Rebane's Ruminations

Gas tax - Hren answers Boardman

[NC Republican Party Chairman emailed me this response to George Boardman’s 29oct17 column for publication.  It appears that Mr Boardman missed an important point or two on the new CA gas tax.  gjr]

George,

Your column yesterday was OK but very incomplete and inflamatory.  You failed to mention why there are no funds for road repairs in the gas tax account.  The gas taxes collected were diverted by the super majority in Sacramento from the gas tax account to the General Fund and spent on anything and everything the General Fund covers.  Thus, road repair disbursements could not be made to counties this year.

Of course, the natural reaction of those now in the super majority in Sacramento when there are insufficient funds is to raise taxes.  So, gas taxes will rise tomorrow, diesel fuel taxes will rise, and soon we all will pay about $100 more on average per year for auto registration.  Anything that is transported in our state will cost more, leading to an inflationary impact.  And, next year under the new law, the gas tax will rise again.  The new law has NO provisions to assure the collected gas taxes will not continue to be diverted to the General Fund.  Plus, the increase in gas tax is a regressive tax that hits lower income folks much harder than middle and upper incomes.  That is because many people cannot afford to live where they work, thus must drive longer distances.

So, your statement is really outrageous where you say the opponents have no answer to get money to fix our roads and want to return to horse and buggy days.  That is crazy and defamatory (but I am not filing charges).  The answer to where to get the funds for needed road repairs is to stop the raids on the gas tax funds.  Simple as that.

Bob Hren

Chair, Nevada County Republican Party

Mueller Mining the Russia Collusion Confusion (updated 5nov17)

George Rebane

It may well be that the ongoing ‘Russia collusion’ investigation will turn out to be a bigger affair than was Watergate, even if it doesn’t connect Donald Trump to any culpable act.  Special prosecutors must needs eventually find something to prosecute, and find it they will as Robert Mueller has already demonstrated with the trio he currently has in his crosshairs.  And it may soon become a quintet if he adds the Podesta brothers.

Sandbox - 30oct17

[Having lived in the LA area most of my life, Jo Ann and I have done our best to get excited about the Dodgers during our annual and singular homage to baseball - the World Series.  We feel that, even if you think the game is terminally boring, all patriotic Americans must submit at least once a year to the national sport.  Full disclosure - when they tied 7-7 last night, we gave up and watched an episode of 'Rake' instead.  The game's final score vindicated our decision ;-)   And then there's the utter joy and dancing in the streets by our progressive neighbors, for Mueller has finally indicted someone connected to Trump.  gjr]

The Singularity is Nearer

George Rebane

Have you noticed over the years when we have met in these pages to talk about the Singularity, that today finally everyone is talking about it in one fashion or another.  It’s as if suddenly everyone who reads is being introduced to the newest developments in AI and the possible futures it portends for humanity.  To be sure, not everyone in this conversation is still aboard with the inevitable advent of AGI (artificial general intelligence), the level of machine cognition that has become the specific definition of the Singularity.  (see more in Singularity Signposts)

Let’s first dispense with troglodytes like the Dr Miguel Nicolelis, Distinguished Professor in the Duke School of Medicine, Professor of Neuro-science and Co-Director of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering.  He writes about ‘The Perils of Putting a Chip In Your Brain’ and tries to make the case that striving for transhumanism is fraught with unacceptable risks which in the end will still be futile in humanity’s competition with the machine, which he believes will never even equal us where it counts – creativity.  He concludes the display of his ignorance of what already has transpired with –

The human brain should be revered as something exquisite and unique. We need to rethink the role of digital systems in education and ensure that humans—not machines, or humans joined to them— control the creation and decision-making process for art, science, politics and all the things that define us. Digital technology will never surpass what our brains can do—but it can shape them, and that is the biggest danger.

Duke should be looking for a new a new co-director.

Nicolelis is not alone in his dim and uninformed view of machine intelligence evolution.  There are also international notables like Nick Bostrom and Stephen Hawking (whom we have reviewed), who still believe that humans will write the code for the first AGI, when even now such efforts have pretty much been abandoned by that dwindling rear guard of ‘programming AI’.  As argued in these pages for years, AGI will be achieved ONLY through machines that develop their smarts through learning.  The most that humans can do and are doing today is developing algorithms and paradigms that make such learning machines more facile.  None of these bleeding-edge workers know exactly what these machines will wind up learning and what they will be able to do after they have been allowed to chomp through vast amounts of realworld data, measurements, and/or observations.  Trained neural nets don’t yet fully reveal their inner workings as they fashion the immensely complex discriminants that allow the amazing feats they today demonstrate in game playing, medical diagnoses, financial decisions, speech understanding, facial recognition, and the dynamic control of some very complex systems.

