Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations – 30may18 (updated 5jun18)

George Rebane

Politically incorrect and nationally syndicated economist Dr Walter Williams offers his thoughts on ‘Why Capitalism is Morally Superior to Socialism’.  The short essay is worth a read, as are some of its leftwing comments. 

The US poverty level has been a political football for years.  The Left keeps upping it regularly in order to bolster their agenda for increased taxation and regulation based on the narrative that America is the leader in wealth and income inequality.  For example, today I just heard from a KVMR regular that “40% of Americans are poor”; the statement passed without challenge as if it came down from the mountain on stone tablets.  For a new data-backed analysis of this issue, take a read of Cato’s Policy Analysis #839 ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’.  From its executive summary we read –

Many U.S. politicians are promoting policies to reduce income inequality and poverty by increasing taxes and transferring more income to lower-income households. These proposals rest in part on claims that income inequality in the United States is greater than that in other Western democracies and is growing, and that poverty persists at high levels. … The usual statistics invoked to support those claims, however, are misleading. Those statistics exclude about $1 trillion in annual transfer payments to lower-income households and do not account for the effects of taxes. When those transfers and tax effects are included, income inequality in the United States is lower than that in many Western democracies and has grown at rates similar to income inequality in other nations. Improved estimates of poverty show that only about 2 percent of today’s population lives in poverty, well below the 11 percent to 15 percent that has been reported during the past five decades.

[31may18 update] TBS’ Samantha Bee called First Daughter Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” for posting a picture of herself hugging her toddler son, blaming her for the fallacious reports that “the Office of Refugee Resettlement lost track of 1,500 immigrant children in the last three months of 2017.” (here)  Ms Bee is unscathed, but imagine what would have happened had a conservative media person so labeled an Obama or Clinton daughter.  The progressives do indeed live in a privileged world of their own.

AI encounters problems in being adopted by the medical industry which kills over 200,000 patients annually through medical mistakes.  For example, deep learning algos are daily discovering new, effective, and super-human diagnostic methods for early detection of diseases.  But their adoption is being stymied by authorities who reject them because their workings cannot be explained to humans – they just work and save lives.  The EU is doing a double dummy in this when it “implemented a regulation requiring all algorithms to be “explainable” by human engineers”, something that is impossible for most deeply learned algorithms from large datasets.  Again, government is guilty until proven innocent. (more here)

[1jun18 update] Hilary Hodge as a county supervisor??!!  From all available evidence, the woman has nothing in her record to recommend her for the position, especially when it comes to promoting business and economic development.  To my knowledge she has never even held a job that required someone to take money out of his own pocket to pay her – the concept of for-profit enterprise is foreign to her.  And a perusal of her political provenance and promoters predicts that the lady will attempt to ‘help’ the county by enthusiastically amplifying the regulatory, tax, and fee burdens that come down to us from Sacramento.

[5jun18 update]  Barabara Ross, Nevada Joint Union High School District Scholarship Coordinator, is retiring.  Since the news is now public, I want to express my gratitude for all the work over the years she has done, in addition to her other NJUHSD duties, as the Academic Chair of SESF’s TechTest.  She has administered the annual TechTest, coordinated the pre-test seminars, supervised the grading of the tests, and awarded the scholarship checks at the annual awards ceremonies.  In the 2007-18 running of TechTest, SESF has awarded more than $150,000 in merit scholarships to Nevada County’s brightest STEM-bound graduates.  I have had the pleasure of working with Ms Ross all these years, and we will miss her greatly as she heads out of state for greener pastures with her husband for a well-deserved retirement.  Thank you Barbara!

Sandbox - 30may18

[Today our merrily marching Marxists, comprised of our dimly lit and under educated leftwingers, have no idea that their new ideological epiphanies are nothing but the retrieved (from the dustbin of history) and reheated tenets of 20th century communists who killed untold millions as they ruined the lives and hopes of billions - "you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet".  gjr]

Scattershots – 29may18 (updated)

George Rebane

The Great Divide debate continues as muddled as ever.  We refer to leftwing commenter jon smith’s 134pm re my 1104am in the 26may18 Sandbox.  The man(?) is apparently not aware of the years-long Great Divide debate in these pages and in the national dialogue (also referenced here, see RR’s ‘Great Divide’ category).  In this debate the Left has always taken the position that the country is to remain unified and continue its progress toward a socialist state.  The Right’s position has been to acknowledge the growing and irreversible ideological chasm, and therefore counsels adoption of a new form of republic to keep alive the Founders’ idea that the US would go forward as a multitude of ‘laboratories of democracy’, each governing according to their interpretation of the Constitution, and each implementing ‘best practices’ from other states as needed.

