Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 29sep18

[The Kavanaugh cauldron continues to boil, and it ain't over 'til it's over.  gjr]

Escrow the Witch Hunt (updated 29sep18)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary that was broadcast on 26 September 2018.  It is an augmented version of the previous RR post, ‘Mueller’s “Witch Hunt” Metric’.  An edited version of this commentary was also published in the 29sep18 Union (here).]

Even with the ongoing Kavanaugh confirmation hysteria, the Russia collusion investigation by special counsel Mueller continues to elbow its way into the lead stories of the news cycle, and rightly so.  Should Mueller find some material evidence on impactive collusion or, now the add-on hunt for obstructing justice, then that would have an immediate and material impact on the prospects of President Trump completing his first term.

Today we continue to have the usual Trump enemies like James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey appearing daily on leftwing media endlessly rehashing their charges that President Trump colluded with the Russians to get elected, and then engaged in various nefarious acts to obstruct investigations that would bring him to justice, a road that would lead to immediate impeachment and possible conviction by the Senate to remove him from office.

The lack of any evidence to substantiate such allegations does not have any impact to slow the beat of the media propaganda drums that today continue to convince the nation’s voters that Trump is guilty as alleged.  Trump and his supporters respond by calling these evidence-free allegations and the seemingly interminable Mueller investigation a witch hunt.  Basically, they accuse Mueller and his Democrat supporters of following a policy that the investigation will continue until some culpable evidence is found, and the nation along with the administration will be kept on tenterhooks until that time.

Sandbox - 23sep18

[A reader alerted me to another gem of the FUE's logic.  He takes to task those who criticize the People's Republic of Kalifornia, and still (gasp!) take their leisure at the state's awesomely scenic locales.  The man's brain cannot separate terribly gone wrong social policies from the state's natural beauty, as if eschewing one requires rejecting everything that is still good about the state, and that mainly because the progressives have yet to eliminate the last vestiges of such enjoyments (e.g. denying/limiting public access to TBD 'wildlands').  This thinking by local lefties is replicated in Sacramento, because those are the idiots that the gimmes all over the state have now voted into power.  And that California now has achieved the nation's highest poverty rate gives additional depth to the ignorance of these leftwing loonies.  gjr]

Ruminations – 21sep18 (updated 26sep18)

George Rebane

Fall equinox (22sep18, 1845PDT) observance preparations should be completed in time by the devout and/or deluded for tomorrow evening’s passage of the sun directly overhead (somewhere) at the equator on its journey south for our fall and winter seasons.  (This is a public service announcement.)

Mine eyes have seen the gory … (updated 21sep18)

‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Mr Seeman, my sixth-grade teacher at Ben Davis Elementary School in Indianapolis, motivated his class to take an interest in the 1952 election pitting Eisenhower against Stevenson for president.  He did this by promising to vote for the candidate that received the best presentation from his roomful of charges – there were about 33 of us.  It was September and time enough to form up a couple of committees to start researching and preparing the presentation.  The Rebanes weren’t even citizens then, but my mom and dad had always been keen followers of the political scene since Estonia.

So, all of us went home to consult our parents as to which candidate was the best one to vote for and why.  Since Estonia, where my father the electrician ran a small electrical contracting business and both sets of grandparents were farmers (mom’s dad even ran the local flour mill), my forebears had been entrepreneurial, self-reliant, hardworking individualists – in short, they were capitalists.  The upshot was that I got a snootful of pro-Eisenhower propaganda from both parents and was told to start reading the op-ed pages of the Indianapolis News, which was the newspaper I delivered six evenings a week on my paper route.  They pointed out that I too was an entrepreneur businessman, since I bought the newspapers from the News every week, and had to market and sell them in my territory at a profit or not, with no recourse if I couldn’t collect enough from some low-life customers who endlessly delayed payment or simply stiffed the kid.