In tune with what’s really happening and what will be required in the very near future are people like Dr Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science, who understands and promotes transhumanism.  He argues that ‘We’ll Need Bigger Brains’ in order “to avoid a dystopian future fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, (and) we must move quickly to create technologies that enhance the human brain.”  The whole goal is to “keep up with machines” and become a thriving part of the post-Singularity future.  The alternative is to become a kept species that will ultimately die out or just be disposed of by the then dominant intelligence as described by several authors, most recently by Max Tegmark in his Life 3.0 (2017).  Koch and other transhumanists point to computationally augmented humans with microchips in their bodies that can compute, communicate, and store data that is all accessible and controllable through new brain-machine interfaces being now developed by a “burgeoning neuro-tech industry”.  And ominously, Dr Koch makes it clear that it is the heavy hand of government that can act as the anchor to these critically needed advances.

The most significant ‘hardware’ developments to support all areas of modern societies are in quantum computing.  All nations have major programs akin to our fabled WW2 Manhattan Project to develop the first practical (i.e. 50 qubit) quantum computer.  And the big fear is that them that gets there firstest with the mostest will wind up ruling the roost on this planet.  A good tutorial on quantum computers, ‘Welcome to the Quantum Age’ by Jack Nicas, appeared this weekend in the Nov/Dec issue of WSJ’s magazine The Future of Everything.  Globally, China has placed the largest bets on getting there first with new quantum computing institute under construction.  In America the leading contender in the race is Google.  Our federal government, as usual, is a day late and more than a buck short.  It’s hard to tell how many times we can pull a hat trick by coming up with some critical needed technology in the nick of time.  We’ve done it in the past, but the lead times to do it again are getting exponentially shorter.  As usual, it appears that the only hope for salvation here is from a minimally fettered private sector.  (more here)

Scattershots – 26oct17 (updated 28oct17)

Legal US gun owners have 300 million guns, and over a trillion rounds of ammo.  Seriously folks, if we were a problem, you'd know it. - Inconvenient fact.

George Rebane

News media reports on Americans’ attitudes about paying taxes includes this little bagatelle – only 39% disapprove of the poor not paying any federal taxes, which is represented as the lowest ranking tax concern in the land.  Well, no s#!t Red Ryder!  According to the government 47%+ pay no federal taxes at all, so it’s a no brainer they would not rank this as a high concern.  That means that 73.6% (39/53), or almost 3 out of 4, of those who do pay federal taxes are concerned about not everyone having skin in that game.  This little wrinkle seems to evade our nation’s crack journalists (including on the vaunted FN).

Here’s another gaffe on FN by James Rosen, one of their premier journalistic intellects.  Rosen calmly reported yesterday that Donald Trump publicly solicited Russia to steal Hillary’s emails.  The post-Rupert FN must have fired all their real editors to let this significant error get on the air.  Most people who paid attention last year know that at the time of Trump’s tongue-in-cheek question, Hillary’s emails had already been stolen, presumably by Russia, and she claimed that the remainder had been erased.  So what Trump and the rest of America wanted to see (and still do) was what was in Hillary’s already purloined emails, some of which would later be released by Wikileaks.  It is double-dumb or pernicious to take this ‘request’ for revelation as the original solicitation for the theft of the emails.  The lamestream, of course, has made hay on this fake news for over a year now.

OK, so everyone not limited to lamestream outlets knows that Team Hillary and the DNC solicited the generation of the infamous and fake Fusion “dossier” on Trump.  Not surprisingly, Perez and Wassername, the current and past DNC chairs, know nothing (a la Sgt Schultz) of this admission and its first report in the Washington Post.  But what’s more important is that the lamestream is treating this in a radically de minimis fashion (as of this morning CNN had devoted 20 seconds to the report), and where it is reported, it is as a side-mention of just some “opposition research” that Hillary and the Dems were doing on Donald.  This means that most Americans today know nothing of the potentially treasonous collusion with a foreign government which Trump’s opposition instigated, launched, paid for, publicized, and used as fake ‘intelligence’ to launch the FBI and now Mueller investigations of Team Trump.  And here the rest of us thought that opposition research meant digging out and not manufacturing the dirt on your opponent.

A bit more on Hillary includes her trip to South Korea during which publicly and repeatedly dunned President Trump.  Back in the old days American politics stopped at the coastline, but that all changed with Obama and his pointedly political apology tour.  So I don’t know what all this continuing crap is about accusing each other of collusion, since openly soliciting the partisan support of foreign governments seems to have been accepted today as just another tool in the politicians’ bag of tricks.

For those leftwing troglodytes who still insist that the lamestream provides ‘fair and balanced’ news, we offer the confessions of the former CEO of National Propaganda Radio as reported in the NY Post (here).  The import of this is as further evidence for the inevitability of the Great Divide, for the Left continues to refuse the growing deluge of evidence extreme leftwing bias in the popular media which has been available for decades in America’s public forums.  (H/T to reader for this link)

Finally, our favorite Union columnist and RR reader George Boardman believes “millennials have become punching bag for people who fear change”.  In his 23oct17 column (here) Boardman writes a somewhat confused commentary first outlining the acknowledged and widely recognized intellectual shortcomings of Millennials, and then flips to criticizing conservatives for recognizing such shortcomings and attempting to preserve American culture from the rapid rate that it is being abandoned by Millennials, who are overwhelmingly graduates from anti-American courses of study profusely available in our unionized public schools.  His attempt to redeem Millennials by citing the accomplishments of the few in the tail of the cohort’s distribution provides comic relief for the numerate reader for whom Mr Boardman’s offering is clearly not intended.

