Rebane's Ruminations

Subliminal Manipulation of Votes (updated 8aug19)

George Rebane

This is possibly the scariest post to date on RR.  Dr Robert Epstein’s congressional testimony about the vote manipulation antics of Google and Facebook are jaw-dropping.  Epstein is the former editor-in-chief of the prestigious Psychology Today and continues as Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research & Technology.  In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, this self-avowed liberal Democrat and strong Hillary supporter recounts numerous incidents of subliminal and so far unstoppable vote manipulation by the named tech giants.  As an example of an experimentally demonstrable vote manipulation effort Dr Epstein recounts that Google swung an extra 2.6M to over 10M extra votes for Hillary and the Democrats.  And to date there is not a thing anyone can do about this kind of activity which Epstein says will definitely be the deciding factor in the 2020 election.  We are reminded during the testimony that Alphabet – Google’s parent – was the single largest contributor to Hillary’s 2016 campaign. 

You wanna see what vote manipulation really looks like, then watch the goddam 7-minute video before someone takes it offline!  (H/T to correspondent)

[8aug19 update]  For a recent example of how these social media giants manipulate public attitudes, see the report in 'Scattershots - 6aug19' for what Twitter quietly did so as not to damage the progressive narrative about who are nation's haters and promoters of polarization.

Scattershots – 30jul19 (updated 2aug19)

George Rebane

SB27 just signed by Sleazebag Newsom. Just when you think it can’t get worse, something occurs that shows there is still a long way for us to go down from the dire straits in which we already find ourselves.  Newsom and his single party super socialists just made a law in CA, specifically targeting President Trump to keep him from appearing in our state’s primary next spring.  From now on you can’t appear in a CA primary, specifically for POTUS and governor, unless you have filed your recent years tax returns with the CA SecState.  This is so blatantly unconstitutional as to invite an immediate suit against such obvious mischief, a most fiendish form of federalism practiced by America’s leading klatch of collectivists who want nothing to do with federalism.  And the CA GOP is filing exactly such a suit, but the real legal counter should come from the DoJ.  Candidates for federal office appearing on state ballots should have uniform requirements under the Constitution, and it’s the AG who should bring and argue the case in the SCOTUS.

Split Pill Problem.  Here’s a change of pace for some of you puzzlers and critical thinkers out there.  Suppose a patient is given a pill bottle with N pills in it.  He’s told to take ½ pill per day until the bottle is empty.  When he dispenses a whole pill into his palm, he is to split it, take a half, and put the other half back in the bottle.  When he shakes out a half pill, he takes it and recaps the pill bottle.  He knows that every whole and half pill in the bottle has an equal chance of being dispensed.  He continues in this manner until the bottle is empty after 2N days.  Then he wonders, what is the average (or expected) number of days that must pass before the bottle only contains split pills, and he doesn’t have to do any more pill splitting.  Can you help him figure it out?

[31jul19 update] Last night’s Democrat debate left me with the feeling that half the gaggle of assembled candidates was going through a kabuki performance, while the other half tried to bring the dialogue back to something that more closely matched things possible on this Earth and this universe.  They didn’t have a chance as the CNN lamestreamers kept tossing puffballs at the progressives.  Seeing people like Reps Delaney and Ryan gave me momentary hope which quickly faded as we saw the kabuki performances overwhelm their voices.  And the last vestige of hope was dashed later when, in a more sober moment, Jo Ann and I considered their chances of making it to the convention.  From reading first person histories of 1932 Germany – e.g. Der Führer (1944) by Konrad Heiden (more here) - there sure are a lot of comparisons that can be made with our electorate today, the overwhelming numbers of whom don’t know history, current events, geography, economic basics, and to boot are totally innumerate.  And then there are the Silicon Valley vote vultures well-practiced in turning out the correct constituent cohorts on election day (more here).

[1aug19 update]  The second half Democrat debate was populated by solid progressives, not many leavening opinions were heard.  But we did learn that progressives are strong believers in race-based criminality, and race-based punishments – colorblind application of ‘you do the crime, you do the time’ is racist and must no longer be applied.  And it also became clear that when our Left calls for ‘unity’ and ‘let us come together’, that means what the Left has always defined it to mean – party line opinions only, dissent not allowed.  Examples of that in practice are emerging from leftwing corporatist entities like Google which has been shunning then quietly firing conservative employees when they make their views known to fellow employees.  Cory Booker came out as the fastest and smoothest talking mouth on the stage; DeBlasio showed his true colors as radical wingnut; Biden and Harris faded; and all of them called each other liars.

