Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 30mar18

[The Union is on an anti-gun binge, led by editor Don Rogers' editorial (here).  More needs to be said about the hoaky poll they are conducting.  Let's see if they publish a mea culpa on how easy it has been to subvert the poll's count as reported by our commenters.  gjr]

“Biased Algorithms” – Advent of Politically Correct AI

George Rebane

[9apr18 - An edited version of this commentary appeared (here) in the 9apr18 edition of The Union.]

Do you want to see the latest on how the progressives plan to take down our lead in one of the few remaining areas of technology in which we are still the world’s gold standard?  Tolerated by formerly science-driven institutions like MIT, the ACLU with activist allies like the ‘AI Now Initiative’ are starting to hold conferences at which they lament that “opaque and potentially(sic) biased mathematical models are remaking our lives—and neither the companies responsible for developing them nor the government is interested in addressing the problem.”

The growing hysteria is built around the proposition that “algorithmic bias is shaping up to be a major societal issue at a critical moment in the evolution of machine learning and AI.”  Has anyone else discovered this “major societal issue”?  The claim of the hysteria leaders is that the machine algos will somehow discriminate against the minorities and the poor, because they were either surreptitiously programmed to do such dastardly things, or they learned to do it on their own (gasp!) when given an objective utility function to maximize along with copious amounts of realworld data.

The Left’s activist elites have decided that government should somehow start regulating the kind of AIs we can use in our businesses and homes.  These limited knowledge types (aka ignorant) believe that they can dictate through regulatory means how machine intelligence should continue to develop and grow so that it’s the best for the most.  This is the shared and overwhelming hubris of collectivists.  According to their initiatives, we should prepare to soon see establishment of the Bureau of Socially Sensitive AI that will attempt to vet every machine-learning utility function, and then test/certify the performance of such AIs before they can be used by consumers or commerce.  (more here)

It is argued that such intervention will make the machine algos more transparent, sensitive to human needs, and prevent the usual litany of discriminants that promote racism, sexism, homophobia, gender bias, xenophobia, … , you know the drill.  Of course, those who are studied in the arts and technologies of smart machines know that this is madness right from the gitgo.  It also hearkens back to how Stalin sank Soviet agriculture by setting up bureaucrats under anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko to tell the collective farmers how much to plant of what and when.

Today, scientific and technical knowledge expands at an unimaginable pace, and bureaucracies (government and corporatists) react, if at all, at a snail’s pace.  Most of what they claim to know and write into gun-imposed laws and regulations is already false.  Ronald Bailey expands on this in ‘Half the Facts You Know are Probably Wrong’.

But all this is still possible with the country now firmly in the grip of dumbth (q.v.).  In the past and in the large, human ignorance was mitigated by market forces as economist Walter Williams once more points out in his ‘Human Ignorance and Market Genius'.  His "bottom line is that ignorance is omnipresent. The worst kind of ignorance is not knowing just how ignorant we are. That leads to the devastating pretense of knowledge that’s part and parcel of the vision of intellectual elites and politicians.”  And that “devastating pretense” is what overwhelmingly impacts the votes of the most desperate and deluded among us.  Just listen to their voices as they mass and march on our malls and streets.

Ruminations – 26mar18 (updated 30mar18)

George Rebane

More illegal aliens (Dreamers or whatever) became criminals when/if they worked on any part of Hillary’s campaign in 2016.  Federal law specifically prohibits foreign nationals from working on or contributing to candidates’ campaigns in federal elections. The records should still be there if they were paid by check or if they paid by check.  Anyone want to make book on whether those crack lamestream journalists will pick up on this.

And speaking of real Russian collusion.  It now turns out that Russia has for some time supported US anti-fracking activists with payments through various front organizations.  Since Mueller is looking for Russian collusion wherever the evidence leads.  You think anyone will notice if he doesn’t put too much effort into this part of the investigation?

The Dems are having a hell of time trying to figure out how to position their ‘Trump loves Putin’ narrative after the Presidents long list of sanctions against Vlad is coming out, now also containing the largest and most meaningful support of ally UK by kicking out 60 Russky intelligence attaches and closing their Seattle consulate.  I’m sure they’ll think of something, even if it’s only changing the subject.

And staying on the Dems a bit – how about their refusal to confirm Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Germany?  Openly gay, Mr Ric Grenell, cleared by the Senate’s Foreign Relations subcommittee, is opposed by Democrats for alleged anti-woman tweets in the man’s past, they won’t even let it come up for a vote.  Another twist in their party-above-country movement.