But it is apparent that our keen observer of the social scene does believe that people like me “fear change”.  He deduces that from my frequent and factual criticism (search RR for ‘Millennials’) of America’s “dumbest generation”, in the process painting all conservatives as sharing that fear.  But one of the most profound political lies of the 20^th century, still taught today, is that conservatives promote stasis and progressives are the champions of, well, ‘progress’.  The available record is replete with exactly the opposite, save for the pace at which the two sides want to abandon America’s nominal culture and constitutional government.  And I am happy to claim that I personally have been on the forefront of benevolent change during all of my career and continue those efforts as witnessed by the reporting in these pages.

Lucky Strike Extra in the reader service department.  A correspondent sent me this link that purports to be the “one-stop shop for practical resources for emerging technologies in government” that is offered by our General Services Administration.

[28oct17 update]  A couple of little items for future forensic data archaeologists.  In this early decade of the 21^st century we are witnessing the spread of wholesale ignorance as never before seen since before the Renaissance, and most certainly before the Enlightenment.  In days of yore, western civilization could count on succeeding generations becoming smarter and more informed as science flowered, technological wonders were adopted into the mainstream, and the earth was explored in the age of sail.  In these pre-Singularity years this has come to a grinding halt.  The dumbth of our Millennial and the post-Millennial generation (e.g. iGeners), as mourned in these pages for some years, has again outdone itself and now passeth all understanding.  Daily Signal reports that University of Wisconsin-Madison Students Protest Abraham Lincoln Statue Because ‘He Owned Slaves’.  There is nothing we can add to that.

The US economy again grew at an annualized 3%+ rate during 2017Q3.  During the eight-year administration of President Obama, the apologetic socialist, our economy struggled to reach the 2% level under his regulatory reign, as he bypassed Congress with phone and pen.  His best economic brains solemnly advised the country that from now on 1.5-2% growth will be the ‘new normal’; to expect more would be folly.  Of course they were right, were the socialist tax and regulatory policies of the Democrats and their carefully nurtured Leviathan to continue.  President Trump has breathed new life into our land with his upbeat outlook, regulatory reductions, restructured tax policy, and the continuing promise of repeal/replace of Obamacare and other onerous legislative muck.  The progressives have noticed this and are scrambling to explain that all this good economic news is made possible only through the assiduous preparation and groundwork laid by Team Obama, which foresaw none of this, did all they could to thwart economic growth, and delivered the slowest and most Sisyphean recovery (if it could be called that) from a recession in US history.

It is turning out that damn near every senior Democrat has lied about when, how, and who commissioned and generated the fake ‘Trump dossier’.  WSJ national correspondent Holman Jenkins Jr puts all the pieces together into the most plausible picture yet of how that dastardadly deed was done, and its effect on the election in his ‘The Trump Dossier Dam is Breaking’ which describes how “a U.S. political party applied to a hostile power for lurid stories about a domestic opponent.”  Stock up on your favorite beverage and popcorn, and fasten your seatbelts; this roller coaster will put to shame the ones in the amusement park - fun times ahead.

Introducing Politically Correct Mathematics

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 October 2017.  A slightly edited version of this appeared as an op-ed in the 4nov17 Union (here). gjr]

In these commentaries we have chronicled the long decline of America’s K-12 education, a decline that has now been joined by our very politicized higher education system.  The race toward the bottom continues, and is very apparent from the aggregate performance of our local public schools.  Today we have major news outlets confirming that “Internationally, US Students are Failing”, prominent technocrats like Bill Gates tell all that “schools are failing America’s kids”, and the government’s own National Center for Educational Statistics states flatly that “everything is just going down.”

Where America is most in trouble is in the critical science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, subjects which provide students the necessary expertise to ultimately enter the workforce into careers ranging from researcher, through electrician and carpenter, to assembler in our new roboticized factories.  The underlying rot in the system exists at several levels, but today I want to highlight some new and unbelievable insanity from our universities that recently came to my attention.  But first, let’s review some background that provides context and perspective for what you are about to hear.

When all is said and done, America has been the world’s leading high-tech nation, providing our citizens an enviable quality of life through our ability to develop, consume, and export products, all of which depend on a constant stream of advances in STEM.  In recent years other developed nations have been catching up and even surpassing us in certain fields, while our schools have “stagnated” and are now “just going down”.  Internationally, American students are “outperformed by their counterparts in 36 countries in math; 18 countries in science, and 14 countries in reading.”  In all categories we rank below developed country averages.  Some startling statistics include 30% of military applicants failing their entrance exams because of poor STEM preparation, and that 2/3 of our 8^th graders already perform below grade level in math.

The language basic to all fields of science, technology, and engineering is mathematics.  And while education at all levels has come under attack by ideologues with agendas that have successfully already politicized almost every subject taught in schools, in recent years these have come to include classes in engineering and the sciences.  Mathematics has remained the last redoubt - untainted, until now.  Today math instruction is also under assault by academics from university schools of education seeking to de-emphasize and dumb down the subject in order to provide social justice for some minorities and students in general who, for a variety of reasons, have difficulty with math.  To put a face on it, let’s take a look at an academic who is a prominent leader of this destructive assault.