The Right has suggested various solutions for the Great Divide that range from partitioning existing states (e.g. SoJ movement) to forming coalitions of states into a confederacy of like-minded regions.  The Left, as also witnessed here, has always been in vehement denial of such peaceful solutions, claiming that these are treasonous, and retorting with the dictum, ‘My way, or the highway’ for those opposing their promotion of Agenda21 collectivism.  Well, at least that was so until alt-Left Californians recently started floating the idea of the state’s secession from the Union.

What one can draw from these lopsided opposing attitudes is that the Right would very much like to be relieved of those Americans who embrace the Left’s insane public policies that are leading us to tyranny through an economic morass and growing autocracy.  And conversely, we see the Left rejecting any such separation and/or change in direction, seeking instead to keep the wealth producing Americans under their heel while denying the ideological leaning of the these wealth producers.  What gives lie to their demogauging is that, if they really believed the Right to be an economic burden that is being shouldered by the Left, they would be more than happy to relieve themselves of such a burden through a Great Divide that provides appropriate economic isolation of the two schools of economics.  In short, we would be happy to be rid of them, but they don’t want to be rid of us.

California’s education woes continue.  The 29may18 SacBee reports (here) that more primary and secondary school teachers left the state (most to Texas) than we were able to attract and/or graduate from our colleges.  Census data shows that in the 2003-16 interval California lost a net of 18,000 teachers in such an out-migration.  All of this, of course, makes no nevermind to Sacramento’s collectivist chorus and their local lackeys who just continue singing ‘All is Well, All is Well’ louder than ever.  Those of us who point out our educational calamity are simply dismissed as ‘gripers’.  (H/T to reader for the heads up on this report.)

[update] On Bob Crabb’s blog I responded to Steve Frisch’s under the ‘History Regrets Itself’ post as follows – “Well, here's a revelation.  I didn't know that the Left considered Trump and Hitler to be so much alike that it would take "mental gymnastics to differentiate Trump from Hitler."  And the chasm continues to grow.”

Attempting to post my comment, I ran into a new feature of the Security Question that compels the commenter to answer a simple arithmetic problem – in my case it was supplying the answer to 10+8 – before the comment is accepted.  Instead of being able to type in the answer as usual, the site now supplies a list of possible answers from which, presumably, the commenter is to select the correct one.  In my case the supplied list contained only the numbers 12, 10, 15, 6, and allowed no other direct entry.  Since my education in this case was demonstrably deficient, I couldn’t post my comment, and am here reduced to lamenting that I may have run into a sample of Common Core math on a liberal site that would put so many of us at a disadvantage.  I assume Mr Crabb’s regular readers have no problem with this new challenge.

When will Mueller’s criminal collusion investigation (aka “witch hunt”) end?  The Left’s answer has been the easy one – it will end when Mueller finds something from which he can make a criminal case against President Trump, and not a day before.  The rest of us are hoping for a more reasonable termination the time of which we can only guess.  But it turns out that we can do better than that if we appeal to a method published way back in 1993 by Professor J. Richard Gott.  Gott applied what we in these pages may term ‘Copernican reasoning’ to derive a formula that calculates the probability that a minimally known process will terminate between now and a specified future time.  Here the minimal knowledge required is only the age of the process, or how long it has been in operation.  I have used Gott’s result and expanded on it in my work over the years – a version of it is summarized in ‘… and this too shall pass’.  (and more here)

So, what are the chances (probability) that Mueller’s investigation will stop in the next month, four months from now, before the election in November (in the next 5 months), …?  Accepting 20 months as the acknowledged duration of the ongoing investigation, we can use the appropriate Gott-Rebane formula to compute the following graph of the increasing probability of termination over the numbered future months.  As we see, the chances are one out of five that Mueller will hang it up before the election.  Now you can make book.

Mr Boardman’s dabble in STEM education

George Rebane

Our irrepressible Union columnist George Boardman’s Memorial Day contribution (here) took a swipe at those of us who “are always griping about the lack of emphasis on the STEM subjects, the math and science course that can get you a good paying job in our information-based economy.”  It’s not clear what Mr Boardman’s position is on promoting STEM oriented curricula in secondary schools, but he does attempt to make a positive impact by suggesting that the country’s high schoolers can learn STEM stuff better if the subject matter were “framed in real life situations students can relate to.”

As an example, he cites a recent NYT article about “Calculating the Risk of Getting Shot” while attending school, and recommends that students across the country busy themselves with a “math exercise to determine the chance any given high school will be the scene of the next mass shooting?”  Mr Boardman recommends this little brain teaser as the vehicle to get some math and probability learning into the little darlins’ heads since “several math concepts would be utilized in the exercise to determine the probability of a school joining the list of over 200 school shootings since the Sandy Hook massacre six years ago.”

