Scattershots – 4feb19 (updated 7feb19)

George Rebane

My heart goes out to our cartoonist Bob Crabb in his kerfuffle with a (fellow?) progressive lady who has accused him of dissing the transgender community with one of his offerings. (more here)  I know Bob, and he would be the last on the planet (if not Nevada County) to ever knowingly hurt the feelings of a class of people who are indelibly part and parcel of the same social orientation as is he.  He has now walked into the expanding "minefield" of progressive thought and talk policing, a prominent aspect of revolutionary political correctness that has become so virulent in limiting free speech that it has predictably started eating its own.  Self-consuming politically correct speech became wholesale in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, and served as inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, and, of course, today also for our own resurgent Left.  After such verbal assault, I hope that Bob doesn’t pull in the horns too far on his wit and wisdom.

Take a look at the kinesiology and kinetics of robots as being developed by companies like Boston Dynamics (here).  In these pre-Singularity years this is only one aspect of how human abilities are being matched and superseded by advancing technology.  Such advancement explains the divergence between the price of labor and productivity that still continues to puzzle some and enrage others.  In the US economy, labor and productivity tracked each other almost perfectly until the early 1970s.  At that point productivity maintained its growth trend, but the price of labor almost leveled off and has been increasing at a very modest rate since then.  The 1970 date is significant in that it coincides with the milestone of the introduction of commercially successful minicomputers into our economy – e.g. Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8.  (I immediately bought one for my R&D company, and quickly upgraded it for a PDP-11 when that became available.)  With such computing power available to ‘everyone’, US industry was off to the races, and the increases in productivity were now due mostly to invested capital instead of labor.  Ever since then, labor in the aggregate has strained in the competition to provide value in the workplace.  From my perch, this divergence was easy to predict and has been preached here for years under the larger category of systemic unemployment (see also John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man).

Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has always come across to me and mine as our local good-hearted and well-intentioned walking monument to intellectual innocence.  In his 2feb19 column ‘Will House shirk duty to initiate impeachment?’ he attempts to make another case for ‘indict first, find evidence later’, which is now the established mode of progressive jurisprudence practiced in government, entertainment, and by the leftwing commentariat.

Millennials against capitalism.  Author Malcolm Harris in Vox – ‘Why Millennials are burned out. Capitalism’ - is the latest to write about the millennial generation and their travails in adjusting to earth.  My basketball coach back in Indiana told his charges about how performance and risk fly in tight formation.  His wisdom was corroborated by years at university and later in business where I confirmed that the greatest achievement, and most certainly every human advancement, is always brought about at the ‘edge of the envelope’ where stability is marginal and risk is highest.  This ‘law’ cuts across ALL endeavors, be they in engineering, finance, sports, or the arts.  Most of those who paid attention came to know this through schooling in the academy and/or of the hard knocks variety.  However, it is clear that this is another wisdom of the ages that is absent from today’s snowflake curricula.  Harris, himself a Millennial, explains why Marxism appeals to this generation, and how they see capitalism exploiting labor, just as Herr Karl said it would.

[5feb19 update]  “This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?” Andrew Cuomo.  I love it when every once in a while a progressive experiences a smiphany (a smidgen of epiphany) about the way real humans behave.  We recall that the Left has always maintained that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior, and the Laffer Curve, well, it’s just worth a laugh.  Now with NY’s very high tax rates combined with Trump’s tax cuts, the state’s rich have been doing the Sayonara Samba to greener pastures, leaving the state’s coffers $2.3B in the red.  The Empire State progressives are asking each other ‘Whoulda thought?!’  But my bet is that even with his t!t in a wringer, Cuomo has learned nothing that will stick with him for more than a week.  And, of course, the remainder of the nation’s Left will pay it no mind – the mantra ‘To increase govt revenues, just raise taxes’ is alive and well. (more here)