[27mar18 update] Startling numbers on the so-called Hillary states - it seems that they ain't what their promoters claim to be.  (more here)  H/T to correspondent.

The weekend's kiddie crusade headcount of kiddies was disappointing.  Only about one in ten were under 18.  The rest were made up of the usual activists and leftwing loyal followers.

[28mar18 update]  Best NRA spokesman since Obama has turned out to be former SCOTUS justice Stevens who now publicly has confirmed what we all have known to be the Left's final solution for the Second Amendment by calling for its repeal (here).  And as I commented in the last Sandbox - the First and Second Amendments are joined at the hip. For evidence of that, just take a look at countries where their First is proscribed because their Second doesn't exist. And for that, you can start with the EU countries before going afield into the less developed world.

[29mar18 update]  The politicization of justice in America can be debated until the cows come home.  One can make the case that we never had  apolitical justice in our land.  But, I do believe the debate about that can now be laid to rest, ALL applications of justice today are political.  And the more loudly some worthy stands up to deny it, the easier it is to use his very own citations to debunk his denial.

[30mar18 update]  Contemplating the evolution of blacks protesting since the days of the dignified and powerful demonstrations that were led by the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, I range between mystified and saddened.  Specifically, today we see the blacks’ public response to the tragic police killing of Stephon Clark showcased by his brother Stevante.  Why do African-American leaders tolerate and even encourage such distinguishing behavior of angry black demonstrators that continues to support the stereotype of blacks held by many non-blacks?  Is it not in the interest of the black community to return to the demonstrably successful methods and manners of MLK?

Sandbox - 25mar18

[I guess tonight belongs to Stormy.  We have the DVR on and it's recording the long-awaited '60 Minutes' interview which we will watch a bit later.  I presume everyone is preparing their pot shots.  Perhaps we'll even have a thoughtful perspective about what our country has now become with this latest widening the rift even more.  gjr]

Scattershots – 24mar18 (updated 28mar18)

George Rebane

Today’s Union has an excellent editorial – ‘Our View: This community is all our backyard’ – in which it takes to task those of us who tend to oppose anything that will bring needed change to our county.  The editorial goes through a number of recent and current development initiatives that have again run into strong headwinds from the usual contingents.  Even though our electeds make a significant contribution to the sand in our gears, but “we can't lay all the problems we face at the doorstep of our elected leaders. Our community could use a sea change about what shape it should take and what direction it should go.”  And in these pages we have been promoting such a sea change for years as our population stagnates, families move elsewhere, and potential new businesses give us a pass once they get a good whiff of the county’s new political face.  I give a big ‘Amen’ to that sea change, and a H/T to Bob Crabb for his contribution (filched from the 24mar18 Union) to the dialogue.

This weekend the nation’s progressively propelled pubertistas are marching in opposition to what they know not, but easily accept as ‘gun violence’.  In a recent post we covered the launch of this nascent lamestream-lauded movement under ‘Progressives Pander Pubertistas’.  What should continue to interest all of us is how the country’s adults view these marches comprised of ignorant and emotional young people, enthralled in the first flood of hormones evolved to mediate the journey from childhood to an adult.  Easily assembled and directed, all of them sport brains that clinical science tells us are yet years from being fully formed for taking reliably rational decisions.  To see who seeks to benefit from franchising these anxious and anxiety ridden works-in-progress, just take a look at the politicians, organizations, and media that promote them.  Long ago our Founders built on the then already known progress of human development, and made it law of the land that no one could be elected into a federal policy making office before the age of twenty-five.  And we also know how past childrens’ crusades have ended.

[25mar18 update]  Meteorologists, you gotta love ‘em.  The recent couple of weeks here in Northern California have again amply demonstrated their prowess at forecasting what they are paid to forecast – the weather.  These guys make economists and stock pickers look good, and I have no idea how they steel themselves before accepting another paycheck for their work.  As one who has some acquaintance with estimation theory, the work of the meteorologists is below sophomoric; most certainly, none of their computer models work.  It is clear that any claim of having improved their sophistry over the years is not due to their increased understanding of the processes that drive the weather.  Their performance, such as it is, can all be laid to having a better view (data and imagery from orbit and reporting surface stations) of what is ‘upstream’ of their prediction area.  Then they look at past records of what such observations have actually delivered, and go from there.  But even then they screw up, apparently never having heard of the good Rev Bayes as their ‘100% chance of rain’ pronouncements confirm.