Well, a numerate citizen would immediately realize that actually only one trivial ‘math concept’ would be used to get us the answer to this “real world math” problem.  Since there has been no evidence that any particular kind of secondary school, located anywhere in the country, would be more or less likely to be “the scene of the next mass shooting”, all secondary schools have an equal opportunity of becoming the next such scene.  The Dept of Education reports that there are 26,407 public high schools and 10,693 private high schools, or a total of 37,100 secondary schools in the country.  Hence the probability that any given school will be next is just 1/37,100 = 0.000026954.  And since there are at least hundreds of students in every such school, the probability that any given individual, such as his cited palpitating pupil, will be killed by an armed lunatic then becomes vanishingly small.

However, kids addressing this problem could learn more about propaganda and lamestream media induced histrionics – to which Mr Boardman appears to be a willing contributor - in their school shootings reports designed to abet the Left's gun control (aka constructive confiscation) agenda, than absorbing low-grade STEM concepts.  For openers they could be taught about the ongoing stream of law enforcement failures that would have prevented many of these shootings, instead of being encouraged to spend time demonstrating against the NRA, the country’s leading organization teaching gun safety and promoting Second Amendment rights.

Memorial Day - 28 May 2018

George Rebane

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

Sapir-Whorf on the Art of Coding and the Communications Conundrum

George Rebane

In his ‘Code to Joy’ essay (featured in the Jun-Jul 2018 issue of 1843, the Economist’s bi-monthly features magazine), science writer and author Andrew Smith almost discovers Sapir-Whorf.  But not quite, and therein lies a tale.  The man had been writing about computer technology and its impact on our lives for most of his career before he realized that he really didn’t know exactly how software worked, and it was the software that enabled all those wonderful things that most of us now take for granted in our daily round.

So he asked, “Is learning to code in middle age a fool’s errand or a committed act of digital citizenship?”, and started his quest for a programming language which he could learn well enough to code up a simple task.  On his travels through the programming world he interviews important personages and finds a well-known mentor to help him as he inevitably hits the ‘dark night of the soul’ when all gleaned progress and understanding fades into a hopeless morass of imminent defeat.  But with a mini-epiphany here and there along the way, he perseveres and finally celebrates his finished and fully functional Python code snippet.

What Smith’s trail of tears illustrates is another confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis cum dictum that a person’s language(s) bound their capacity for thought.  We have visited the ramifications of S-W in these pages before (e.g. here) in the context of languages such as English and mathematics.  The bottom line of it all is that every human being is not capable of thinking all human thoughts; they are limited by the languages they have mastered.  And Smith’s essay is a clear illustration of this, even though he is not able to connect it with S-W.  (He is not alone, almost none of our ‘educators’ have this understanding as they mangle our schools’ curricula and/or teach in our classrooms.)

The ramifications of S-W necessarily extend beyond thought to communications and understanding.  What you cannot think, you cannot communicate, and what is beyond your lexicon, you cannot understand what someone else is trying to tell you.  Cultures with such language deficits have a difficult time making progress since it is hard for them to come together to solve problems and make more complex plans for productive cooperative enterprises.  It has been the expansion of language that has always provided the bases for the advancement of cultures in the sense of securing more resources, insuring their survival, and increasing their quality of life.

Think of what your life would be if you had no concept of nor ability to communicate ‘before/after’,  'future/past', ‘more/less’, ‘harder/easier’, ‘if/then’, numbering/counting things in your environment, expressing the subjunctive, considering counterfactuals (“A counterfactual thought occurs when a person modifies a factual prior event and then assesses the consequences of that change.”), quantifying risk (the notions of likelihood/probability), … .

In the same manner, Smith and others not familiar with the art of coding have no concept of the kinds of primitives that are both necessary and possible in various programming languages.  And therefore, given a problem to solve that involves the manipulation of specific types of data or implementing a user task, they simply have no place to start thinking about how to approach and structure a solution (i.e. to algorize).  Smith runs into this problem without appreciating it when he initially considers which one of the current 1,700+ programming languages he should first learn.  His mentor takes him through such considerations, but without connecting to the larger linguistic landscape of thought and communications taught by Sapir-Whorf.

Today much (almost all?) of our discussion of social issues is also hampered by the various boundaries that exist in the (partially) shared language people use domestically, which, of course, is immensely amplified when translation is required between languages with widely different roots and current capacities for understanding and expressing thought.  The comment streams of blogs (e.g. RR’s) along with countless letters-to-the-editor attest to the so far insurmountable difficulties Americans have in communicating with each other, no matter how sincere are their efforts.

