’s sop for inducing economic progress has bitten off not only more than it could chew, but projects totally ‘inedible’ by a Nevada County in its recent political mindset.  The most recent ballyhooed Green Screen Institute for incubating local virtual and augmented reality enterprises is a good example, and one that continues to underline ERC’s reputation as a non-performing institution in our community.

What the ERC has never, to my knowledge, addressed are the factors and local attributes needed for an inviting environment in which to start/build for-profit developments and businesses.  To a capitalist entrepreneur, no matter how socially conscious, the county is as inviting as a slow-dance with a porcupine.  The local governments and agencies combine to interpret and enforce higher-up laws and regulations in the most strict and rigid manner that modern bureaucracies have devised.  And then our local leadership goes a step beyond in demonstrating to all its progressive propensities by adding on draconian local strictures to top off the already formidable battlements erected against businesses in California.

Sandbox - 10aug17

[Apologies for the delay in providing fresh sand.  It is interesting to continue the discussion of the Fat Kid's threats in response to which our Left wants to go through the next cycle of appeasement, so that when another 5-7 years have gone by NK really has the capability to concurrently launch multiple missiles with survivable warheads.  The people counseling a diplomatic solution to the current 'crisis' are firing intellectual blanks - they propose nothing new and fully succumb to Einsteinian Stupidity by repeating the same thing while expecting different results.  gjr]

Scattershots – 7aug17 (updated 9aug17)

George Rebane

A most puzzling question – why is Putin acting as if Russia’s chances for achieving its national interests under the present US-led world order are worse than under an unknown world order that will arise when/if Putin, Islam, and the American Left successfully upsets US leadership?

Absent any believable and propitious policy initiatives from the Democrats, the Left is reduced to its historical MO of pandering to people who don’t have the intellectual tools to understand or evaluate what they are told.  The current diversionary full-court press in the lamestream media appears to be a political redoubt into which they have retreated, to then do what??  Emerge with some new killer program of initiatives that will sweep all opposition from the public mind?  Or just hunker down and continue lobbing politically correct ‘bombshells’, hoping one of them will finally derail Team Trump, or in the interval see the Republicans splinter and eat their own?

Look for Google to go into corporatist hyper-drive in the coming years.  The left-leaning company has now become so politically correct with its internal policies – especially with regard to race, gender, and ideology - and office milieu that an unnamed male software engineer has written an extended sober critique of the situation for his colleagues which has gone viral (here)  The Left, of course, is outraged and its newly hired VP of Diversity discombobulated by the unauthorized and freewheeling discussions/debate the memo has launched.  And here is a better measure of the depth of this disease; this is the response from one of the software engineer’s bosses who “wrote the memo ‘troubled me deeply’ because it suggested ‘most women, or men, feel or act a certain way. That is stereotyping, and it is harmful.’” (yes; you really can’t make this up)

But what it all reveals about Google is most interesting.  When companies manage to achieve this stage of entangled undies, their competitive performance inevitably suffers and future fortunes must be bought and paid for through and to appropriate government contacts.  It was ever thus.

[8aug17 update]  Well I’ll be a sumbich, Google fired Mr James Damore, the software engineer who wrote the memo.  And the reason?  Wrongthink.  Yes, boys and girls, our society has now undeniably arrived on the outskirts of the Orwellian world in which you can be proscribed and punished for revealing that you are thinking ‘wrong thoughts’.  (more here)

But here’s the important point yet to be raised in the debate on this action by one of the world’s largest and most influential corporations.  If a private corporation restricts its employee policy to work related functions that support its commercial objectives, then one can argue that employees should restrict their workplace behaviors to the business at hand, and not use the work hours and venue to proselytize their thoughts on other topics.  However, if the corporation itself addends to its employee policy and proselytizes in the workplace such things as ideology-driven social engineering desiderata, then it should be the commensurate ‘right’ of every employee to express their own ideas about said desiderata in the workplace.  And if that means pushing back on the corporation’s extra-commercial messaging, then so be it, the corporation has no grounds for dunning the employee for equally sharing their thoughts as long as such activity does not subtract from the employee’s productivity.  After all, the purpose of the corporation was to make a profit selling its goods/services, and not to act as an adjunct ideological re-education center for its workers.  (The 8aug17 WSJ dances around this topic here, but doesn’t quite connect the dots.)

However, that clearly is not the case today where diversity VPs also wear the hat of corporate thought police, and can severely punish workers who dare voice opinions and ideas that are counter to the corporation’s politically correct lines of thought.  Welcome to the early onset of 2084.

[9aug17 update]  More on the joys of Obamacare, Rasmussen reports that 6.5 million Americans paid their fine rather than sign up for that latest progressive-promoted paragon of social engineering - a fact studiously ignored by the lamestream and leftwingers everywhere. (more here)

Megaphones and Reporters – what’s the difference?