Sandbox - 25oct17

[Just because it was time ... gjr]

Sandbox - 21oct17

[The last sandbox was a bit overfull, other than that it appears that 'climate change' has again become the perennially misunderstood issue of interest du jour.  I was a bit surprised that Thomas Elias <[email protected]>, waxing on the evidence for inevitable climate change in the 21oct17 Union, never once mentioned even the existence of credited and credible scientists who dispute the hysteria of the True Believers.  I suppose such admissions to the lightly read might discombuberate their carefully implanted opinions, and inadvertently open up directions of inquiry best left undisturbed.  gjr]

‘Is Classical Liberalism Conservative?’

George Rebane

The so-titled recent essay (here) by Yoram Hazony, president of the Jerusalem-based Herzl Institute, poses this question and sheds considerable light on the answer.  To prematurely cut to the chase, Hazony argues that modern conservatives and classical liberals have recently drifted apart in many significant ways.  In the sequel I attempt to summarize the main points of Hazony’s essay.

Sandbox - 17oct17

[Lots to talk about, but my attention is still on education which for the average American student is getting dicier by the year.  Here is a bit on the new fad of dual enrollment programs which have high school seniors taking courses also form local community colleges, the longer term benefit of which has yet to be demonstrated.  gjr]

The G-C Grid

George Rebane

In the figure below we present a grid representing the two-dimensional space over a defined range of governance, and a range of collectivistic social orders.  The governance (G) range encompasses a continuum starting with anarchy at G = 0, and progressing all the way to one world global government at G = 10.  The collectivistic (C) range starts with comprehensive privatization at C = 0 where nothing is owned collectively – everything is private property to be disposed of as its owner wills.  At the other extreme of the collectivistic range is communism at C = 10 in which the collective owns everything and private property has disappeared.

In the G-dimension we start with a Mad Max world of anarchy, there is no higher authority to enforce any codes of conduct or contract law.  Peace and tranquility in such a region can only obtain through comprehensive altruism in which it is the individual who has and implements his notions of the common good.  Or, of course, the opposite where raw might is right.

From there we move to versions of the Westphalian order (q.v.) in which various territories have regional sovereignty based on various forms of shared attributes such as race, ethnicity, language, common history, … .  Westphalianism per se can encompass more structured forms of governance that are restricted to within the boundaries of mutually recognized and respected sovereign nation-states that agree to maintain existing borders and not interfere in the internal affairs of their neighbor states.

More encompassing forms of governance can subsume larger land areas in which formerly independent jurisdictions join in various forms of confederation to achieve, say, economic and/or security benefits.  The European Union is an example of such a regional confederation of states.  From there we come to an overarching global government that achieves the one-world objective of seeking peace, harmony, and sharing among all the earth’s peoples.  The United Nations considers itself as prepared to assume this role under the aegis of its Agenda 21 protocols.

The intermediate stages of collectivism include various forms of proto-capitalism where sufficient contract law exists and is honored so as to permit establishing enterprises of shared ownership that seek profit through collective action.  Capitalism can progress into more formal forms in which it depends on an overarching government to enforce contract law and lay down regulations that create various economic environments favorable to this or that sector of industry and commerce.  The ultimate format of capitalistic collectivism morphs into corporatism in which government and corporations work hand-in-glove to guarantee both conducive environments for sustaining each.

It is a relatively short step from corporatism to socialism in its various forms that engender “social ownership and democratic control” of various means of production and the (re)distribution of wealth.  As such collective ownership and control becomes more comprehensive, we arrive at communism in which everything is jointly owned and all decisions are made democratically by the collective (or a small troupe of professional elites who discharge their duties to promote the common good).

It is clear from the looking at the G-C grid that proceeding upwards takes one into more organized and authoritarian social orders, and proceeding downward promotes more individual freedoms and brings us to worlds that are least organized and predictable.  And please note that not all places (coordinates) on this chart are necessarily stable, and one could argue that there may be some that are not even achievable.

So where are you on the G-C grid, what are your desired coordinates and where do you think is the US and/or any other country in the world?  My own preference is to live near a (G,C) = (4,3) environment, and according to my lights America is now transiting through (5,6) on its way to (7,8) arriving there well before 2040.  Of course, if the Singularity arrives before that date, then all bets are off.  (See also the Nolan Chart here.)