Sandbox - 26may18

[So Starbucks is going to sensitize all their employees in all their 8,000+ stores this coming Tuesday afternoon.  Anyone have any idea what difference such newly sensitive employees will make when all the stores will be open to anyone wanting to get in out of the rain and cold, and take advantage of a pause that refreshes?  gjr]

Scattershots – 25may18 (updated 27may18)

George Rebane

Legal CCW guns continue to save lives.  The recent spate of shootings again demonstrates that only a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun – everything else is progressive blather.  A reader’s comment highlights the FBI’s recently released ‘Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2016 and 2017’.  That report “indicates 16 percent (1 of 6) of crimes that qualify for inclusion in the paper were stopped by a law-abiding citizen with a gun. The figure represents more than a five-fold increase from the agency’s 2000-2013 study, when the figure was 3.1 percent. … The 2014 and 2015 report, the first biennial study on the topic released by the agency, adds statistical weight to the long-term trend. During those years, 5 percent of the attacks were stopped by armed citizens.”  That is quite a lot of potential murders prevented.

The elected Democrats continue to denigrate the intelligence of the people who sent them to Washington.  Rep Joaquin Castro (D-TX) is one of the Left’s poster children in this as he was interviewed on NPR citing the Republicans in Congress “going after” the DoJ and FBI when requesting evidential documents that they had every right to see, and accusing President Trump of “bullying” high-level Deep State bureaucrats like FBI’s Rosenstein who have done everything in their power to obstruct congressional oversight investigations.  According to Castro, Trump’s assessment of Rosenstein’s performance was bullying because Rosenstein may eventually give in and provide the needed documents because “(he) is afraid of losing his job.”  Anyone at that level who would consider doing something unethical or illegal in order to keep his job, doesn’t deserve to hold it in the first place – they should immediately resign if forced into such a position.  But these kinds of ‘obstruction of justice’ arguments are all that the Left has, now that their allegations of ‘collusion’ have run out of steam.  The pivoting Dems know that their loyal constituents have nowhere near the needed resources to evaluate what their Castros are telling them.

Trump has shown up his eager critics again with his recent letter to the Ugly Fat Kid cancelling the summit.  All kinds of historically challenged experts on diplomacy crawled out of the woodwork to point out how such a move was wrong on all counts.  As even the humble RR pointed out, Trump’s letter was just the next well considered move in response to the UFK’s sudden declaration that NK’s nuclear programs were not to be considered at the summit.  We expect this dance to go on before it gets resolved, instead of what the naïfs predicted was Trump’s clumsy mistake to torpedo progress, progress that they conveniently forgot was only due to all of the other ‘diplomatic mistakes’ that Trump has made getting us to where no other US president has even gotten close.  Stay tuned, the hourly entertainment will continue - provided by the UFK in NK, and the never-Trumpers closer to home.

[26may18 update]  Deep learning AI algos are flooding into the medical field demonstrating their abilities to monitor and predict patients’ life-critical pathologies and events.  These abilities reach far beyond what human physicians are able to do.  Some of the algos even prescribe timely treatments selected from a set of endless candidates which a human under stress and time constraints have a low likelihood of getting right.  Today, human medical personnel are still in the treatment loop, but soon they will not be and the AIs will handle the cases autonomously and report what they have done.  More here.

Yellow journalism is fast becoming the standard in lamestream media.  The latest example of this is their quiet cover-up of one of Obama’s Great Lies that he is continuing to spread on his current speaker’s circuit – namely, that his administration was scandal-free.  PJ Media is one of the outlets that will not let this atrocious claim lay unchallenged (here).  The truth of the matter is, of course, that Obama’s scandals cost lives, corrupted our political system, and demonstrably affected national security; this as opposed to the collusion allegations and sex peccadilloes that the Left is using in their attempt to hamstring the Trump administration.  But as far as the lamestream is concerned, there was no evil to see, hear, or speak of in the Obama administration – and there still isn’t.

[27may update] Former CIA head Michael Hayden explains (here) the government’s unrestricted use of spying on Americans anytime, anywhere, and for any reason, as long as it can later be claimed to have been an undercover counterintelligence effort.  Hayden described this kind of embedded spying as being “stunningly normal” in the course of our intelligence and security operations.  Inserting such paid “informants” into any activity carried out by Americans does not require any kind of special warrant or evidence of criminal conduct; just putting someone in there to poke around and see what they can find is reason enough.  I don’t think we Americans have been explicitly made aware that citizens may no longer have concerns or conduct legal activities that they can keep confidential.  All this is also fine and dandy by some Republican conservatives such as Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL).  As taught in these pages, security and freedom are seesaw benefits with no clear understanding of an acceptable balance.  The more cynical and/or distrustful the deep state, the more government spying we should expect.

Ruminations – 22may18

George Rebane

America’s students are still struggling as they compete for leadership in the high tech job markets of today and tomorrow with other students arount the world.  A correspondent from the east coast emailed me the following – “The 2015 Program for International Student Assessment tests 15-year old students around the world.. It's administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  The United States placed 24th out of 71 countries in science. It did worse in math, ranking 38th.  The U.S. scored at 470 in math, below the OECD average of 490. That's well below the scores of the top five, all of which are Asian: Singapore at 565, Hong Kong at 548, Macao at 544, Taiwan at 542, and Japan at 532.  China was not included, since only four provinces participated.  In science, the United States scored at 496, above the OECD average of 493. The top five highest scoring countries were Singapore at 556, Japan at 538, Estonia at 534, Taiwan at 532, and Finland at 531.”