Russ Steele has assembled some revealing temperature data for all you climate crusaders. (here and here)  As usual, the government’s (NOAA) hanky-panky on reporting global warming goes on unabated.  The full court press on the looming climate catastrophe – they can’t agree whether it’s in 10, 12, or 30 years, but it’s a’comin’ – has been heightened recently as the Dems are using it to rally their true believers.  The rest of us would still like to see a public debate on the matter that features their vaunted climate mavens defending their narrative viz data measurements, data manipulation, data availability, atmospheric physics (e.g. earth’s carbon cycle), the estimation problem, climate model designs, climate model programs, replicable computer runs, … .  So far, none of them want to show up to defend the Gospel according to Gore.

[2aug19 update] Wow, ‘lamestream media’ is now a national meme that President Trump broke out in a tweet (here) about the withdrawal of Rep John Ratcliffe as nominee for DNI, and then FN reported on his use of it this afternoon  Not sure if it’s true, but IMHO I came up with that pejorative for journalism on RR years ago.   My earliest use that I could find was in a 21jan11 post (here).  It didn’t take off too quickly, even with RR readers.  But then readers started using it (ToddJ introduced it on his blog in Nov 2011), and now and then I started seeing it used on other blogs – things can go viral at various speeds, it doesn’t have be overnight.  And lately it has cropped up pretty regularly in unexpected places on the web.  So out of curiosity I’m asking readers to see if they can find, either on RR or elsewhere, a confirmed use of ‘lamestream media’ that pre-dates 21 January 2011.

Natural size limit of a corporation (updated)

George Rebane

After some considerable thought, we are adding the criterion for the natural size of a corporation to Rebane Doctrine.  To keep it short and simple, a corporation becomes too large to manage when its manager cannot be reasonably held accountable for the corporation’s major violations of law and regulations.  In short, when the corporation becomes criminally culpable, and no one can reasonably point a finger at any people in management who should be held accountable, then there is a problem.  When that occurs, then the appropriate regulatory agencies, overseen by the Executive, should file suitable anti-trust suits to break up the corporation.  In this case, the offending corporation should be given six to twelve months to come up with a ‘breakup plan’ that it considers acceptable to the regulators and shareholders so that the surviving entities may still be viable in the marketplace.

The acid test of such a break up is whether the new CEO nominees (or management committees) will accept their positions, given that they will be held personally culpable if their corporation goes off the legal or regulatory rails.  If no one is still willing to take the job, then it’s clear that smaller pieces of the original corporation are called for.  Management should have no excuse in copping the pleas that ‘it was too big and complex for me to keep track of it’.  If corporations are to be treated as legal entities with rights and privileges, then they must also be liable for screwing up.  And since corporations as legal entities per se can suffer neither pain nor celebrate joy, that feedback must fall to the humans who can.  That is Rebane Doctrine.

All this comports with the long-held Rebane Doctrine principle that government is not the only kind of large bureaucratic organization that can regularly screw up – all large organizations in which feedback paths become dysfunctional or cease to exist are liable.  Recall that when corporations become leviathans unable to compete in open markets, they use their cash reserves to buy politicians and transform themselves into the corporatist mold in which they invoke the government gun to keep competition at bay.

[update]  The Cato Institute just released a recent policy analysis regarding how government should treat 'tech giants' that have a potential of acting like monopolies in their respective markets.  It's an area where government should provide oversight but tread lightly when it comes to dictating the structure and operational limits for private enterprises.  Economist Ryan Bourne explains in 'Is This Time Different?'

And as radical leftwing and unapologetic as one can get, here is a missive from Umair Haque, currently one of our favorite communists, on the “awesome plan” Elizabeth Warren has “to save America”.  To keep up with great thoughts from our Left, especially on how to treat America's businesses, this piece (here) is assigned reading.