Scattershots – 14oct17 (updated 16oct17)

George Rebane

President Trump will stop subsidizing insurance companies – i.e. stop the Treasury from making ‘cost sharing reductions’ (CSRs) that allow the health insurers to reduce premium and deductible costs required to slow down the capsizing of the ACA (aka Obamacare).  The CSRs were instituted by Obama’s executive order in 2011 as one of several hastily cobbled together band aids after the ACA predictably started diving for the mud.  The problem was that the CSRs are not constitutional, therefore not legal, as subsequently confirmed by a federal court.  The President cannot bypass Congress’s power of the purse and start draining the Treasury with EOs at his whim.  Obama appealed the ruling while the CSRs continued.  Now the Dems are putting Alinsky Allegation into gear and volubly accusing Trump of violating the law which never existed. (I swear, you can’t make this stuff up.)  But aided by the lamestream – e.g. NPR’s 12oct17 Weekend Edition – the national Left is screaming outrage to their mini-minded constituents and other lightly read folks, implying that the CSR payments went directly to needy consumers, and that Trump is sabotaging the critical components of the ACA (which the CSR never was), thereby he and the Republicans are the cause of ACA’s catastrophes.  (See also Bob Crabb's contribution to the cacophony here.) Instead, President Trump is putting the entire issue back into Congress, which is where it still belongs. (more here)

Socialism is and always has been a sorry and sordid means to organize society, no matter how altruistic its proponents have been at the outset of every attempt ever tried.  The Israeli kibbutzim have been a poster child of such attempts.  After independence in 1948 the kibbutzim thrived and played an important part in the new nation’s economy.  Why?  Because they were heavily subsidized with other people’s money and borrowing, and their products were protected by Israel’s high tariff walls.  As the world and Israel liberalized and capitalism again became the acknowledged approach to generating wealth and allocating its use, the kibbutzim came on hard times and all the weaknesses of collectivism started showing their true colors.  The alternative was to start introducing privatization in profits, products, and property.  The first crack was that workers could keep their own wages which represented their individual abilities and skill sets instead of putting them into the public pot to be divided equally among the kibbutzniks.  Now Israel is a dynamic country that invites and promotes free enterprise, and trades with the world.  Fewer than 13% of Israelis consider themselves to be leftwing, and less than 2% are kibbutzniks. (more here)  While the rest of the world develops and grows by incorporating free enterprise and expanding personal liberties, the progressives of America are doing all they can to take us back to the days of failed collective autocracies with their very effective tool of co-opted public education playing at a school district near you.

[16oct17 update]  Has Israel become more capitalistic while shedding socialist policies in the process?  This threatened to become a comment thread on RL Crabb’s blog (here) where Bob celebrated the Israeli state-run healthcare.  I threw a bit of water on that celebration which brought in Steve Frisch, our local defender and promoter of everything collectivist.  After reprising Israel’s socialistic inception (which is not it dispute), Frisch ends with his piece de resistance –

Under the LIkud rule since 1977 Israel has seen the same rise in income inequality and a narrowng of its middle class, which was growing under the socilaist (sic) labor parties before the rise of the Likud. In addition Israel has one of the highest proportions of debt to revenue in the developed world…meaning they may say they are capitalists, but they sure have a ton of debt. … So although it is popular to parrot the Likud line that Israel has moved from socialism to capitalism, they have not, and their capitalist economic policies have increased debt and reduced economic opportunity. (emphasis mine)

I have no idea how such arguments support or are even relevant to his conclusion that Israel has not seen a major shift from socialism to capitalism, literally along almost every dimension of its enterprise intensive economy.  The entire world has witnessed this significant migration in a very visible and prominent nation-state – here is just one report on that from Forbes.  But for a real snootful on this change, just google ‘israel from socialism to capitalism’.  Meanwhile our local misinformed continue their desperate fabrication of the never-ending glories of socialism.

Europe’s multi-kulti problems compound with Germans joining other EU countries now starting to realize at the grass roots level what their feel-good leadership has done.  Towns that openly catered to the Islamic refugees from the Mideast and Africa wonder how they will live together with newcomers who are not joining the workforce, are putting a heavy burden on their welfare programs, degrading community safety, and have no propensity to assimilate with the culture of their new home countries – German towns filled with refugees ask, ‘Who is integrating whom?’.  And Austria’s recent election brought two populist parties with anti-immigrant agendas into power and prominence, and will give that country its youngest chancellor, the 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz.  In spite of the suppressed news about Europe’s experience with the masses of migrants they have admitted, all of them are beginning to rethink what their uncritically welcoming stance will have on their own citizens and culture.  To the extent that our lamestream permits, Americans should pay close attention to what’s happening over there as we debate our own immigration and border control policies. (more here and here)  Whoulda thought?

Ruminations – 11oct17 (updated)

George Rebane

MIT’s Max Tegmark just released Life 3.0 – Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which I bought immediately and dove right in last night.  In his prelude Tegmark takes us through a scenario of a developing AI super-intelligence and its human ‘handlers’ that includes treatment of rampantly systemic unemployment addressed through an institutional approach very similar to the Non-profit Service Corporations which I have proposed in these pages (here).  The book promises an education of how the current pre-Singularity years will unfold – check it out, Tegmark writes good stuff.

The Boy Scouts of America have decided to start admitting real girls, and I guess that means going beyond just boys who wake up feeling like they have been issued the wrong plumbing.  The move seems to be motivated by more than political correctness in these gender-confused times.  According to the Girl Scouts of America it really has to do with the BSA needing more funds, and thereby raiding the GSA membership is a reasonable plan forward.  The resulting dust-up will continue between what were two of America’s iconic institutions, as the times they are a’changin’.  (more here)

I have always viewed Kaspersky’s popular antivirus software with a gimlet eye.  I guess that I just don’t trust Russian companies, given the kleptocratic regime under which they all operate, and therefore are all instruments of the state in one way or another.  So why would I want to install Kaspersky on my company’s in-house computer systems, especially if I develop high tech stuff or have other valuable intellectual property that keeps me in business?  Well, now it turns out that ‘Russia Has Turned Kaspersky Software Into Tool for Spying’ – whouda thought?