Fellow blogger and RR reader Russ Steele has a new blog – Rural Economy and Technology - that focuses on the introduction of technologies into rural economies.  It’s worth reading, especially as it treats the slow introduction of broadband to communities like Nevada County.  (more here)

Still on travel.  Apologies for sparse postings and responses to comments.

Sandbox - 18may18

[More school killings, this time with a revolver and a shotgun - no semi-autos in sight, yet the killings continue.  When do we come to a national conclusion that it is the shooters we should do better at identifying and stopping, rather than taking guns from law abiding citizens?  gjr]

Kelly Sadler’s “insult”

George Rebane

Last week, White House aide Kelly Sadler said McCain’s opposition to Gina Haspel’s nomination to be the next CIA Director didn't matter because he’s “dying anyway."  Ms Sadler’s comment was made during a private, closed door planning session in the White House concerning how now-confirmed CIA Director’s nomination was to be managed through Congress.  Nothing unusual about the president’s staff doing such strategizing.  And nothing unusual about a staff member assessing the factors surrounding potential members of Congress as they may affect the Haspel vote if the confirmation process were to be long and drawn out, or as to the weight of an MOC’s opposition to the confirmation.

Pointing out that a particular senator’s opposition may be weakened because of his apparent health-induced lame duck status, was an expected contribution to the deliberations.  There is no evidence that Ms Sadler’s observation was in any way made with disrespect let alone intended to be an insult.  However, those norms have long been abandoned in the operation of our federal government, especially if there is hay to be made in the ongoing attempt to weaken the Trump administration.  The comment was leaked to the opposition in a now pro forma fashion, and it was off to the races.

The usual Democrat suspects jumped all over it, and their lamestream lackeys piled on with lurid reports of how the White House disrespects and continues to insult hallowed veterans such as Sen John McCain.  Everybody who could find a mic voiced their ‘shock’ at such an insult being tolerated by the President.  The leftwing barrage was so heavy and came so rapidly that even the Republican MOCs were swept along, and had chime in about their own disappointments about such a now-established insult.

To add further insult to injury, Fox News - you know, the people who are “fair, balanced, and unafraid” – were scared s#!tless to set the matter straight.  Instead they formed up their talking heads who obediently cluck-clucked their tongues at the unfortunate leak and the politics of such news of the ‘insult’ as it affected the President’s ongoing foreign policy and economic agenda.  None had the balls to say that Ms Sadler’s remark in a private executive branch planning meeting was not an insult, and the resulting fray was simply an expected a political dust-up, that correctly reported, would quickly blow over.

And this how the Washington 'honorables' govern us today.

George Boardman’s California

George Rebane

Intrepid left-of-center columnist George Boardman is one of our county’s recognized students of the human condition who regularly shares his observations and interpretations in the op-ed pages of The Union.  RR is proud to also number him among our regular readers and commenters.  In his 14may18 column – ‘California shines again, much to the annoyance of our critics’ – he paints a salubrious picture of California that goes a long way to explain why our Sacramento socialists see nothing wrong with what they have done to our state over the last few decades.  Not only that, but their sharing Mr Boardman’s view will not cause the loss of even a smidgen of momentum in our headlong rush towards the People’s Republic of California (perhaps even unto its status as a sovereign nation-state).

Mr Boardman’s analysis is supported mainly by ignoring the growing dumbbell shape of CA’s income demographic.  As I pointed out in ‘Solar Panels …’ and ‘California’s Common Core …’, the state’s population is growing slowly, mainly by the steady ingress of the welfare-seeking poor and succor-seeking illegal aliens, along with a thin cohort of knowledge workers joining the state’s unique high tech sector.  The slow growth rate is due to the concurrent exodus of middle class workers (especially in the second quintile) who can no longer afford to live here due to the low wages that their limited and rapidly redundant skill sets command.  What is left behind is a small hump on the high earnings end and a large hump on the low/no earnings end supported by government checks.  The middle earnings area is on its way to becoming a wasteland that is devastated by California’s high taxes and countless regulations which increase every aspect of our cost of living.

Now, what Mr Boardman points out but does not lament is that the people leaving California are of the vaunted middle-class that the Democrat politicians all celebrate and claim their policies are designed to help.  Well, you can’t get more Democratic than California, and that’s where the real rubber meets the road on socialist policies.  Pointing out that no one really wants to go live in North Platte, Nebraska is not exactly an example of keen insight.   Most people know the decline of regions generating wealth through agriculture, that require fewer and fewer workers, which actually started about 125 years ago.  Yes, cities are where the country’s wealth is generated in the modern age.  However, the record of Democrat governance of America’s urban areas is an ongoing and growing tragedy of the human condition.