[28mar18 update]  WSJ's leftwing columnist William Galston may have had an epiphany which, in all fairness, I must recognize.  In the paper's 28mar18 edition he writes a piece on 'The Case for Responsible Nationalism', and surprises us with -

National governments are not required to value the citizens of other countries as highly as their own. A degree of self-preference is morally justified and politically essential. Leaders in advanced countries are not obligated to practice global utilitarianism or lift up the global poor at the expense of their working and middle classes. ... There will probably never be a real world government. There are no “global citizens.” People belong to sovereign states with different languages, cultures and institutions. Free societies are composed of citizens who agree to share a common fate and to work out their destiny through accountable politics. They undertake special responsibilities toward their fellow citizens, and the policies of free governments must take these reciprocal commitments into account.

What happened to the FBI?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 March 2018.]

Today many thoughtful people on both sides of our wide political spectrum ask, ‘whatever happened to our FBI?’  Almost everyone has an opinion, along with news stories to back it up, about how our premier domestic law enforcement agency entered politics and attempted to impact, or actually did impact the 2016 presidential election.

There are today media reports, congressional committee findings, Justice Department pronouncements, and even, most damning, FBI’s own internal Inspector General reports of politically and criminally motivated wrongdoings at the highest levels of the Bureau.  We read messages from deputy directors and top agents openly promoting one candidate over the other.  We witnessed news conferences where the Director himself publicly exonerates one candidate whose email activities and servers clearly violated the law; the unprecedented exoneration itself usurps a function reserved for the Department of Justice of which the FBI is a managed division.  We heard the Director again making unwarranted pronouncements of what and who is under investigation one week before the election.  And now it becomes clear that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA court, established to counter foreign intelligence activities and agents on US soil, was fraudulently petitioned with a definite political motive to spy on an American citizen in order to attack one candidate.

All of these activities represent the agency’s departure from enforcing existing laws, to becoming a new onshore intelligence agency like the CIA.  This transition of purpose and operations has caused much disquiet and unreported grief within the rank and file of the FBI’s cadre of professionally trained agents to fight crime – they have now found themselves to be weaponized investigative tools of their managing directorate pursuing blatant political agendas.

A cri de coeur recounting of this recent and still ongoing chapter of the Bureau is told by Thomas Baker, a 30+ year veteran special agent and legal attache of the FBI.  Recently retired, he has witnessed the change and maintains contacts with his former colleagues whose distress he reports in a 20mar18 WSJ commentary titled ‘What Went Wrong at the FBI’.  In it special agent Baker paints the large contours of the changed landscape for us.

The high hard one from Baker is that “after 9/11 the bureau lost its law-enforcement ethos as it tried to become more of an intelligence agency. … The FBI’s culture had been rooted in law enforcement. A law-enforcement agency deals in facts, to which agents may have to swear in court. That is why ‘lack of candor’ has always been a firing offense. An intelligence agency deals in estimates and best guesses. Guesses are not allowed in court. Intelligence agencies often bend a rule, or shade the truth, to please their political masters. In the FBI, as a result, there now is politicization, polarization, and no sense of the bright line that separates the legal from the extralegal.”

Over the past decade the FBI appears to have evolved more and more into a political tool of the Department of Justice, to the extent that it even unquestioningly acted as the DoJ’s prosecutorial mouthpiece on 5 July 2016 to take the political heat off then Attorney General Loretta Lynch.  And its fraudulent application to the FISA court did more than “shade the truth”.  As Baker reminds us, “FISA was never intended as a tool to pursue Americans. It was to be used to gather intelligence about agents of a foreign power operating in the U.S. … If an American is suspected of operating as an agent of a foreign power, that individual should be pursued under the Espionage Act, a criminal statute. The fruits of (FISA) monitoring could then be used in court for a prosecution. The use of FISA to target a U.S. citizen is the most egregious abuse uncovered so far.”

The FBI’s recovery from the dark side is not yet over.  The agency is still stonewalling and hiding from Congress secrets of its recent politically directed wrongdoings.  Baker calls for “a renewal of the FBI’s culture. When the smoke clears from the current controversies, Director Christopher Wray must help the bureau turn the page on this intelligence chapter and get the bureau back to the law-enforcement culture of fact-finding and truth-telling that once made us all so proud.”

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the 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.