[update]  Implicit Bias, another flat-earth pseudo-science lapped up by the liberal legions turns out to be bullshit.  Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse lately as “implicit bias.” Embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the press, implicit bias has spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry, along with a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law. Yet its scientific basis is crumbling.  (the hilarity of it all continues here)

Wanna see another liberal shibboleth bite the dust?  Take a look at ‘A Flawed Study Depicts Drug Companies as Profiteers’.  And then corroborate that with the share price histories of the big pharmas.

The ‘Casting Couch’ has been a Hollywood staple for over 80 years.  And since most of show biz folks have been historical proto-communists, the Left has left the sexual abuses of young sweet things under the rug where they have always had a home.  Now ol’ sleazebag Harvey Weinstein finally gets exposed, and our lamestream is making it out as if they have found the only bad apple in their barrel.  Another demonstration that they don’t give a crap about women save what political advantage they can wring out of our fair sex.  I’d love to see a clean sweep of the overwhelmingly leftwing entertainment industry to expose what aspiring women have really had to put out or up with to succeed.  It didn’t all happen in corporate offices of other industries that have a tilt to the right.

More on Millennials’ Mini-Minds

George Rebane

The private sector is running into a problem marketing products and services to the millennials, specifically those in the most populous 24-27 age bracket.  They know so little and have been sheltered and/or diverted from the normal course of ‘adulting’.  An example of this problem is the one Scotts Miracle-Gro is having selling its plant growth products to these young adults getting started in their first homes.  Let’s make that real easy – these simple people don’t even know that it takes sunlight to grow plants, and that puts companies like Scotts into a quandary.  How do you tell these self-designated geniuses that they’re dumber than doorknobs and still get them to spring for your product.

This newly discovered deficit in the millennials is putting a companies into a bind attempting to revamp both products and advertisements so that they can be understood.  That this is a first in the annals of marketing and merchandizing is explained by Ellen Byron in the 10oct17 WSJ who notes (here) that “This age bracket, bigger than any other, is pushing companies to revamp marketing and products, including a lot of remedial education.”  Moreover –

Companies looking to grab a piece of that business, however, have run into a problem. This generation, with its over-scheduled childhoods, tech-dependent lifestyles and delayed adulthood, is radically different from previous ones. They’re so different, in fact, that companies are developing new products, overhauling marketing and launching educational programs—all with the goal of luring the archetypal 26-year-old.

Note here that we’re talking about the aggregate behaviors and practical knowledge that typify the 93 million Americans born between 1980 and 2000.  These are the victims of our educational system and progressive parenting.  Of course, there are the inevitable outliers (on the upper side) in whom we can still put our hopes.  The rest, … I dunno, maybe guaranteed national income?

Sandbox - 10oct17

[Cleaning up the FUE-related off-topic comments was a chore.  Please try not to rile the gentleman with ad hominems relating to his appearance, education, career, etc - there is enough topic matter to highlight re his editorial policy, political ideology, and morality lectures to fill volumes.  And I propose that even these would be better suited for other blogs.  However, I do appreciate that RR sandboxes may be the only venues-of-response available to those readers who are gratuitously impugned on the FUE's website, since there he does not permit such reciprocity.  But do try to keep it to a dull roar on matters of substance, and eschew delving into comparative cosmetics, character, and morals.  Much grass.  gjr]

Why Not 24/7 Air Attack? (updated 11oct17)

George Rebane

Dropping fire suppressants from fixed and rotary wing aircraft is an extremely effective way to fight wildfires.  Living in the southern California mountains we annually witnessed how air attack kept little fires from becoming big, and big fires from going into populated areas.  In the 1993 Malibu fire, it was five or six heavy lift helicopters with big buckets that saved the community of Topanga with 8,000 housing units.  The demonstrated airmanship was awesome to behold as an orbit was established with the heavy lifters dropping sea water on the ridge where we lived that separated Topanga Canyon from Tuna Canyon as the four-day-old fire returned to consume the last few houses on the Tuna Cyn side as it tried to breach the ridge.  The heavy lifters soaked our ridge, climbing up Los Flores Cyn, dropping their loads (our cars got sea water rinses) with pinpoint accuracy, and then diving down through the narrow Tuna Cyn gorge with rock walls within a hundred feet of their rotors to the ocean to fill up and repeat the cycle.  With their skill and courage, those airmen saved an entire town (our ridge-top house included) in the Santa Monica Mtns.

Witnessing year after year how effective were the aircraft, many of us wondered why the operations had to shut down after sunset, and sometimes even when the smoke got too thick.  The answer given was always flight crew safety, it was not possible to fly when you couldn’t see the terrain.  But by the 1990s a lot of technology had already been developed that might mitigate that concern, and today that definitely appears to be the case.