Sandbox - 28jul19

[Was going to intro this sandbox with a comment on the current Trump/Cummings imbroglio, but reader Todd Juvinall's comment in the last Scattershots covers it pretty well.  "Elijah Cummings district is truly a shithole district. Most of the urban blight is contained in the areas represented by the Con Black Caucus. With over 40 members I have watched them most of my political years and they are as impotent (as) Steve Frisch. Their districts are shitholes. We see the same thing now in LA with the Hispanic Caucus. If they would cast off their leftist robes of failure and embrace Republican values and ideas they could revitalize their shitholes. But they won't. The press is siding with these failed politicians against Trump. He sure says what is true."  gjr]

Some Journalistic Jollies

George Rebane

Readers know that today’s professional journalists comprise one of my favorite foils.  Perusing the morning papers, I ran across three doozies that brought on a spate of self-satisfying chuckles.  First, let’s start with Don Rogers’ essay in his 26jul19 Union.  The newspaper’s publisher is an irreconcilable ‘never Trumper’, and promises to cut off your nose to spite your face.  He observes the national scene and laments that “no one truly acts for the common good.”  But in the sequel he doesn’t seem to understand that in today’s America we no longer have a ‘common good’, all the polarizing evidence withstanding.  Let me begin by acknowledging that Mr Rogers is a likeable man of good character and an intellectual leader of our community

In today’s essay he claims to like “some actions” of Trump “almost exclusively in economic matters”, and brushes off the historic sea change from Obama years as something “any decent Republican could have accomplished”.  But they didn’t, Trump did.  Society correctly credits the individuals who actually accomplished a notable thing, good or bad, and doesn’t withhold accolades or accusations with the excuse that someone else could just as easily have done it sooner or later.  Einstein discovered relativity, Lucky Lindy was first to solo the Atlantic, and Stalin killed tens of millions of his own citizens.  It wasn’t just anyone doing those things.

Mr Rogers joins his legion of liberal colleagues in calling Donald Trump “Racist? Sure, of course, but we’ve known that for a while.”  And along with them he offers no definition of the ‘racism’ to which he hews; Trump is “of course” racist for the reason that Rogers simply echoes that accusation – for a liberal, that is more than enough to make it so.  Consensus ignorance becomes common wisdom.

Our publisher’s main complaint in his ‘Impeach me, please’ is that Trump is flying solo in wanting the House to impeach him as part of some self-serving “thuggery” in his re-election strategy.  Apparently, Mr Rogers has not been exposed to the last two years of news about how Democrats, high and low, are in an all-out assault to impeach and discredit the president based on no culpable evidence, and ONLY as a blatant tactic to end his presidency in 2020.  The long litany of investigations, hearings, conspiracies, criminality, along with gratuitous and baseless accusations in the Democrat-compliant media, to Rogers somehow fall short of thuggery - actions and behaviors which for the rest of us overfill its most basic definition.

Don Rogers would rather vote for the Democrats’ “wrong-headed” and “ill-advised” legislation and policies and deny us the demonstrated benefits of Trump’s policies, why? because he doesn’t like the wrapper in which they are delivered.  And there we have a sterling example of a journalist promoting the common good. 

With a mild segue we now encounter Aaron Zitner, WSJ editor for digital innovation, who discovers the independent voter as those who actually swing elections one way or t’other.  He breathlessly reports the news of both parties having the dilemma of spending campaign funds to nail down their core voters or spend it trying to convince those yet to make up their minds.  His report (here) in the 26jul19 WSJ has got to be evidence of a slow news day.  Why?  That decision and its cash allocation dilemma is as old as electioneering.  Anyone familiar with how America has voted for the last couple of centuries knows the 40-20-40 rule.  We have reported on it extensively (here, here, and here) starting with The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) by Bryan Caplan, who covered the large body research which demonstrated that the minority ruled, and did so until politicians discovered mass media in the 1920s.  This caused voters to succumb to the guile of political sound bites in their number and recency.  And that, of course, brought the whole thing back to which party and candidates could buy more eyeballs and earballs on the media.  So we’re back to the ‘middle minority’ as the swing votes who always determine elections.  But then, you knew that, and so should have Aaron Zitner.