[7feb19 update]  We’ve all heard that gold is ‘an ancient relic’ from government elites whose job is to convince to value fiat money über alles.  Governments themselves, of course, know better and value gold as the mother’s milk that really nourishes and upholds the function of dollars to drachmas to serve as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value.  This truth was again underlined with Russia’s announcement that recent confirmation of vast amounts of gold under Siberia will make its currency bulletproof against sanctions imposed by the west.  And they are right, it will because everyone really wants to know that those little pieces of paper and computer bits are really backed by something that everyone agrees has value, no matter how ancient.  (more here)

The Olympus of hubris. Former President Obama has continued to take credit for today’s booming economy, you know, the one that took off a bit after President Trump had a go at it (more here).  But on second thought ol’ Barry may have something there.  It took some mighty dedicated mismanagement to keep America’s stellar economy hobbled to less than 2% growth for all those years.  Obama did indeed keep our economic pressure cooker plugged up until someone, anyone, would come along who did not want to fundamentally transform America.  So maybe he can take some credit for finally getting out of the way, and letting good times return again.  (Of course, the Dems have their Plan B – aka the Green New Deal - ready to go to really sink the country.)

Comments

[Paul Emery]

eorge

For purposes of discussion about the possible reasons for impeaching Trump did you support the impeachment of Clinton?

[George Rebane]

PaulE 119pm - I did, but for reasons other than his cited sins. There, with crossed fingers behind my back, I accepted the French approach to love and marriage which has been practiced by at least half of our presidents.

[Paul Emery]

George

Here is a summary of the two two articles of impeachment . Would you support Impeachment of Trump or any President if there was evidence similar to that which was provided to impeach Clinton?

1-The president provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury regarding the Paula Jones case and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

2- The president obstructed justice in an effort to delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence of evidence related to the Jones case.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/articles122098.htm

[Bill Tozer]

Re: Crabb inadvertently steps in it.

Did he really thing he could escape the sharp teeth of the snarling Blue Mob Wolfpack? Did he think he could go through life lobbing rubbber balls at both sides and be an equal opportunity offender and stay above the fray? Did he not foresee that he cannot not be neutral and must take their side and forsake all others ....or else?

First, our betters are always always always offended...about everything. The first thing that goes through their minds before they even get out of bed in the morning is, “What can we be offended by today? Who can we make the into the victim today?”

Second, Crabbman MUST acknowledge his Cisgender Privilege and make reparations for his opppression and repression.

Let’s hear from our resident expert on the subject.

I’m a cisgendered woman,” she declared. “I will never know the trauma of feeling like I’m not born in the right body. And that is a privilege that I have, no matter how poor my family was when I was born. But it’s really hard for some people to admit that they — you know, it’s part of this weird American Dream mythology that we have, that for a lot of — in a lot of circumstances isn’t as true or isn’t as clearly communicated as we’d like for it, or we wish it was.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2019/02/01/aoc-i-acknowledge-my-privilege-in-being-a-cisgendered-woman-n2540635

[Gregory]

Paul, I feel your pain... you so want to have Trump removed from office, but you have no idea what impeachable offence he could be found guilty of.

Just click your heels together three times saying, It's Mueller time, Mueller will tell us, oh, please god, have Mueller tell us. If your heart is pure, you will be rewarded.

[George Rebane]

PaulE 238pm - I think I'll just stick with my already informative 149pm response, instead of starting to pore through Clinton's impeachment documents.

[Gregory]

George 432pm

That's hardly fair to Paul, is it? He has a list of hypothetical statements about the Clinton for you to agree to, and then even more tenuous hypotheticals about Trump that he's absolutely sure of. What about that? What about THAT!

[Scott O]

I feel sorry for Bob, but apologizing and claiming the old "some of my best friends..." won't cut it with the Left Wing Social Justice Purity Society. Stick with the reason you penned the cartoon and tell anyone if they are offended they'll just have to deal with it.
Bob of course tries to blame this on today's climate in general, but he needs to acknowledge this is all on the left. They are the humorless sourpusses that go after anyone trying to point out the foibles of modern society. Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce would have an awfully hard time these days trying to find an available venue.
Maybe some one can explain to me why the California govt allows people be officially a non-binary sex and at the same time demand certain public corps have to have a certain amount of binary sex board members.
That - in itself - is a laughable situation.