So, I raised the question about 24/7 flight ops again to my professional aviator friends.  And to make sure that I don’t get anyone’s undies in a knot, I am not impugning the skill and courage of the flight crews, nor do I want them to take any more risks than they are already taking.  (For the techies, I don’t want them to undertake missions in which their probability of accident is any greater than it is today.)  But I am questioning the policies under which our wildfire air attack operations are designed, prepared, and executed.  And I am perfectly willing to be educated and accept any reasonable answer.

Scattershots – 5oct17

George Rebane

The news media, including Fox News, are confounding the latest buzz about the SecDef and the President being at odds about the Iran agreement.  Trump has called the Iran deal “the worst ever” for the US, while Mattis along with the JCoS chair testified that Iran appears to be living up to the agreement.  To the pea-brains who pass for journalists these days, this is a stand-off in the making within the administration.  No one seems to understand that the two assessments are totally independent.  Yes, Virginia, it is possible for the Iranians to be living up to the letter of the worst agreement ever that Obama negotiated with Iran.

With all the latest histrionics about ‘gun violence’ and ‘police brutality’ witnessed at entertainment venues across the land, it is clear from just the raw data about gun deaths that neither the blacks nor the Democrats believe that ‘Black Lives Matter’.  Given the stats from longstanding Dem-controlled urban areas, it is clear that no such concerns exist about the overwhelming proportion of black-on-black murders committed there every month, year after year, numbers that also overwhelm the carnage in Las Vegas.  But all those whites killed by a white man, now there’s “a disaster that must not be wasted” to give government control over more of our lives.

Control over our lives is governed by regulations that actually implement laws passed by elected legislatures; regulations that more often than not overextend what was intended in law.  Here is the latest from the Mercatus Center of George Mason University on ‘Regulatory Accumulation: The Problem and Solutions’.  Note the vertical scale of the graph below.

Regulations are created one by one. By design, each new regulation contains obligations or prohibitions—regulatory restrictions that policymakers hope will deliver benefits that justify their costs. Over time, however, the buildup of more and more regulatory restrictions distorts and deters the business investments that drive innovation and economic growth. These dynamic effects of regulatory accumulation can hinder economic growth considerably, on top of the many other consequences often associated with regulations, such as higher unemployment, higher prices, and lower wages, particularly for low-income households

Here is a quick look at the “gobbledygook” in which the nation’s gerrymandering problem is now mired and argued in the SCOTUS (more here).  According to my lights, the solution to gerrymandering seems to me an easy one.  Set an upper threshold on the ratio of area to perimeter of the district to be gerrymandered to such a value that keeps the defined regions reasonably compact.  The ratio would have to be defined in terms of a specific unit of length (e.g. mile, meter, kilometer, furlong, …) since the ratio or fraction of area divided by perimeter will be in units of length given that perimeter is a length and area is in length squared.  So if we pick ‘mile’ as the unit of length, we can set a lower threshold like, say, ‘2 miles’.  For a rectangle that means that L*W/(2*L+2*W) must more than or equal to T = 2 miles.  This will keep everyone from coming up with these thin tangled regions with very wiggly boundaries.  The geometers among you will realize that the most compact region is a circle with its area/perimeter = radius/2.

Education - Nevada County’s Quiet Crisis

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 October 2017.]

Amid an ongoing parade of mass demonstrations against racism, massive calamities by mother nature, and mass shootings at public venues, we have another ongoing, more insidious, and little-known crisis that directly impacts our community, and will continue to do so far beyond these massive disruptions for at least a generation to come.  The crisis is in our lamentable public K-12 education system, and it continues as highlighted in the recent report (here) from the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress that now includes test results of students taught the controversial Common Core curriculum.

California’s national standing in education is in a sorry state – 10^th from the last to be exact, according to a battery of metrics compiled by Education News. (more here)  And in the above cited California assessment report we learn that in ‘English Language Arts/Literacy’ more than half of K-12 students fail to meet the state standard, and in mathematics more than two out of three students fail to meet standards.  And this is happening in our nation’s largest state that considers itself the mecca of high tech, and draws most of its revenues from STEM companies and the millionaires it has spawned.

In Nevada County, where we attempt to halt the departure of our tech and manufacturing companies and attract new ones, our schools are not helping, save for an outlier, the exemplary but very selective Ghidotti Early College High School.  For example, Nevada Union High School students’ performance in mathematics, critical for all STEM related careers in technology and manufacturing, 70% did not meet standards.  In English literacy, two out of five performed below standard.  The Bear River High School students scored better with one out of six failing to meet the literacy standard, but still had half of their students unable to meet the math standard.

No matter how much we like to pat ourselves on the back about our teachers and schools, the bottom line is how well our students are prepared for college, where they will learn their workplace skills.  A recent National Public Radio report stated that “the vast majority of public two- and four-year colleges report enrolling students – more than half a million of them–who are not ready for college-level work, …  The numbers reveal a glaring gap in the nation’s education system: A high school diploma, no matter how recently earned, doesn’t guarantee that students are prepared for college courses.” 

For some decades there has been an obvious tension between parents and teachers who want schools to educate students, and the entrenched teachers unions whose overarching objective is to maintain the status quo and maximize union memberships by lowering the bar for educators at all levels.  To do this requires dumbing down the curriculum, opposing revealing tests for both teachers and students, suppressing the publication of existing test results, and actively supporting compliant politicians in state legislatures with money and votes.