George Rebane

Regarding the national controversy on leaks and leaking, let’s consider the roles of megaphones and media reporters.  We understand that a ‘leak’ today is considered as the release of confidential information that is not intended to be widely distributed among the public.  A leak requires the participation of at least two functioning ‘agents’ – 1) a person (the Leaker) who decides to divulge information in an unauthorized manner and does so to a third party, and 2) the agent (the Broker) providing the functional means of distributing the information to an audience so as to serve the agenda of the Leaker.

The Leaker’s actions may or not be illegal and therefore criminal.  (If it is illegal to transmit the confidential information to an unauthorized recipient, the Leaker becomes a criminal the moment he gives the information to the Broker, regardless of whether the Broker knows the provenance of the information he receives.)  The Broker is usually a media reporter who works for an outlet through which he will distribute the leaked information to an audience intended by the Leaker.

Today’s controversy involves the status and role of the Broker as a member of our Fourth Estate, namely the press.  Liberal societies perfunctorily hold the role and function of the press to be sacrosanct, since it is thought that it is an unfettered press which keeps ‘the people’ informed of things important to their well being, information that would otherwise be held from them to their ultimate detriment.

However, the role of the Broker becomes controversial when the leaked information is deemed confidential to the level that it affects the security and relations of sovereign nation-states, and the internal operations of their governments.  Specifically, does the Broker bear any responsibility for distributing any information he may receive from a Leaker?  Or since if the Broker violated no law or explicit stricture of confidentiality, is he free to broadcast the leaked information without further thought or consideration?

To help answer this important question, consider two scenarios.  In the first, the Leaker contacts the Broker, transmits the information, and sits back to enjoy the Broker fulfill his function of dissemination.  In the second, the Leaker picks up a megaphone (or in the modern era a radio transmitter or an anonymous web post or its many functional equivalents) and, bypassing the Broker, simply disseminates the confidential information himself.  We then reformulate the question – does the human Broker have any more responsibility in being part and party to a leak than does a megaphone?

The national debate today does not seem to appreciate this important perspective of what is a leak.  For most certainly, if the Leaker gave his information to the Broker who then decided not to further disseminate it, but to simply hold it confidential in perpetuity, there would be no leak.  I have not seen any reporter or pundit able to penetrate this simple analysis of the existential components of a leak, and the further ramifications it would raise regarding the responsibilities of an involved Broker/reporter.  But to be absolutely frank, I tend to think that a reporter – no matter the low regard that that profession commands in our land – should still be held to a higher standard than a plastic megaphone.  

The Return of Featherbedding (updated 5aug17)

George Rebane

When George Westinghouse patented his railway ‘fail-safe’ airbrakes in 1869, that new technology inaugurated a century of what came to be called featherbedding for the railroad industry as unions successfully fought the railroads to continue employing unneeded workers.  Prior to airbrakes on each railroad car, the speed of trains on down grades were controlled by brakemen manually setting each car’s brakes and then releasing them.  This was demonstrably the most dangerous job on a train since it required the brakemen to run up and down the length of the moving train equipped with narrow wooden gangways on the roofs of freight cars, jumping from car to car night and day in all kinds of weather.  Thousands of brakemen died during the 1800s until all trains were equipped with the Westinghouse brakes.  Today we still have railroad ‘brakemen’ doing other things, but that’s another story.   (more here) 

The important notion to understand here is that after remotely operated airbrakes were installed, railroads were still forced to hire brakemen whose new make-work tasks allowed them to also while away their work hours ‘featherbedding’ in the obligatory caboose (crew’s sleeping quarters) at the end of each train.  Due to successful lobbying of the federal and various state legislatures by the unions, laws were passed to enforce specified crew sizes and compositions, and, of course, union memberships.  This continues to this day.

Sandbox - 2aug17

[I had no idea that the discussion of Trump’s presidency and its survival could be elevated to the enviable level of an unending ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, without any perceptible loss of interest by the discussants.  Nevertheless, on the off chance that someone wants to introduce a new topic thread, here’s some fresh sand.  However, any such forays into new issues are not required, especially for those convinced that other readers are hanging on every clever word in their repartees ;-)  gjr]

Scattershots – 2aug17 (updated 6aug17)

George Rebane

Hillary Hodge running for Nevada County’s District #3 supervisor?!  And claiming that "as a non-profit executive in Nevada County specializing in small business development, I know we can revitalize our community with innovative solutions."  This from a former Union columnist who has publicly been refreshingly frank about her store of knowledge concerning anything having to do with business?  We recall that by her own admission selling her skillset to anyone hereabouts who had to pay her out of his own pocket has proved to be a challenge.  Now as Exec Dir of the non-profit, OPM-funded Sierra Commons (here), we can see what kind of innovative small business development the good lady has in mind for revitalizing our community.   Would I be that far off to doubt that even the Sierra Business Council would have a hard time endorsing her as our county’s revitalizing sparkplug?  Well, maybe.