Socially Just STEM – it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

While the Dems have the nation tied in Kavanaugh knots and Russia collusions, they are also making quiet progress on other fronts.  In their constant efforts to weaken and then destroy the United States as a sovereign nation-state, our progressives accelerated shift to socialism today adds a new program to stifle and dilute STEM education in the nation’s high schools.  This innovative federal pilot program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and “will promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) high school curriculums that are steeped in the context of social justice.” (more here)

NHS has granted $1,009,762 of taxpayer money to train the initial cohort of 24 teachers from Drexel University to mangle the math curriculum in the Philadelphia school system.  The stated goal for the new and improved STEM curricula is to “promote social justice teaching”.  Internationally, US students’ STEM performance already ranks in the dire straits region, but nowhere in this new initiative is the improvement in STEM performance included as a stated objective.

In the new socialist order, "the long-term and far-reaching benefits to society of this project are the potential to document and share sustainable approaches, steeped in the context of social-justice, for recruiting and preparing STEM majors to provide success in learning mathematics and science for all middle-grades students in a high-need school district."  So, our learned left-lurched educators at the federal level have concluded that the solution to our poor performance has been due to the lack of social justice emphasis in teaching STEM.  This will all be improved when “the (new) foundation of the math and science courses will be based on ‘understanding students' cultural communities as a foundation for classroom culture.’”  (H/T to reader for the heads up.)

Progressive Perspectives – 17sep18

George Rebane

George Boardman, our favorite Union columnist, writes in the 17sep18 edition (here) of the newspaper and shares another important worldview held by the country’s progressives.  He starts with an expected dunning of our Republican congressmen Doug LaMalfa and Tom McClintock who refused to attend a candidate’s forum held by the League of Women Voters.  For years now the LWV has morphed itself from an assiduously non-partisan voter information organization into an active arm of the country’s progressive movement under Democratic Party leadership.  Such ‘candidates’ forums’ have turned out to be nothing but leftwing propaganda events showcasing hit jobs on their opposition candidates and issues.  Why attend such an event on purpose?

What Mr Boardman misreports is that Congressman LaMalfa “boycotts” Nevada County.  That simply is not true given his considerable attendance record supporting Republican sponsored events at which all county residents are welcomed to attend, hear his report, and question their representative.

But the real worldview, that comes out in the column, is how progressives view taxation as a zero-sum game.  It’s hard to tell whether or not they are really naïve enough to believe that if one government jurisdiction (say, the county) levies taxes of a given amount/rate, then another government jurisdiction (say, the state) will somehow be inhibited from also getting their pound of flesh from the taxpayer.  He makes that point viz the history of Prop13, claiming that since that proposition limited the local jurisdictions’ ability to arbitrarily continue raising property taxes, it then fell to the state to take up the taxation slack.  Mr Boardman’s point being that had Prop13 not placed such inhibitions on local taxation, then the state would have demurred and diminished its rapacity for continuing to raise taxes.  It would be interesting to discover how many of our left-leaning citizens join Mr Boardman in his embrace of such a charming fable.

Another progressive perspective, contributed by a Mr William Larsen, is the more familiar one advocating open borders and a ‘y’all come, regardless …’ immigration policy.  In his 17sep18 Union column Mr Larsen interprets this century-plus message on the Statue of Liberty as our mandated perennial and correct policy toward all who have let their homelands become what in today’s vernacular would qualify as 'shithole countries'.  Anything else, he informs us, would be considered an utterly racist national response that favors the white skins of Europe over the black and brown skins from the south.  The deeper understanding of this perspective is that America is immune to becoming a shithole country no matter how many people we permit/invite in from countries that have already suffered that fate at their hands and the hands of their fellow citizens and cultural cohorts.

Mr Larsen also shares with us an unfortunate incident he suffered when returning from a local political demonstration with a sign he displayed.  Apparently some aggrieved worthy on the right thought he was an illegal alien, one of those who today unabashedly join such left-sponsored demonstrations, and told him to “Take your sign and go home!”  Understandably Mr Larsen, who is a veteran, was a bit miffed and replied, “I am home.  I am a veteran.”  But then, awash in guilt and self-opprobrium, he goes on a soul-searching pilgrimage, “reflecting on that short interchange, I couldn't help noticing how I had ranked myself as having some special status because I'm a vet. My comment made it seem that being a veteran gives one an enhanced claim to call this country "home," and I was embarrassed at my arrogant assumption of privilege.”  Here Mr Larsen communicates the clear message that America should be home to its veterans, those who have manned the ramparts of their homeland, and equally home to the illegal alien who by hook or by crook has managed get across our border and into some privileged sanctuary status among us.