[rl crabb]

This wasn't from anything I drew. It was a photo I shared from someone else on Inyourfacebook. It was a cop trying to identify a person of interest who claimed to be a gender-fluid male who identified as a female mountain panda. Being in the comics business it wasn't anything new to me. There is a sub-culture of anthropomorphic fans known as "furries" who dress and act like cartoon animals. (Lisa Ling did an episode on them on her CNN show recently.) I think it's a throwback to our druid days in the old country. Everything old is new again, eh?

[Scott O]

"...who claimed to be a gender-fluid male..."
So - gender fluid female mountain pandas can identify as a male?
And you apologised?
I would tell them that seeing as how you are actually a pen and ink drawing courageously living life as a functioning humanoid their 'attacks' are not validating your life-style choice and therefore you'll be reporting them to the toon police.
So there!
C'mon Bob - don't let the bastards grind you down like a #2 Eagle in an electric sharpener.

[Todd Juvinall]

I defended him the the babes letter but withdrew after he apologized just like all the democrat prez candidate are doing. Gutless.

[Don Bessee]

So how will the snowflake sjw's deal with grandpa joe when this goes viral? The dem leadership in VA is looking like a clown car crash.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/04/joe-biden-1975-flashback-segregation-is-better-for-black-pride/

;-)

[Paul Emery]

I think George can speak for himself Gregory.

[Russ]

The productivity vs. wages dichotomy is not going to improve any time soon as more AI enters the corporate work environment. Efficiency will increase, but wages will remain static, or decline as intelligent machines replace blue and white collar workers.

AI will drive a vast range of efficiency optimizations but also enable hidden discrimination and arbitrary penalization of individuals in areas like insurance, job seeking and performance assessment.
— Andrew McLaughlin, executive director of the Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale University

We will need new hybrid-skilled knowledge workers who can operate in jobs that have never needed to exist before. We’ll need farmers who know how to work with big data sets. Oncologists trained as robotocists. Biologists trained as electrical engineers. We won’t need to prepare our workforce just once, with a few changes to the curriculum. As AI matures, we will need a responsive workforce, capable of adapting to new processes, systems and tools every few years. The need for these fields will arise faster than our labor departments, schools and universities are acknowledging…We need to address a difficult truth that few are willing to utter aloud: AI will eventually cause a large number of people to be permanently out of work.
— Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute and professor of strategic foresight at New York University

AI has the potential to play an important role in boosting productivity and living standards.
— Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

Not sure how living standards get boosted when machines are taking all the jobs.

[Bill Tozer]

Well, it looks like Crabbman is playing it safe with his lastest submission: Werewolves of Gaston. But, he stepped in it again. I see he identifed the sex of the our furry friend as “she”. Did OR-54 say she is a she? Did he ask her or just assume? Did he think he was being cute or clever?

Crabbman did say “There’s a full moon every night in Nevada City.”

Take it away Earl.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OnZTHinuQP0

I saw him with the Queen last night....werewolves of the Blue Mob

[Bill Tozer]

OR-54
https://www.theunion.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CrabbCartoon-GVU-020519-111.jpg

[Walt]

I'm on Crabby's side on this one.
Panda you say? That old CSI Vegas did a show with the "fur folk"
And one was a panda. (Hey.. whatever gets your rocks off....)

But I see your not taking this with your pencil down.... GREAT!
Stick it to OR-54
We got your back.

[Bill Tozer]

Darn, posted wrong video. Normally, I would let it ride, but for Crabbman, I will try it again. He has only felt the first nips of the wringer. Give it time, more bites to come. Bigger bites. Chop, chop.

R.L. did say “there is a full moon every night in Nevada City.” To the full moon and the we’re wolfs of Panda.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpYBT0XyvA

[Bill Tozer]

Re: Crabbie Paddy and his clown shoes. He ready steppped in it this time. Maybe R.L. will apoligize for him.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/43198/sjws-excoriate-chef-gordon-ramsay-wanting-open-paul-bois?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dwbrand