Bracing for Ms Hodge’s candidacy is the current District #3 supervisor Dan Miller who writes (here) in the 1aug17 Union to ask why our county’s famed pot growers don’t contribute to the good works which abound in our community.  Pro-pot promoters volubly crow (even on these pages) about the money these people earn and the contribution they make to our local economy.  So Supervisor Miller makes the good point that - It is often mentioned the cannabis industry brings in boatloads of money to our county. Where is it? The Cannabis Alliance reports that they have several hundred members. When you add the nonmember growers to that number, you have a sizable economic engine that ultimately could be used to put cash flow back into the homeless needs. Since the growers do not pay taxes yet, this challenge provides an opportunity for them to participate in a jumpstart of goodwill. … If the cannabis-growing community is truly committed to the welfare of Nevada County, then this idea should resonate with their leadership. Now, we invite them to join us in becoming part of the tradition.

[update] In today’s Union we have an expose by a Mr Richard Stormgaard who attempts to take to task Ms Cindy Hren’s 17feb17 piece on the form of US governance as defined by our Constitution.  Sadly, what the Nevada City resident winds up exposing to one and all is that he gives new meaning to the notion of light thinking.  In disputing Ms Hren’s excellent pedagogy on pure democracy vs constitutional republic, Stormgaard gives no evidence that he is up to the task.  In the anti-Republican vitriol, founded on forged facts, which makes up the lion’s share of his offering, he doesn’t even define the contending notions.  But he does expose his grossly malformed line of reasoning in claiming that the Right still hews to ‘1828 values’ on governance since the Merriam-Webster definitions of ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ he attributes to Hren have not changed in the last two hundred years.  The gentleman will no doubt similarly argue that anyone who still defines ‘cat’ as they did in 1150AD is guilty of practicing medieval zoology.  For him semantics are as malleable as they are to Carroll’s Queen of Hearts.  But in all fairness, to get a true measure of the man, do read his contribution (here).

[4aug17 update]  For the history buffs among us – this we in the west knew more than a hundred years ago –  Winston Churchill 1899: "Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."  We now live in the extended shadow of that religion.

[5aug17 update]  Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer is yet another big government progressive unclear on the difference between affordable housing and low cost housing.  In his 5aug17 ‘Isn’t affordable housing key to western Nevada County’s future?' he goes through the usual liberal song and dance about affordable housing being our absent attractant for middle class families wanting to move and work here.  He goes to great lengths in specifying what kinds of ‘affordable units’ the government should allow to be built by developers who must survive in a world much different from the one he sees.  On top of it all he shows no understanding of the past effectiveness of government mandated ‘affordable housing’ programs in achieving the aims he outlines.  And he is, of course, blind to the chicken/egg reality that jobs have to arrive in tight formation with the availability of LOW COST HOUSING that their workers can buy/rent, and which will subsequently serve as an appreciating asset for their families which they can dispose of as they wish.  Developers know how and where to build low cost housing that sells, if only the government would let them.  Affordable housing is another misguided notion by the central planning elites that is disconnected from how a thriving world works, and another reason that Nevada County is in economic doldrums.

When I have argued that people like to be with similar people in these pages, our leftwing readers have castigated me and agreeing readers as being un-American, racist, and even traitorous to just entertain such thoughts.  That this is a seminal and existential feature of human beings is rejected in their ideology of class-based Marxism.  Now the pendulum definitely appears to be swinging in the other direction.  The Left today is becoming active in their practice of exclusionary cultural Marxism in their attempts to divide America into more and more distinct ethno-racial groups, in the process contending that America’s historic promotion of assimilation is nothing more than a white supremacist ruse for control and domination.  We should no longer seek to remain a dynamically shifting amalgam with the passage of time, but assume distinct ‘race-ethnic’ groups who will contend for their share of the American pie mainly through becoming federally recognized minority cohorts who are due federal funding and preferential treatment under federal law.  The newest of these race-ethnic groups being proposed for the next US census is called MENA (Middle East and North Africa).  Given the already established separation of our Hispanic class, I wonder how our leftwing will now revise their newspeak so as to make seamless this course change for destroying America. (more here)

[6aug17 update]  The rabid Left is well-known for its successful efforts to stifle free speech that counters the strident collectivist ideology.  Its recent advances in such censorship in academe have now entered the historical lexicon of America.  A reader sent me news of how this constructive proscription of our First Amendment rights has now entered the domain of performance art, specifically in the field of classical music. (more here) As I have asserted in previous commentaries, this no longer is ignorance or stupidity, it is simply evil.

Estonia 2017 (updated)

George Rebane

Yesterday we returned home from a two-week visit to Estonia with our grown daughters.  The trip was a long-anticipated odyssey to introduce them to the other half of their heritage, to let them see and walk in the places about which they have heard from their grandparents and me.  For Jo Ann and me it was our second trip since Estonia regained its freedom in 1991.  The journey had special meaning because it was the first time our ‘core family’ had spent time alone after our girls grew up and went to college more than thirty years ago.  Now in their early 50s they are both mothers of grown children, and one is even a 4-time grandmother.

Tea Party's demise greatly exaggerated

George Rebane

Wasn't it Mark Twain who remarked that "the recent reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"?  (Click on the image to enlarge.)