Sandbox - 17sep18

[No one, including Donald Trump, needs to attack Ms. Ford. She believes what she believes. This is not he said-she said. This is a case of an alleged teenage encounter, partially recalled 30 years later without corroboration, and brought forward to ruin Mr. Kavanaugh’s reputation for partisan purposes. ... Letting an accusation that is this old, this unsubstantiated and this procedurally irregular defeat Mr. Kavanaugh would also mean weaponizing every sexual assault allegation no matter the evidence. It will tarnish the #MeToo cause with the smear of partisanship, and it will unleash even greater polarizing furies.  17sep18 WSJ]

Scattershots – 14sep18 (updated 16sep18)

George Rebane

Judge Ken Starr, special prosecutor of Clintons fame, is pushing his new book Contempt that details the in and outs of the Clinton investigations.  On FN last night he made the surprise announcement that he and his team almost indicted Crooked Hillary who was questioned by Starr for all her dirty doings and wasn’t able to help matters by telling her interrogators over 300 times that she had forgotten all about the salient goings on in her shady past.  We know that she gathered strength from Starr’s ethical conduct – he knew she was crooked, but by his high standards for evidence that was lacking, he did not go forward with the indictment.  Meanwhile, Hillary went on to embellish her reputation as a bad ass bitch who was not and still is not accountable to anyone.

Sen Feinstein has been sitting on a letter she received last July that supposedly has the telling dirt on Judge Kavanaugh.  The anonymous letter is rumored to detail something from Kavanaugh’s high school years that would torpedo his SCOTUS nomination.  California’s scumbag senator has been sitting on this apparently nothing-burger deciding to threaten to reveal it now that everything else the Dems have tried has not worked.  So she kept this scurrilous script for a last minute desperation Hail Mary lob into the gears of the Senate, stating that she has given it to the FBI, and all things on the Kavanaugh confirmation should grind to a halt until the FBI completes its hoped for investigation.  This is how scumbags operate.

Puerto Rico has been the closest thing to a shithole country that the United States has had the pleasure of dealing with since the Spanish-American War.  Its culture is distinctly Latin, with all that this unfortunate baggage entails.  For generations its population, US citizens all, have had one of two objectives – make it on the island’s take in corruption, or make it to the US.  Nobody there considers the island and its established power structure as anything fixable.  But still, our progressive elites today are convincing their light-thinking lackeys that PR’s problems started with Trump not giving enough federal aid after Hurricane Maria devastated the island – that is blatant BS.  Sixty years ago it was already a place to leave as Leonard Bernstein made clear in his West Side Story.

[16sep18 update]  The lyrics to 'America' that I originally posted here from a website turned out to be considerably abbreviated.  As a commenter pointed out, a critical phrase was omitted.  Upon further research, there were even more phrases left out.  It turns out that there were at least two versions of lyrics to this and other WSS songs.  Anyway, I have deleted the incomplete version and give you a link to a site that seems to have the complete versions from both the Broadway show and the 1961 film.  The message re Puerto Rico remains unchanged.  (Enjoy the video here.)

Sandbox - 11sep18

[On 11 September 2001 radical Islam carried out its most devastating attack on those they identify as infidels and kafirs, their name for the rest of us on this globe.  On this day of remembrance it is incumbent on us in the west to reflect on the state of Islam, and especially its quiet ongoing conquest of Europe, whose belated recognition of and opposition to what's happening is deemed racist by the Left.  Lest we forget, Europe is just the warm-up, with the battle cry 'Death to America!', an Islamic America is their main objective.  gjr]

Scattershots – 10sep18 (updated 11sep18)