To understand this as a socialist (or thereabouts?), Mr Boardman should examine the history of California’s Gini Index that measures the equality of income distribution – e.g. CA’s Gini Index is one of the nation’s highest and rose 18.2% during 1979 – 2012.  As technology accelerates and California attracts more and more low/no earners (1 of 3 US welfare recipients live in California), the Left-fostered income inequality will continue to ramp upward.  Given the strong correlation between income and critical thinking, the Democrats see perpetuating such inequality as a virtuous cycle that ensures their hardening grip on power as the dumbbell demographic accentuates.  California is now home of the coastal well-to-do who can still afford the taxes and increased costs, and those legions of the poor who rely on government transfer payments to make ends meet.

Finally, that the fewer rich, who are sufficient to operate the California companies commanding margins which make the state’s GDP one of the highest in the world, should be no surprise to those who mastered Econ 101.  However, all that will also end when even the rich must eventually sell Sacramento the rope with which they will be hanged.

Solar panels - the latest California calamity

George Rebane

California’s collectivist calamites just keep rolling in.  The latest in the works is the Great Solar Panel Sidestep – a new government mandated, contractor supported dance that will push low cost housing, now already out of reach, even further into the land of the bureaucratically impossible.  As observed from outside our state’s borders, “California is often where bad ideas spring to life these days, and they’re worth highlighting lest they catch on in saner precincts. Consider the state Energy Commission’s decision this week to mandate solar panels on all new homes. Meanwhile, Democrats bemoan the lack of affordable housing. Hmmm, maybe there’s a connection?”

But his latest really takes the cake – you can run the numbers yourself, but here’s the back of the envelope version of the California Energy Commission's mandate for all new homes.  Start with the “average cost of a rooftop solar panel system today is $18,840, which amortized at a 5.5% interest rate over 30 years is $107 a month.”  Add to that an average of about $400 annually for government inspections, cleaning and maintaining the system, to get a total monthly cost of $140, or $1,680 annually.  The advertised benefit is $80 monthly off the already outrageous cost of California electricity, making the net negative out-of-pocket $720 annually.  An earlier smokescreen claimed that the initial cost would be recovered by such savings in 30 years.  Now the cat is out of the bag – this bamboozle costs a lot out the gate, and keeps costing forever (even if it last 30 years).  Given the low cost of energy in America, California’s solar energy only benefits leviathan and corporatism.

Meanwhile, California housing costs average between $50K-$75K per unit more than in the rest of the country, and a government specified ‘affordable housing’ unit costs an unaffordable $332K.  Building low cost housing in California is prohibited by more laws and regulations than can be counted.  This is “why hundreds of thousands of middle-class Californians are fleeing. In 2016 Arizona welcomed twice as many Californian refugees as Mexican immigrants. California’s labor force last year expanded by a mere 1% compared with 2.2% in Nevada and Arizona. Sharing a border with California is a gift that keeps on giving.”  (more here)

It’s ALL in the label (updated)

"A rose/skunk by any other name would smell as sweet/foul", Wm Shakespeare expanded.

George Rebane

Watching the recent California gubernatorial candidates’ debate, it again became clear that the labels we both carefully, and sometimes carelessly, attach to important issues determine the direction and nature of the subsequent debate on and the final resolution of an issue.  For those who pay attention to public affairs, this was most apparent when the topic of ‘immigration’ came up.

The clear line of division between the Right and Left involves the existential factors –