OK, we’ll end with a real subtle knee-slapper.  How many times have you been told about investors moving into this or that investment?  The image painted by these financial reporters is of a mass of agitated people moving en masse from, say, stocks to bonds or vice versa, or to some other area like commodities or real estate.  ‘Investors give up on gold!’ is a regular headline in this genre.  Today we read Jessica Menton’s breathless report (here) about investors pouring money into bonds at a “record pace”.  Apparently investors are forsaking stocks as being more risky and going into the perceived less risky debt instruments.  Well, no they aren’t.  No investor threw their gold bars or stocks into the gutter; no one left their corporate stocks lie fallow in some drawer or some broker account when they switched their investment focus.  Every investor sold their old investments to whom?  Rumor has it that these buyers have always been (seatbelts please) other investors – imagine that.  Just as much money was coming out of one pile of investments as was going into another pile or two.  These monies don’t move by abandoning what was previously valued; they can’t.  Never are there discarded piles of share certificates found in dumpsters when monies move.  For some reason, this important little aspect of investor monies moving around is never mentioned.  You gotta sell stuff before you can buy other stuff.  And if investors are buying something else at a record pace, other investors must also be buying what was sold at a record pace.  Reporters should point this out now and then. 

Pricey Parking Problem Postponed

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 July 2019.  An edited version of it (here) was published in 22jul19 edition of The Union.]

You’ve heard Nevada City recently announce that it intends to expand metered parking in its downtown area and make it considerably more expensive.  The town’s left-lurching governance has been comedy central for as long as people can remember – it is always short of money and has very little idea about what makes an economically vibrant community.  Its city council mamas and papas see every financial shortfall as a problem solved with more fees and taxes.  As all of our pro-socialist neighbors, the town’s leadership doesn’t seem to understand that people’s economic activities are affected by the taxing of those activities.  Neither do they understand that you get less of what you tax more.

Scattershots – 23jul19 (updated 24jul19)

George Rebane

Marxist-Leninist ideology has proven itself as the world’s most toxic way to organize society, primarily because of its appeal to the simple-minded and uneducated (according to Rebane Doctrine).  Today the so-called Justice Democrats have joined with Our Revolution to form the most prominent ‘legitimate’ political organization to promote an M-L future for America.  Our Revolution is the front for the three most influential Marxist organizations in America – Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party USA, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  This is what you will get when you back Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the Squad.

‘Can’t We All Just Get Along?’ Here’s Victor Davis Hanson putting many things from the Obama years in perspective, things that our liberal contingent shows us daily that they have forgotten, if they ever even noticed such happenings in the first place.  As VDH reminds us, the Democrats have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.  (H/T to reader)

Fire Team (a squad is divided into two fire teams) Tlaib and Omar are heading for Israel and the West Bank with the blessings of President Trump and the welcoming Prme Minister Netanyahu.  They will be there to promote their anti-Israeli BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) bill that Pelosi will never allow on the House floor.  That doesn’t matter, the Squad has become the mind and message of the Democratic Party whose more politically astute members are trying to stifle before the election season gets too far along.  Every Republican considers those brainless broads to be the gift that keeps on giving – long may they wave.

Puerto Rico’s hot summer continues as San Juan’s citizens by the tens of thousands demonstrate to get their governor Rossello to resign after some revealing tweets of his were made public.  But the question I ask readers to consider is why Puerto Rico continues to flirt with being a banana republic.  Why has that island remained a corrupt and essentially dysfunctional state after enjoying more than a century of being a succored territory of the United States with special dispensations for its citizens, trade relations, investment sources, economic aid, … ??  I suggest again that it is their culture that keeps them in their perennial dire straits; a culture that they share with much of the western hemisphere south of our border, and the same culture that most on our Left are trying to infuse into our land with its porous borders.

[update]  Seven Dems on the House Judiciary Committee floated fake Russiagate stories. Tomorrow they get to quiz Mueller.  Such is the nature of the carnival that was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.  No more deliberation allowed, just time-worn, disproved allegations and outright lies.  There is the cast of characters ready to expose their character and show their prowess in questioning Special Counsel Mueller in the fervent hope that he will break and tell everyone that Trump was really guilty as sin, his report was a whitewash, and now he is sorry. (more here)