George Rebane

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Left likes to make lying a pastime unique to Republican politicians, especially President Trump.  None of them probably noticed that literally all of the Dems’ leading lights on the Judiciary Committee told whoppers when they grilled Judge Kavanaugh in their vain attempts to pry something loose that wasn’t there.  One of them claimed Kavanaugh’s nomination should be thrown out because he was nominated by a president who is an “unindicted co-conspirator”, which Trump is not.  And another one claimed to be the modern-day self-sacrificing Spartacus for releasing committee documents against committee rules, documents that the committee released to him the previous day.  But the lying demagogue just had to have his grandstand for the cameras.  (It turned out that the document in question to show Kavanaugh’s racism was a nothing-burger that indicated exactly the opposite.)  The other Democrats on the panel all did their best to bamboozle their constituents when it came their turn, and given the nature of their constituents, some were undoubtedly successful.

NPR’s daily dump on Trump featured author Bob Woodward talking about his new book.  The interview revealed either how little Woodward knows about executive decision making, and/or the severity of his TDS.  Those familiar with how an executive uses staff for solving problems knows that asking the right questions (formulating the problem) and generating good alternative solutions are the most difficult parts of the process.  Woodward and the mainstream are now citing how a staffer surreptitiously took a supposedly disastrous letter off the president’s desk before he could sign it.  The truth of the matter is that the letter (to South Korea on trade), clearly marked as a draft/WIP,  was one of several alternatives for the president’s review.  Then Woodward takes the president to task for asking ‘why do we have NATO troops in Europe?’ and the same question for South Korea.  Trump is represented here as a double dummy for ‘not knowing the answer’, and SecDef Mattis’s proper answer is characterized as making things clear to an ignoramous.  The real ignoramous is Woodward and Team Lamestream, who have no idea that asking ‘zero base questions’, especially when concerning long unquestioned totems, is a fundamental task of an experienced executive in the process of taking critical decisions.

The Coddling of the American Mind describes the cognitive fragility and brittleness of today’s young.  The just-released book written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt - two lifelong Democrat academics - raises yet another alarm about how the progressives have managed to screw up an entire generation plus of Americans with massive deficits in being able to “understand nuances” of arguments, and being totally intolerant and fearful of any idea, concept, or notion that questions or goes counter to their carefully taught intellectual and socio-political underpinnings.  This, of course, is massively denied by the country’s Left as witnessed even in these pages.  Neither author is able to suggest a ready remedy to bring these millions of mind-mangled minions back into the realworld.

California proves itself once more “100% certifiable” as a government of grifters sustained by an electorate of malleable idiots.  Our progressive Democrats now mandate that the state get 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030, and 100% by 2045.  The impact of all this will be utility bills through the roof that will devastate the unsubsidized poor and drive more wage earning taxpayers to other states.  Only the coastal elites will not notice the economic devastation.  Today Californians already pay the highest rates for electricity which have increased more than 25% since 2013.  Given the natural gas-powered back-up plants required, the heavily subsidized wind and solar alternative will not even make a noticeable nick in reducing CO2.  (more here)

[11sep18 update]  Global alarmists claims refuted by another score of credentialed experts in their individual fields.  The details can be accessed on Russ Steele's blog here.  His report concludes with "The well-documented invalidation of the 'three lines of evidence' upon which EPA attributes global warming to human-caused CO2 emissions breaks the causal link between such emissions and global warming."  Worth checking out as we continue doing battle with the politically motivated True Believers in consensus science.

This year's 9/11 memorial will again be held at the gravesite of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Grass Valley this morning.  The Nevada County Republican Women Federated maintain the ambassador's grave, and regularly observe various anniversaries there throughout the calendar year.

American Retreat

George Rebane

Robert Kagan is a historian and political scientist with an endowed fellowship at the Brookings Institute.  He perches a bit left of center from where he has been a foreign policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.  Dinesh D’Souza is a conservative political commentator, author, and filmmaker formerly associated with the Heritage Foundation, who continues as a lightning rod for critiques of rightwing ideology.  Not so surprisingly, these two intellectuals share many insights into America’s post-war role in the world and the state of the world were America to “retreat” from this role.