1. The Left’s overarching public policies are ALL directed toward demonstrably achieving the world envisioned in the UN’s Agenda21 objectives.
2. The Left cannot achieve this as long as the US remains a sovereign nation-state and a (the?) world hegemon that recognizes and still celebrates its origin as a western civilization.
3. A cohesive national culture and secure borders are anathema to the A21 future. A fragmented and mutually wary (suspicious?) cultural tapestry is the required starting point to any “fundamental transformation of America”.
4. Continually promoting the victimization narrative (through public education and the media) about America’s blacks and Hispanics forms the attained beach head for maintaining and expanding divisions of the aggrieved in our land.
5. Most productive and conducive to achieving A21 goals is the simmering sentiment in Hispanic communities that embraces Reconquista (q.v.) – the reacquisition of lands lost by Mexico through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and their reformation under a new sovereign Hispanic government.
6. Porous borders that invite the ingress of Hispanic illegal aliens is the ongoing near-term objective – ‘I don’t believe in borders.’, ‘I don’t believe in walls, I believe in bridges.’, … is today’s cry of Democrat politicians and activists.
7. Border porosity is most strongly promoted in the Hispanic communities where purposely aggrieved people naturally practice tribalism, and invite/condone the growth of their cohorts with people who are ethnically and culturally similar. Reconquista’s oft-stated guiding principle is its ‘peaceful achievement’ through overwhelming numbers at the ballot box and in government bureaucracies – ‘We will outbreed you!’
8. Porous borders are abetted under the imprimatur that the illegal entrants are today’s continuation of America’s historical open-door policies of legal immigration. Hence, it’s of paramount importance to rename the illegal aliens among us as the innocent cohort of ‘undocumented immigrants’, which has finally morphed into simply ‘immigrants’.
9. To America’s growing population of the marginally educated, the Left’s use of ‘immigrants’ is purposely designed to confound the historically beneficial ingress of legal immigrants and the not-so-beneficial ingress of illegal entrants which subsequently meld into the unassimilated population of illegal aliens already established in the US.
10. The Left’s public position is that how you got into the country doesn’t matter, especially if your native country was authoritarian, poor, and without human rights and economic prospects for its citizens (aka a “shithole country”).
11. The Left fosters the illusion that our illegal aliens are equivalent to our legal immigrants in how they draw on public services, participate in our justice system, and contribute to our economy. To them immigration is NOT a two-party process that involves a mutual and formal agreement between the immigrant petitioning entry and the government welcoming such entry.  To them immigration is just whatever means are available to aliens to enter our country.  Illegal aliens and legal immigrants are all just ‘immigrants’ and so represented to the rest of Americans.  They all deserve equally to become franchised citizens, and until then they should have all the rights of franchised citizens, thereby making the latter distinction existentially moot.

One can make the case for the importance of correct/accurate labels that cover other issues such as ‘climate change’ nee ‘global warming’, which functionally the Left argues and treats as preventable manmade global warming.  One can make a long list of such propagandized mislabeling of issues, proposed legislation, and laws on the books that is the stock in trade of those dedicated to deception.

[update] We live "in the rotting carcass of an once great state" - the case for this is summarized succinctly in this YouTube video brought to our attention by a regular reader and commenter.

Sandbox - 10may18

[We kinda skipped over the initiative to let California's illegal aliens hold seats on state boards and commissions.  And none of the Left have answered the concern about what will become of America if everyone who presents themselves at our border, and declares that their own country is not fit to live in, is granted asylum.  And this especially since they will be standing in either Canada or Mexico, neither of which threatens them harm.  The Left's position is understandable - 'who cares, let 'em in because that will speed up the fundamental transformation of America.'  Did you note that none of the Dem governor candidates would even consider this in their promotion of open borders?  gjr]

California’s Common Core Catastrophe

George Rebane

In these pages we have long lamented California’s adoption of the Common Core curriculum standards, especially in the teaching of math in K-12.  H/T to longtime RR reader and discussant Greg Goodknight, who points us to an important just-published essay on Common Core performance in California since the standards were adopted in 2010 and fully implemented in 2014-15.  The piece – ‘California’s Common Core Mistake’ – written by W. Evers and Z. Wurman of the Hoover Institution contains a crisp summary of the educational catastrophe that CC has bestowed on California and the nation in preparing our young people to enter STEM careers so demanded by the AI-driven shift in required workforce skills.

The whole mess started with California having the widely acknowledged highest math teaching standards in the nation throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  The keystone of it all was preparing the maximum number of the state’s public school students to take Algebra1 in the 8^th grade.  Evers and Wurman present copious charts and graphs of the data showing the progress of California students before CC, and then the disaster that befell when the curriculum was dumbed down after CC mandated postponing Algebra1 until the 9^th grade.  And who was hit the hardest by this curricular retreat? – the poor and minorities, of course.

A cynical but totally rational explanation for this Left-promoted, government induced travesty is that the CC curriculum will surreptitiously yet reliably stifle the growth of a more numerate and critically thinking electorate, which then will be more compatible, susceptible, and compliant to the socialist nostrums that now and eternally will gush out of our one-party Sacramento in a steady stream.

Scattershots – 9may18 (updated)

George Rebane

When I speak of the notion that ‘the Left is evil’, I am not talking about some outlier faction representing a minuscule fraction of that population.  Invoking that notion for me requires showing that a large fraction, which includes the Left’s thought leaders and intellects, is practicing a given evil policy.  Here is an example today rampant on the nation’s campuses.

Among the several types of thought police colleges have now instituted to detect and corral wrong thinking by students, the Bias Response Teams (BRTs) on many campuses today are perhaps the most prevalent and insidious.  These outfits are set up to surreptitiously monitor students’ speech “and to encourage others to report if they have been the target or witness of a bias incident.”  To identify a bias incident, BRTs apply the gold standard that states "the most important indication of bias is your own feelings”.  What happens then varies, but all such BRT ‘investigations’ of bias and subsequent recommendations to administration, which often invoke draconian retributions, are nothing but unabashed violations of the students’ First Amendment rights. (more here)

National Propaganda Radio took the lead this morning in fashioning a narrative to counter Trump’s latest foreign policy success in getting the fat kid to release three American hostages he’s held for the last few years.  They’re coming home with SecState Pompeo returning from his second trip there to set up the upcoming summit, another first for our President.  NPR spun the story as a potential disaster in the making since it wasn’t clear to them whether Trump had prepared any response to the fat kid’s presumed demand for some quid pro quo.  And Trump’s lack of preparation (according to their mavens) will torpedo the talks.  The desperation of the Left in these whole cloth fabrications has become a reliable source of political humor for at least half the country.