Climate Industry’s Shameful Science

George Rebane

A correspondent alerted me to an important new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation titled ‘Global Warming – A Case Study in Groupthink’ by Christopher Booker.  This extensive report examines the now institutionalized global hysteria embracing the belief that humanity is in the grip of catastrophic yet heroically preventable manmade global warming.  In these pages we have commented and debated extensively on the groupthink aspect that has been dominant in politics and academia.  Booker’s monograph provides a comprehensive chronicle of its psychological basis which we see playing out daily in the media, and even more fervently among those most innocent in the sciences.

The foreword to the report is by Prof Richard Lindzen, recently retired Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT.  It follows in its entirety –

“The bizarre issue of climate catastrophism has been around sufficiently long that it has become possible to trace its history in detail, and, indeed, several excellent recent books do this, placing the issue in the context of a variety of environmental, economic and political trends. Darwall’s Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex and Lewin’s Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deserve special mention in this connection. Booker’s relatively brief monograph asks a rather different but profoundly important question. Namely, how do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, contradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications. Booker convincingly shows the power of ‘groupthink’ to overpower the rational faculties that we would hope could play some role. The phenomenon of groupthink helps explain why ordinary working people are less vulnerable to this defect. After all, the group that the believers want to belong to is that of the educated elite. This may have played a major role in the election of Donald Trump, which depended greatly on the frustration of the non-elites (or ‘deplorables’, as Hillary Clinton referred to them) with what they perceived to be the idiocy of their ‘betters’. Booker’s emphasis on the situation in the UK is helpful insofar as there is nowhere that the irrationality of the response to this issue has been more evident, but the problem exists throughout the developed world. The situation everywhere has been reinforced by the existence of numerous individuals and groups that have profited mightily from the hysteria (including academia, where funding predicated on supporting alarm has increased by a factor of about 15–20 in the US), but why so many others have gone along, despite the obvious disadvantages of doing so, deserves the attention that Booker provides.”

The importance of the GWP Foundation’s work receives its strongest testimonial from the constant attack it has been under since its inception by those who have the most to lose in grant funded livelihoods, ejection from groups with pre-calcified credos, reputations based on irredeemable advocacy (i.e. manmade global warming cannot be falsified), and constituencies induced with politically profitable fear.

Sandbox - 20mar18

[Wow!  Didn't mean to let the last sandbox overfill with over 300 comments.  But lots of important stuff to discuss and provide links for, among the unfinished ones being the asymmetrical Cambridge Analytica turmoil and the latest findings surfacing about Mueller's doings at the FBI.  gjr]

Those Who Can, Can’t, or Won’t

George Rebane

Colleges and universities will “soon begin to divide into two entities—the STEM fields and related practical subjects (i.e., business and economics), and the social sciences and humanities, which would start to shrivel under the weight of the degradations the left has inflicted over the last 40 years.”  So writes Steven Hayward in ‘The Higher Ed Crack Up Begins’ to which a reader and correspondent draws our attention.  The degradations to public education have been covered extensively in these pages over the years, and the anticipated ‘crack up’ described by Hayward is long overdue.

Our public institutions of higher learning already naturally divide their curricula into what I will call productive courses and today’s leftwing ideological “fever swamps”, consisting mostly of the ‘xx studies departments’ – you know the ones I’m talking about.  Carrying out this kind of divisions over the land will not be easy, and there are plenty of opportunities to unintentionally cut off some desirable meat with the proverbial fat.  Hayward points to some things that must be carefully considered in doing this surgery.

If we want to view this restructuring from a more encompassing perspective, we inevitably encounter and must answer the question, ‘What is the function of education within a defined society?’  The answer quickly begins forming around the society’s attempt to achieve two prime objectives – survival and enhancing the quality of life.  To survive, a society must successfully pass on to future generations the culture that defines it and makes it unique – among such cultural attributes are its language, history, values, mores, traditions, religions, …; essentially their commonly held ontology.

To provide the economic basis for enhancing a society members’ quality of life, it must also pass on needed skill sets, functioning infrastructure, and the means by which wealth can be created and accrued.  We are, of course, clear on the mutual support that achieving these two objectives provide each other.

The members of societies long ago realized that some of the educational efforts required to achieve these things necessitate collective action – pooling their private resources to work together in an organized manner.  This immediately called for the formation of collective institutions to carry out needed functions – among these are the military, emergency responders (e.g. law enforcement, fire, medical), and, of course, education.  But why education?