Of D’Souza’s many books, his America: Imagine a World Without Her (2014) contains assessments that tie closely with Kagan’s sentiments as expanded in a major essay ‘The Cost of American Retreat’ in the 8sep18 WSJ.  (Essay based on Kagan’s latest book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World, that comes out later this month.)  My commentary on this highlights that the Rebane Doctrine on foreign policy espoused here over the years also ties closely with what these essayists have gleaned from their studies and experience.  I believe that, in these times, the tenets from both bear repeating emphatically and often.  (Graphic by Brian Stauffer)

Kagan points out how the period of liberalism under the hegemonic umbrella of the United States has given rise to a most unusual epoch of human history.  During this epoch “liberal ideals triumphed because, for the first time, they had power behind them.”  And all this, because “a new player arose on the international scene: the United States. It possessed a unique and advantageous geography, a large, productive population, unprecedented economic and military power, a national ideology based on liberal principles, and a willingness, after the war, to use its power to establish and sustain a global order roughly consistent with those principles. … That order - with its mutually reinforcing security, economic and political components - has created a geographical and geopolitical space in which liberalism has taken root, spread and evolved. But it was always artificial and tenuous, challenged from within and without by natural forces - the always potent antiliberal aspects of human nature and the competitive and anarchic tendencies of geopolitics.”

Sandbox - 7sep18

[It's clear that our liberal readers have a wildly different conception of 'witch hunt' than the rest of us.  The WH effort to discover the self-declared anonymous leaker and resister who wrote the NYT op-ed is an existential and legitimate target of an internal investigation to ferret out someone who promises to make shambles of presidential executive privilege.  There is nothing here to compare with what Mueller is doing in his investigation of Trump which is based on allegations and no evidence of 'Russian collusion' after an 18+ month probe into the affairs of Team Trump.  There was no culpable evidence to launch the investigation, and its interminable continuation is also based on nothing but the hope of perhaps finding something in future.  Now that is a witch hunt.  gjr]

‘Choose capitalism’

George Rebane

So argues Manny Montes in an excellent piece in the 6sep18 Union (here).  Mr Montes, who lives in Auburn, is a kindred spirit we have cited before in these pages.  He begins by reminding us how the lamestream media misleads and purposely spreads discontent (‘enemy of the people’?) by continuing to imply that the ‘rich’ don’t get taxed enough and therefore don’t pay their ‘fair share’.  Citations of concurring Democrat congress critters abound; even some who militate to taxing 70% of the first million you earn, and make the point “… if you can’t get by on $300,000 in a country where so many …”.  Never mind that of the federal tax burden "the top 1 percent shoulders 40 percent, the top 10 percent, 71 percent, and the top 20 percent, 87 percent."

He points out the fundamental reality of how socialism is like a cancer that is “inextricably dependent on the producers for their viability”, and “like a cancer, feeding on healthy cells, the progressive socialist must inescapably feed … off the producers of wealth. … Their animal kingdom counterpart is the leech.”  And in its inevitable end, as we have repeatedly seen, socialism is a “cancer (that) essentially commits suicide, feeding on its host until the host has no more to give.”

Montes also cites one of our favorite leftist pundits of plunder, Saul Alinsky, who in Rules for Radicals instructs his acolytes ‘How to Create a Socialist State’, wherein Rule #2 states “Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.”  This “morally repugnant” dictum has been followed to the letter by Democrats who long ago launched the nation’s greatest multi-decadal social bamboozle called the ‘Great Society’, whose policies and programs went on to destroy minority families and create poverty wholesale in our cities under their decades of seemingly misguided administrations, abetted by Washington, that actually hewed to chapter and verse of Alinsky’s teachings.  (Of course, those read in history know that Alinsky was himself a student of Lenin, and, in turn, the ideological mentor of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The Left continues its lame attempt to pass off Alinsky as just “the father of community organizing”, which he was not, since the Bolsheviks perfected that art of pernicious public persuasion a century ago.)