In light of all this, many of our progressive neighbors in Nevada County do not condone disseminating this information on our students’ performance, and have a record of dunning anyone, myself included, who sheds light on this issue.  But the naked truth is that sweeping such education performance results under the rug, while celebrating outlier and/or irrelevant occasions of student achievements, is what got us to this sorry state of affairs.

Given our heavy funding of education, it is clear that the dollars are being misspent – too much is going to extraneous and irrelevant government mandated programs and staffing, and not enough is going to classrooms where we educate the mainstream youngsters who make up the lion’s share of our student populations and subsequently the nation’s workforce.  My advice to parents is to take an extraordinary interest in your children’s education, and become active within their schools and elected school boards.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  First I’d like to thank a regular reader who alerted me to the published test results and Nevada County’s performance.

I anticipate that these test results will be spun in a much more salutary manner by the Left in order to keep people distracted during the downward spiral of our K-12 system toward a cosseted, compliant, and politically correct cohort of emerging graduates.  What’s left out in these commentaries is the increasing threshold of academic performance and/or intellectual acumen (which the tests measure) required by the new jobs created through technology’s ‘creative destruction’ of old jobs.  Doing well by yesterday’s measure does not mean that you’re doing well today.  I attempted to make this graphically clear in ‘edX meets the workforce’ several years ago.

The outstanding performance of the Ghidotti Early College High School in the CASPP report is worth highlighting.  As usual, it’s the underlying numbers that provide the necessary perspective and tell the tale.  In 2016 Nevada County’s K-12 enrollment was 11,607 students.  Of these 2,995 were enrolled in our high schools.  You have to be an especially talented kid to get into Ghidotti (applications for the next school year will start being accepted in November), and, reflecting that, the entire school’s attendance is 162 students of whom only the 45 juniors were tested.  That goes a long way to explain why they were ranked first in the state on the reported assessment tests on which all of them met or exceeded the required performance standards.

Sandbox - 4oct17

[I suppose there are still other issues beyond Puerto Rico and Las Vegas that need to be recognized and resolved in our own inimitable manner.  Apologies for not having an open sandbox for the last couple of days. gjr]

‘Gun Violence’, girding for the next chapter

George Rebane

With the Las Vegas massacre still fresh in the news, and memories of previous such shootings indelibly burned into our collective memories, the ongoing debate in these pages about preventing children from accidentally shooting themselves or others assumes a heightened focus and an inevitably extended scope.  We are all standing by for the new spate of progressive platitudes and proposed proscriptions of the lawful ownership and possession of guns guaranteed by the Second Amendment.  This guarantee is not recognized by many of our newly educated citizens, most leftwing politicians, and all lamestream journalists.  But the only guarantee we have is that when the dust of the latest tragedy settles, and it will settle, this next chapter of the debate will leave us more separated than ever – the Great Divide ratchet turneth.

So, back to preventing accidental gun deaths.  I wonder what would happen to current statistics if children were taught about gun safety in kindergarten and/or first grade.  Today concerned parents have no hope of denying their child’s knowledge of the existence and, yes, the romance of guns since the world’s cultures glorify their existence as objects of power, adventure, status, justice, crime, coming of age, … .  Today all of this is drummed into the heads of the little darlins through immensely popular and engaging shoot-‘em-up computer games, realistic movies, and TV/online videos available 24/7 on the youngsters’ phones and pads.  And the more such parents attempt to keep children from having early ‘gun experiences’, the more attractive guns become to kids as the forbidden fruit that when serendipitously discovered, must immediately be handled, explored, surreptitiously shared, etc.

As a youngster (and child war veteran) in 1950s middle America, I was as interested in guns as were any of my friends.  In those days fathers (mine included) put guns into the hands of their sons (and many daughters) when they were, by today’s standards, very young.  I got my Red Ryder Daisy BB gun when ten, and my first 22 mag-fed bolt action rifle when thirteen.  (One of my grandsons now has it.)  I taught my children and grandchildren about guns and gun safety before they were five, and to shoot before they were eight.

Before the age of political correctness it was rare to hear of a youngster tragically discharging a found firearm.  Although kids did have their share of hunting accidents when improperly handling their firearms.  But then such accidents were not political or politicized events, no one became hysterical as a result and started militating for some new draconian laws or regulations that proscribed or constructively denied the then legal ownership and disposition of guns.  Overall, these were viewed as childhood accidents similar to when a kid seriously injured himself on a swing or other playground equipment, or riding his bicycle, swimming, climbing trees, or … .  These were simply tragic accidents the solution to which was more/better safety training.  We recognized that life lived to the fullest has inherent dangers, and their attempted eradication would also eliminate other unintended desiderata that contributed to our quality of life – in sum, the overzealous quest for safety itself has a price, as we see all around us today.

Are we really a better society as a result of fifty years of social histrionics wherein we have sought to impress each other with our social consciousness and caring that today mandates almost everything that we do, say, or think.  How many mass shootings did we have when young people knew more about guns and had easier access to them?