Sandbox - 16mar18

[The Miami bridge collapse embarrasses me as an engineer - such screw-ups are supposed to occur only in third world countries.  And then we find that this was a 'shovel ready' project from the past, designed by the nearby university, that took five years of bureaucratic buffeting before being awarded to a problem-plagued construction firm.  And it turns out that the Left did another number on CIA's Deputy Director Haspel nominated by Trump to be the new CIA head.  They lied about her involvement in past waterboardings by the agency, which even if true, is to me and mine no reason to doubt her ability to lead that organization.  gjr]

Progressives Pander Pubertistas (updated 7apr18)

George Rebane

Yesterday was the day kids across the country were organized to walk out of their classes and protest ‘gun violence’.  Given what the little darlins are (not) taught in schools, they appeared to have no idea of what had happened in Parkland and what they were actually protesting with signs like ‘Choose me, not guns!’  They were simply pawns in the most recent progressives’ plan not to waste another tragedy to advance their agenda.  One of my favorite political observers put it this way –

If the kids doing the demonstrating/walking out were protesting massive failure at EVERY level of government and were protesting the dereliction of duty by the adults in their school, community, state, and federal government who are sworn to protect them and didn’t – great.  Call attention to the fact that every single warning sign was ignored, pushed under the rug.  Call attention to the fact that there was cowardice and incompetence.  Call attention to the school which failed to refer the shooter to the police, call attention to the social workers who didn’t do anything, call attention to the sheriff and to the FBI who didn’t do anything.

I am suspicious that the kids’ desire to be kept safe from harm was and has been hijacked by political activists for THEIR intent to disarm American citizens.  The response of the MSD HS students and elsewhere has been professionalized.  When entities like the Miami Herald, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Women’s March, Michael Bloomberg, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, and the Broward County American Federation of Teachers all provide instant organizing assistance, buses, money (from celebrities too), publicity… you know the kids didn’t do it alone. 

The president of the AFT told BuzzFeed that they are also behind the national school walkout.  Now that is inappropriate.  That is using children. 

I would add that had the kids not been professionally goaded, they may not have done anything of this nature or coordinated on a national scale.  Their reason-restricted and one-sided protest against the access and ownership of guns is prima facie evidence of their having once more been marshalled as the Left’s “useful idiots”.

The Left’s alarming increase in the use of ‘action’ instead of reason to advance their cause highlights their lack of the latter to support their arguments.  Agreeing with this observation we now have the voice of Michael Walzer, the long-heralded dean of the American Left and 30+ year editor of the leftwing magazine Dissent.  In his just published book Foreign Policy for the Left (2018), Mr Walzer explains why the Left has substituted action (e.g. the managed student demonstrations) for reason in their apologetics.  As a champion of the Left, Walzer has been a longtime proponent of the moral argument for collectivism.  “He believes, a priori, in practicing human decency: a moral sensibility toward other people and their existences. He thinks that capitalism’s inequality has coarsened this sensibility but that capital’s productive capacity can be harnessed, through political action, to transcend the capitalist system: to create societies where people can live more equally and so be more decent to one another.”

Walzer sees the danger in the Left’s “vanguardism, under which acolytes of an ideal believe that the ideal is more important than how they reach it.” – in short, the end does justify any available means.  We see that every day, especially in the Left’s rabid efforts to ruin Trump’s presidency, and in their longer term opposition to anything American as a force for good in the world.  Walzer advises the Left adopt a “politics of sympathy and distinction”, but concludes his anguished analysis with a fear that today America’s Left is too far gone in their ingrained practice of public “indecency”.

Martin Peretz, the former editor of the leftwing New Republic, reviews Walzer’s book (here) and asks "can there be a 'decent' Left?".  He adds his own “explanation of the Left’s indecency” that originated with the teachings of Herbert Marcuse, “the intellectual influence behind the New Left of the 1960s”, who “urged his followers to practice varieties of extreme experience”.  Echoing Marcuse, today’s leftists claim that reason “is a scrim for forces that want to oppress (the people) - their identities, their economic interests, their self-regard.  So words no longer matter, only actions.”  That is their “explanation for why other viewpoints are not worthy of attention”.  We have seen a profusion of such sentiment expressed in these pages.

[7apr18 update]  The much celebrated community cartoonist, thought leader, and RR reader RL 'Bob' Crabb takes a bit of a swing at this little conservetarian trumpet.  Bringing us again to the attention of the county’s cognoscenti is much appreciated.  However, a careful perusal of Bob’s artful commentary – filched from the pages of the 7apr18 Union - did not reveal the whereabouts of the well-organized and funded handlers of the pubertistas.  Their omission must have been an oversight, for it’s hard to imagine that such an oft-declared center roader would just continue parroting the lamestream’s line that the kids did it all by themselves. 