Mr Montes reminds the reader in his takeaway on capitalism, that as a counter to collectivism, “there is only one economic system which provides the greatest opportunity for all to achieve self-reliance, and that is capitalism. The flip side of the capitalism coin is individual rights. This is the moral basis of capitalism. The right of individuals to live as they see fit with respect for the rights of others to live as they see fit.”  And as we often conclude such sentiments on RR, the reader is again invited to revisit and meditate on Bastiat’s triangle of rights.

The Vassals of Corporatism

George Rebane

The good part of capitalism is that it games the system; the bad part of capitalism is that it games the system.

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 September 2018.]

I was going to do this week’s commentary on the ongoing Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  But after what I saw happen today and during yesterday’s opening round, I thought better of it - since, after all, this is a family radio station, and there are still some limits on what words can be used on the air.  Let’s just say that I was more than put out by things I have never witnessed from a Senate chamber conducting one of its most serious constitutional assignments for our republic.  And the outrage on display was perpetrated equally by protesters in the audience and senators on the panel.

Instead, tonight I want to talk about something pretty bad that happens when government and capitalism collude, or more accurately, when they conspire.  Such conspiratorial collusion is called corporatism.  Corporatism occurs when a usually large corporation and government conspire to mangle the market in which the corporation is then shielded from new competitors – usually start-ups and small companies.  This paid protection plan includes cleverly minted regulations, required licenses, fees, and taxes that create a barrier to entry which the small guys cannot afford to overcome.  In turn, the protected corporatist donates ample sums to the politicians who enshrined into law what the corporation’s lobbyists and lawyers had drafted.

Ruminations – 4sep2018 (updated 7sep18)

George Rebane

Rapidly decreasing sperm counts in western males.  The trend is now over 40 old and presumably contributed to by some ‘endocrine disruptor’ chemicals in the plastics we use. (here)  Now that is a real shot in the shorts because low sperm counts are also harbingers of all kinds of other maladies in men as reported at a recent conference in Sweden.  The Singularity cannot arrive too soon. (here)

The Senate hearings to empanel Judge Kavanaugh are once more illustrating the trademark thuggery of the Left when they cannot have their way through established civil procedures.  Police this morning have arrested over 20 people who attempted to disrupt the hearings when Dem members of the Judiciary Committee failed with their own attempted disruption to again demand tens of thousands of irrelevant and supernumerary documents which will not impact their publicly declared opposition to Kavanaugh one whit.  Astute readers will remember how the Left went nationally ballistic in 2016 when candidate Trump hinted that he might protest election irregularities for which some DNC instigated rumors were already coming to light.  Instead, they have demonstrated for the last two years what real political disruption looks like in the wake of a legal and duly conducted election won by someone they don’t like.  More later.

Disingenuous Dems.  Given what the reading public already knows about Judge Kavanaugh, does anyone really think that the Dems on the Judiciary Committee really believe what they are saying about the nominee, especially that his confirmation to SCOTUS will destroy America as we have known it???  If enough Americans believe that tripe, then this may finally be the real litmus test giving fair warning that we should immediately form an active federal commission to start working toward a peaceful Great Divide.  If not, then can we not assume that these Dems are simply evil in what they are trying to purvey to their least read and intellectually innocent constituents?

OK, time for some giggles on this auspicious day.  A guy goes into a bar in New York where all the bartenders are robots.  The guy sits down at the bar and the robot asks, “What will you have?”.  The guy replies “Whiskey.”  The robot brings back his drink and asks, “What’s your IQ?”  The guy says, “168”.  The robot talks about physics, space exploration, and medical technology.

After the guy leaves, he pauses at the street corner and thinks about what he just encountered.  And the more he thinks about it the more curious he gets, so he decides to back.  Another robot asks, “What’s your drink?”  The guy answers, “Whiskey.”  The robot returns with his drink and asks, “What’s your IQ?”  This time the man replies, “100.”  The robot talks about NASCAR, Budweiser, LSU football, and All-star wrestling.  The man finishes his drink, leaves, but is so interested in this ‘experiment’ that he decides he’ll try again.