[24jul19 update]  The Mueller testimony to Congress is over. The man came across confused, timid, and uninformed – the Dems ‘movie’ to follow the ‘book’ was a bust.  But au contraire, to hear the Dems on the media outlets tonight, they had a great victory – now the American people know that Trump colluded with the Russians to assure his election victory, and then partook in numerous criminal acts to obstruct subsequent justice.  This is straight out of the Stalinist/Leninist playbook – just counter with bigger lies that contradict truth.  Mueller found no evidence for collusion or obstruction; had he done so, he, who set a new standard for RINO, would have said so.  Instead, his best efforts against Trump was a lame statement, never before heard from a prosecutor, that he “did not exonerate” Trump from the obstruction allegations, having yet to find any evidence of support – a non-news statement first made public in AG Barr’s letter summary of the report over three months ago.  So all the Dems are now busy in the political sweatshop trying to sew silk purses out of sows’ ears.  Only Pelosi is justifiably happy that, no matter the further efforts of Nadler’s nitpickers, the butt stupid effort to impeach the president is dead.  As a footnote, one of my liberal friends assured me today that Mueller’s 17 crack lawyers only included 4 Democrats, when in reality they were 13 Dems, 0 Repubs, 6 Hillary donors, and most having being associated with Team Clinton in one way or another.  But all that only underlined that Mueller’s obvious unfamiliarity with his own investigation and report, strongly indicated that he did little to lead the investigation which was conducted and reported by his ‘never Trump’ troops (e.g. "not familiar with Fusion GPS").

Racism and Racists revisited (updated 24jul19)

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

George Rebane

In a more learned time ‘racism’ was defined by first class dictionaries like the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged) 2 ed as “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.”  Today, Dictionary.com still posts that same definition verbatim.  Unfortunately, that’s where it ends.

In days of yore, and perhaps still among the more precise speakers and writers, a ‘racist’ was a person who embraced such a belief or doctrine.  No longer.  Today in the public forum ignorance and political cynicism rule the day, and are reinforced by the hour in print, online, in schools, and by politicians of both parties.  Racist can be an indictment of someone's comments that have absolutely nothing to do with racism, simply on the invocation of 'We know what he really meant'. It is of a piece of our declining culture that does not bode well for America.  One of my early commentaries on racism was ‘Who is a Racist?’; there I particularly call your attention to the intense and self-assured responses from our liberal commenters.

Today, racist is a label publicly, cynically, and even gratuitously hung around the neck of –

1. Anyone who disagrees with your speech or opinion;
2. Any white person who disagrees with the speech or opinion of a non-white person;
3. Any white person who describes a non-white person in any but the most salutary terms;
4. Anyone who tells a non-white to ‘go back where you came from’;
5. Anyone who describes radical Islam in their own terms;
6. Anyone who opposes illegal entry into the US;
7. Anyone who opposes taxpayer funded succor and sanctuary to illegal aliens;
8. Anyone who calls a shithole country a shithole country;
9. Anyone who wants illegal aliens deported according to our laws;
10. Anyone who wants to enforce our immigration laws;
11. Anyone who cites the race-based IQ testing results published by the American Psychological Association;
12. Anyone who points out the cultural deficits of a non-white country;
13. Anyone who identifies a mulatto as a mulatto;
14. Any white person who disagrees with an elected politician, official, teacher, … of color;
15. Any white person who criticizes the government sponsored demise of the black family;
16. Anyone who points out that overwhelmingly and obviously people like to live among cultural likes;
17. Anyone who points out the failure of certain non-white groups to assimilate;
18. … .

The list goes on indefinitely as expressions and behaviors are uncritically labeled ‘racist’.  What they all share in common is that each has absolutely nothing to do with the original precise definition of racism.  In spite of this, for the Left 'racist' has long become the preferred pejorative with which to tar their political opponents.  So today ‘racist’ can mean anything, when it actually means nothing.  The danger to our republic is that the Humpty Dumpty approach to semantics has now been baked into our justice system.

[24jul19 update] The national press is taking up the points of my above commentary.  To wit, that the media offer no proof or basis for charging President Trump’s tweets to have been ‘racist’.  They just continue to pile on empty moralizing, repeating the racist charge with no accompanying reasoning or evidence whatsoever.  In the comment stream below, we see the echoes of this from our local liberal light-thinkers who have never been able to go beyond the lamestream’s talking points.  To their benefit we beseech, ‘Lord, forgive them for they know not what they say.’

An example of this appears in ‘Prove the Tweets Were Racist’ by WSJ editorial board member Holman Jenkins.  Excerpts from his piece follow –

• Numerous outlets this week deceived themselves when they referred to Mr. Trump’s “racist tweets” as if their racist nature was an established fact that good reporting had nailed down. They think they are being brave when they are being the opposite. Brave was a dissenter: Keith Woods, National Public Radio’s diversity chief, who argued on NPR’s website that reporters should report facts and do interviews and leave the moralizing to people they quote.