Stephen Hawking, RIP

 

Dr Stephen Hawking, Physicist (1942 - 2018)

Ruminations – 13mar18 (updated 14mar18)

George Rebane

College students can’t write, like in cursive handwriting.  More and more are in dire straits at schools that don’t allow laptops in the lecture halls.  Years ago the loss of that ability was described in sci-fi stories of a future when writing skills had withered and people ‘wrote’ by speaking to computers with speech-to-text capability.  Now that future is here, and we shall see how we do when requirements for making some quiet notes arise.

Dollar General in Alta Sierra, what a kerfuffle.  Residents there protest the advent of a store carrying cheap merchandise that will attract a class of people who benefit from such offerings, and whose obvious presence in that neighborhood may lower real estate values.  Mac Young in the 13mar18 Union calls such voices discriminatory (here).  And, of course, they are in both the politically correct and classical meanings of having the ability to make studied distinctions.  These people of Alta Sierra are exercising their right to voice an opinion about a likely effect that such traffic will have on their heretofore pristine community of well-kept and prim houses which dot the hillsides on the road to the county’s premier country club.

Russian collusion is most evident in the collectivist conclaves of New England – Boston town to be specific.  Here they are welcoming large Russian LNG carriers in their harbors discharging the natural gas required to heat their homes for the remainder of their globally cold winter.  They are financing Putin’s adventures rather that approve the pipeline that would have brought in Canadian and American gas to satisfy the needs of all of New England.  They see no conflict in what passes for their rationale as the region’s liberals join with the usual activist suspects – Greenpeace, Sierra Club, … - to oppose safe, sane, and sustainable native solutions.  (more here)

[update]  Rebane Doctrine dictum – Relinquish to higher government ONLY things that you or the more local government can’t handle – a hierarchical solution for benevolent governance.  (Am reading Taleb’s latest – Skin in the Game (2018) – on which I’ll report later.  I have found Taleb’s ethics and political philosophy to fly in fairly tight formation with my own credo and socio-political doctrine.)

[14mar18 update]  In ‘Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle’ liberal columnist William Galston cites The New Geography of Jobs (2012) by Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, who argues that achieving creativity in the workplace still requires face-to-face efforts by people drawn from a critical mass of proximal workers – telecommuting just won’t do.  There’s a lot more to be said about that which also bears on the decades-long, mostly misguided, but still persistent efforts by our own community to attract jobs and workers.  Moretti’s findings support the A21 stack-and-pack objectives of depleting rural populations in favor of dense, highly-regulated city living.  For another view of how and why cities (among other complex systems) evolve and renew themselves, I recommend the important and highly-readable Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (2017) by theoretical physicist Geoffrey West.

Sandbox - 12mar18

[Time to revisit the national education scene with the just published critique Common Core by Nicholas Tampio (review here), and also enjoy the comedy of ‘Doomsday Climate Scenarios Are a Joke’ by Oren Cass (more here).  Of course we can also re-circle the Trump and Stormy imbroglio a few more times.  gjr]

 

Trump and the Ugly Fat Kid

George Rebane

There’s more to be said about President Trump’s anticipated meeting with NK’s Ugly Fat Kid (aka Kim Jong Un), the murderous dictator who today runs the world’s largest forced labor camp in the world.  That Trump got the UFK off the dime and issue an invitation is laudable in itself, and has really miffed all the professional diplomats who for over more than half century have gotten nowhere with that workers’ paradise.  Actually, it’s been even less of an accomplishment than that; the pros have gotten us into a situation where today the UFK’s about to get a deliverable nuclear weapon that can reach the continental US.

The big deal now in preparing for the meeting is how do we make sure that Trump doesn’t wind up circling that Bamboozle Barn one more time.  Trump’s unorthodox and straightforward approach should work for him in this regard.  The conduct of the meeting should be on an announced no-bullshit basis.  Everyone knows that America (and others?) want to have the UFK give up his nukes program, and that should be as a precondition for whatever else we are willing to give in return.  Rebane Doctrine calls for such negotiations to be done on an open declaration of interests basis (cf the Harvard Negotiation Project).

Our interests are known to the world, but the UFK’s not so much – in fact, he really can’t openly declare them for fear of getting a bullet through the back of his head or worse.  (Recall he fed an entire family of a feared high-level muktimuck to hungry dogs in an arena where the rest of the NK leadership was forced to watch.)  The UFK knows that he is the most despised human being on earth today, and he’s got a tiger by the tail.  He’s finally run into a US leader who may actually launch an attack of black helicopters preceded by a massive fleet of stealthies taking out his SAM installations, followed by a squadron of C-17s dropping MOABs on the artillery positions overlooking Seoul.  In any event, he won’t survive such a scenario because then he will more than likely fall in a quick coup led by his generals who will have nothing to lose and everything to gain with his sudden departure.  And that kind of thinking defines the UFK’s interests – his own and his family’s survival.