He enters the bar and, as usual, a third robot asks him what he wants to drink.  The man replies, “Whiskey.”  The robot brings the drink and asks, “What’s your IQ?”  This time the man answers, “50.”  The robot leans in real close and slowly asks, “So, are you people still unhappy that Hillary lost?”

[5sep18 update]  Social justice as it is.  (H/T to correspondent)

NYT RIP.  With its publishing an anonymous editorial of extremely scurrilous content today (here), the Gray Lady has hammered the last nail - from the inside - into its coffin as ‘the nation’s newspaper’.  Henceforth we can anticipate its resurrection as The Nation’s Tabloid.

[7sep18 update]  Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave good account of the Dems’ behavior in the Kavanaugh hearings, and it further illustrates how the media are shortchanging an already shortchanged electorate.  Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ) is the Judiciary Committee’s poster child of a grandstanding demogauge spewing BS.  Ms Robin Diel does an excellent job summarizing the Senator Cruz’s remarks in the 7sep18 Union (here).

fMRI in your pocket

George Rebane

A longtime friend, RR reader, and former colleague just made me aware of this latest reason to celebrate capitalism.  The name of the new start-up is Openwater that has invented and is now productizing a whole new medical imaging technology that uses light and sound.  Its introduction into the healthcare markets here and abroad promises to totally revolutionize the ability to deliver timely, continuous, and low-cost healthcare to literally billions around the world, especially those who have never been able to afford or get close to today’s massive imaging equipments such as fMRI and CT scanners.

The technology was invented by the active and successful entrepreneur Dr Mary Lou Jepsen and her team.  Here is the link to more information and to the TED talk on her technology that Dr Jepsen recently gave in Vancouver.  Wow!

Local socialist labors on the Economy

George Rebane

On this Labor Day our Union columnist George Boardman takes a particularly dim view of the state our economy and its workforce (here).  He recounts economic news only to continue the socialist narrative of envy and promote some dismal legislation, while decrying the evil and uncaring capitalist system under which Americans are forced to suffer.  Mr Boardman is not breaking any new ground here with his reportage of the dire straits of the American worker – that kind of news has come from the Left like clockwork since at least the roaring 20s, and reached an apex when the federal government put and kept the county mired in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Along with the Pelosi, Schumer, et al school of economics and social justice, Boardman discounts the sea change in economic growth and unemployment under President Trump.  What he chooses to trumpet is how the Left sees our workers fairing, abetted by the false flag stats that horribly misrepresent the quoted official US poverty rate of above 14% (with some more rabid leftwing outfits claiming a 28% to 50% rates) that compares poorly with other OECD countries (here).

Fair Division 101B

George Rebane

In ‘Fair Division 101’ I introduced readers to the field of fair division algorithms and presented a powerful and easy-to-use two-party algorithm derived from the literature which I named FD01.  At the conclusion of that dissertation I offered a method for extending FD01 for use by more than two parties.  The method works but is a bit clunky to apply.  Since then I have developed a slick multi-party version dubbed FD02 which retains the correctness, format, and all the simplicity of FD01.  FD02 is suitable for online implementation, and can be used in adjudicating wills, dissolving partnerships, mergers & acquisitions, and private occasions requiring the fair division of an identified set of assets.  You can download the short paper ( Download TN1808-1_FD02) describing it and the MS Excel™ spreadsheet ( Download FairDivisionAlgo_FD02) that is fun to play with, demonstrates its implementation, and can be modified or used as is in the realworld.  Enjoy.

Sandbox – 1sep18

[Good-hearted Darrell Berkheimer, one of our Union’s several progressive columnists, is truly an exemplar of ideological low hanging fruit.  His most recent 1sep18 column is standard leftwing pap and a collection of its staple feel-good talking points, with no consideration of how any of such socialist goals can be achieved, either with living breathing human beings or available monies.  His solution for the latter is to defund the military, which to him and his is the ever-present and unnecessary burden that maintains an America which keeps globalism at bay.  If it weren’t for his effect on the even less-well-read of our community, Mr Berkheimer’s ignorance of history and economics could be gently dismissed as the simple outpourings of a concerned and kindly old gentleman.  gjr]