That AI creates or destroys jobs debate is getting pretty lame.  Of course, the advent of more AI is destroying jobs in BOTH the number of job types and the absolute number of jobs, each employing one full-time-equivalent (FTE) human.  But there is a contingent of elites out there whose message is ‘Not to worry, AI will continue to create more jobs.’  That message is beyond vague, and overwhelmingly misleading.  The 30apr18 WSJ’s special section on AI featured ‘Seven Jobs Robots Will Create – or Expand’ containing the list of job types to be created/expanded.  It was meant to be a comforting article for the great unwashed and discomfited.  All the jobs listed 1) required workers on the high end of the IQ scale, and 2) in toto would require many times fewer FTE workers than those losing their jobs to AI.  Sooner or later this bamboozle will be known to all.

The Dems are doing their best to apply double, triple, quadruple standards manufactured on the spot to suit their attempt to torpedo another Trump nomination – currently of Gina Haspel as the new CIA director.  The lady was undercover for 30+ years laying her ass on the line for our country, in a position that had nothing to do with making policy, and the liberal lamebrains are insinuating that she was the mother of waterboarding.  The progressives are putting her through a kabuki dance – ‘torture doesn’t work’ - trying to trip her up about the future use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques.  She is holding up well, promising to uphold the moral high ground of the law and not to torture captives for information.  Most of the country hopes that when push comes to shove, our intelligence agencies will do whatever straddling of the line is necessary to get timely information from enemy hostiles when national security or American lives are on the line.  If our enemies ever become convinced that the US will not squeeze, say, the raghead leaders that we capture, we will be in deep pucky.

Sandbox - 4may2018

[Well, I guess the big question du jour is whose bygone trysts are the most damning - a previous president's, verified and while in office; or the current president's, alleged and before he took office.  The French are laughing their butts off that the puritan Americans, especially the secular humanist progressives, are making such a fuss over it, to the point of impeachability.  gjr]

Criminal Uses of Drones & AI

George Rebane

It didn’t take long for criminals and terrorists to start using affordable, commercially available drones for surveillance and even weaponized munitions delivery platforms on the battlefield.  Terrorists routinely launch their own eyes in the sky when being attacked by the militaries of countries seeking to destroy them.  In the US drones have already been used by prepared criminals to actively harass the FBI during a hostage situation.  And there’s more to come.

With affordable face recognition AI, authorities are anxious about the launch of assassination drones in built-up areas to search out and then kill a designated human target either with a firearm or explosive.  Drug smugglers are using ever more sophisticated drone platforms to monitor and catalog border security procedures and process so as to pick the proper times and places to bring in the drug payloads.  Smaller deliveries of high value narcotics are already handled by drones from Mexico.

Our military and law enforcement are playing catch up with counter-systems and delays caused first by the usual calcified bureaucratic assessments of ‘oh, they’ll never be able to do that’ to R&D and procurement red tape that doesn’t allow the good guys to invent and test as fast as can the terrorists and criminals.  Of course, all that government can field against the bad guys is the same stuff that they can field against law abiding citizens to keep the rest of us on our mandated straight and ever-narrowing paths.  As someone once said, ‘There is no free lunch.’  And that goes double for advanced technology.  Stand by for ram.  (more here and here)

 

The 21st Century Progressive Dating Game (updated 9may18)

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.  Mark Twain

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 May 2018.]

For millennia females in all cultures were shielded by their families.  Marriages were arranged for commercial or political benefit, love was optional and came later if at all.  Extra marital trysts and affairs were di rigeur at all levels of society.  Females were treated as chattel, to be kept on the shelf in a perfect condition for display until a desirable customer came along.

In the west, the female perquisites of love and, therefore, choice began to emerge during the Renaissance in the 1400s, and blossomed during the French Enlightenment (ca 1740).  Although almost all proper marriages were still arranged, or at a minimum still required the blessing of the prospective bride’s closest senior male relative or appointed male guardian.  As the years passed, requiring the male imprimatur became totally optional in the most developed nations during the 20^th century in the aftermath of the Great War.  This signaled the liberation of both partners, giving each gender the freedom to go through a semi-formal game of ‘pick and choose’, during which a number of prospective partners were given the ‘try before you buy’ treatment.  The dating game was on between boys and girls of all ages.