Scattershots – 9mar18 (updated 10mar18)

People want to have their soul in the game.  In that sense, decentralization and fragmentation, aside form stabilizing the system, improves people's connection to their labor.  N. Taleb

George Rebane

‘Trump’s Hoover Temptation’ appears to be real and, to me, scary.  The only thing that would keep the world from spiraling into another Smoot-Hawley abyss is that today countries have many ad hoc trade relationships with each other such as the new TPP from which the US withdrew.  But we’re still the economic gorilla on this planet, so it’s hard to tell what will really happen.  My own hope is that Trump has the guts to replace Gary Cohn with some equivalent anti-tariff voices like Kudlow, Laffer, or Graham.  The Dems, of course, are cheering on Trump’s tariffs, hoping that they will cause enough economic chaos to dent the GOP’s chances in November.  For today's Dems it's always party above country.

Sandbox – 7mar18

[The corruption of the FBI is detailed by former federal prosecutor and US attorney Joseph Digenova in the feb2018 issue of Imprimis.  Entitled ‘The Politicization of the FBI’, this summary of the 2016-17 ongoings with the Clinton and Trump campaigns is the most clear, concise, and complete recounting I have read.  It totally corroborates the arguments presented and debated here during the indicated period.  I strongly urge you to read it.  H/T also to a prominent RR commenter for beating me to the punch in his alerting our readers to this piece.  gjr]

Californians, take what you will but … (updated 8mar18)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 7 March 2018.]

California is a mess.  There is not enough time in this short commentary to describe all the ways in which our state has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, but I will attempt to summarize some of the more visible areas.  And the scariest thing for our future is that most Californians don’t have a clue about the dire straits of our state.  California has been effectively under one party control for so long that in this election year most people have forgotten there are alternatives.

Let me start by pointing out some facts that you may have missed because our media has also been flying in tight formation with the architects of our multiple maladies, and they aren’t about to point a finger at all the things that have gone wrong on their watch.  Because if you do find out, then you’ll start asking all kinds of questions, and pretty soon you’ll vote the bums out of office.  Then where would they be?

Scattershots – 5mar18 (updated 8mar18)

If you cannot see the irony in having a gun ban enforced by men with guns, then you fail to understand why the Second Amendment was written in the first place.

George Rebane

The NYT publishes another exhibit of yellow journalism with an article (here) that leaves the naïve reader convinced that ‘assault rifles’, like the Parkland massacre kind, fire special bullets that cause “ghastly” wounds not experienced with normal hunting rifles.  They show X-rays of 223 bullets smashing bones and quote surgeons unfamiliar with war wounds being astounded by what a high velocity bullet does to meat and bone.  The truth of the matter is that regular civilian hunting rifles at calibers above 223 (5.56mm) firing higher velocity, more massive, soft-nosed bullets (banned in warfare) do much more damage than the AR-15 civilian versions firing the standard full metal jacketed bullets.  All this is lost in the NYT article, the main purpose of which is to promote the removal of AR-15 style rifles from civilian hands.  The reader unfamiliar with firearms is totally bamboozled by this latest dose of bullcrap from the now totally propagandized Gray Lady.

Respected ecologist Robert May (The Perfect Bet, 2018) showed that tightly connected, large complex systems are not stable.  (That’s why they don’t exist in nature.)  His corollary was that the larger the ecoosyctem, the less stable it is.  Question – can anyone connect the dots for what this says about a centrally planned, comprehensively administered, large socio-economic system?  While always welcome, progressives may be excused from participating in this little exercise.

Over the years RR commenters have divided themselves into two more or less distinct groups with how they support their debate arguments.  There are those who cite sources that present data which can be factually checked, and those who present sources that contain nothing more than restatements of their own fact-free allegations, thereby claiming that two sources of identical allegations are all that’s needed to confirm the verity alleged.  For the former, I draw your attention to commenters who cite colleges that now include leftwing propaganda subjects in their STEM curricula in support of the thesis that our institutions of higher education have been compromised along many dimensions of pedagogy.  These citations appeared in the recent Sandbox and repeated here and here.

Trump’s tariffs are an economic policy screw-up.  I know I’ve said this before, but it really irks me that he is now materially denting his presidency beyond whatever sins he has committed in his Twitter account.  Team Trump should know better than most, that you get less of whatever you tax more.  Higher taxes have never increased the supply of anything, and here Trump is attempting to increase America’s supply of jobs.  No one in his administration can explain why seeking to guarantee (not increase) the existence of 140,000 metals sector jobs will not jeopardize and reduce some of the 6.5M collateral jobs that depend on the current low prices of metals available to American manufacturers.  The bottom line here is that Trump’s tariffs will not bring more jobs to the steel and aluminum industries which are going balls out to automate and make better quality, cheaper metals at higher volumes.  An example of all this is seen in how a small steel mill in Austria (that global steel producing powerhouse) is able to stay competitive.  Hasn’t anyone in the WH studied comparative advantage, after all, they’re supposed to be Republican capitalists? (more here)  

Our George Boardman writes in the 5mar18 Union on gun control (here), and properly argues that existing gun laws should be enforced before we go willy-nilly into making another batch that ratchet us toward gun confiscation.  But then he can’t let well enough alone, and goes off the rails with a proposal to jail the victims of theft when their guns are stolen and subsequently used in crimes (which he correctly points out is the prime source of criminals’ guns).  Imagine if we took the Boardman Principle and applied it to automobiles, prescription medicines, household chemicals, plastic bags, sharp cutlery and tools, and who knows what else that could be stolen and criminally used.  In America storing something in one’s house (the owner’s vaunted ‘castle’ according to English common law) should be sacrosanct on its face, no matter how it is therein secured.  Your house is already supposed to be a secure facility against thievery and robbery; we establish and support local constabularies to make it so, and their failure to accomplish this should not be cause to also criminalize the victim.  Government’s reach into the home to dictate further how things in there should be disposed has already put us on a slippery slope on the return road to serfdom.  Mr Boardman seeks to don the mantle of reason with his helpful nostrums to surreptitiously decrease our rights to property ownership.  The Left has never accepted that you own something only to the degree that you can dispose of it as you will.

[8mar18 update]  NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten reports on another big government screw-up that is kicking our private parts from over 50 years ago.  In his 'The Curious History of Chain Migration' he takes us on a short trip on memory lane to illustrate "a classic case of unintended consequences".

Sandbox - 2mar18

[The lamestream is now reduced to reporting on every Russian who ever had anything to do with US, or who traveled to America and in some way dealt with Trump or let his shadow fall on a Trump property.  What does that say to the work product of special prosecutor Mueller after all these months?  And we are still being informed that Russia has meddled in our elections, and will likely do so again - as if we just fell off the pumpkin wagon, or was it they who were so unfortunate?  gjr]

The Progressives’ Parkland Pawns (updated)

George Rebane

Everyone now knows how the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School became very visible gun control and confiscation advocates after the massacre at their school which also highlighted massive government failures, cowardice, and LE incompetence.  The students were able to organize themselves into several functional and mobile teams that confronted the media, legislatures, and selected politicians all the way to the White House.  It was an amazing feat for young people with no previous knowledge of the involved intricacies required to pull off such media-wise and nationally prominent activism.  Or did they really organize ‘themselves’??

They did not.  And it’s another giant piece of evidence that the lamestream media is composed of legions of yellow journalists.  A little bit of questioning would instantly have revealed that the students became the convenient and compliant pawns of several professional progressive propaganda organizations, politicians, and liberal media outlets, that leaped into action, apparently while the 17 murder victims’ bodies were still warm.  Among these were The Miami Herald, Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Women’s March, Michael Bloomberg, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, American Federation of Teachers, Broward County’s teacher’s union, … (even the usually astute WSJ fell for it).  This included immediate and huge donations from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney, which should have tipped off anyone paying attention that there were bigger movers and shakers involved than just a bunch of kids suddenly being on site and on message just as if the pros had organized the whole thing.  Well, it turns out that they did.

David Hines asks, 'Why Did It Take Two Weeks To Discover Parkland Students’ Astroturfing?'  H/T to a sharp-eyed reader.

[update]  Ever hear of Obama's PROMISE program in schools where undisciplined students were managed under federal guidelines that promoted the schools internal handling of cases that should have involved the police.  The whole program is based on the tenet prescribed in the PROMISE manual - “This approach focuses on the situation as being the problem rather than the individual being the problem.”  You can get the whole snootful on this feel-good progressive program (here) that also nurtures development of school shooters like Nikolas Cruz.