• (The media sought) to incriminate Mr. Trump with words and actions of people who are not Mr. Trump. Media outlet after media outlet confidently asserted that Mr. Trump was speaking in racist code. But if it’s code, its meaning cannot be detected in the plain words, so we must rely on the media’s anointed code breakers to tell us what Mr. Trump really meant. (emphasis mine)

• Trump makes a great deal of trouble for himself because he insists on free-associating in public. He won’t, like other politicians, stick to scripts carefully scrubbed of ambiguity. But the press does not make truth out of ambiguity by putting words in his mouth. (emphasis mine)

• If they acquired a bit of political realism (from Trump’s election), reporters might even notice something about Mr. Trump’s “make America great again” slogan. It gives a large and ineradicable part of the electorate a way to frame their interests and discontents without reciprocating the identity-based claims of those they see (not altogether inaccurately) as assailing them.

• Frankly, some humility is also in order from a press that has displayed a more than usual amount of gullibility, conformism and poor judgment on just about every matter that has come before them in the past few years. If the media’s not-so-secret agenda is to defeat Mr. Trump, they might consider the possibility that they are (again) going about it in exactly the wrong way.

Ruminations – 18jul19 (updated 19jul19)

George Rebane

Gold-backed dollar or not?  Interesting debate now going on over how to set the value of the dollar which is fiat money but still the world’s leading reserve currency.  Gold is pooh-poohed by governments and pundits as just an “alternative asset class” which serves many as a “speculative store of value”.  Interesting to note is that it is the governments who hoard massive amounts of gold and use it to clear inter-nation trade accounts.  Hmm?

Counting Trump’s ‘lies’ has become another favorite pastime for leftwingers.  Books have been written on the subject.  On closer inspection, such counts include all the bravados and projections and predictions and promises that politicians over the ages and of all hues have generously poured into their constituents’ ears.  Today’s under-educated TDS sufferers know nothing of this, and feel proud that they are plowing new ground in such endeavors.

AOC for all seasons and reasons.  Seldom has a politician come along who gives so much pleasure to both sides campaigning in a highly polarized political landscape.  Today both Repubs and Dems hope that AOC and her brood will continue spewing loud and clear their anti-American assessments and prescriptions for a fundamentally transformed US.  Karl Rove calls her “the gift that keeps on giving.”

[19jul19 update] 'Impeachment Phonies' in the 19jul19 WSJ - "So much for high crimes and misdemeanors. Faced with a resolution to impeach President Trump on Wednesday, House Democrats blinked. That was the smart move politically, but what does it say about the courage of their conviction that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to the country and Constitution?"

Toward our transhuman future

George Rebane

Elon ‘I’ll try anything new’ Musk just announced a new development in brain-computer communications that was made at Neuralink, his recent investment in man-machine symbiosis.  Yes, it will take a while before we can command Alexa or Siri with our thoughts and have the results delivered as directly perceived knowledge/data.  But Neuralink’s approach (shown below) is the first that will connect 1000+ wire threads directly to neurons in your brainbone and record the time-series signal of their activity (i.e. firings).  Algos will be developed to decode those firing patterns into something understandable, and a computer connected to anything from prosthetics to the Internet will do the rest. (more here and here)

A handful of other companies are working on similar interface technologies, and Musk blowing his trumpet is guaranteed to have the others put their pedals to the metal.  In these pre-Singularity years it is the significant baby steps like this that tend to set off an avalanche of development.  For years we have talked about the Singularity and the requirement for H. Sapiens to climb aboard once that event occurs (as shown in the figure).  That climbing aboard the transhuman express will be made much more facile if we have some of the required tools developed and already in use.  Congratulations to the Neuralink team and Elon Musk.

Sandbox - 17jul19

[The Secure Act going through Congress will do a significant modification of how you can and must dispose your retirement accounts, and it will also open the door for the gummint to come in and tax a portion of it.  And we know what will happen to the size of that 'portion' as time passes.  All in favor, say Aye.  gjr]

Scattershots – 13jul19 (updated 16jul19)

George Rebane

Thistle and Shamrock is a weekly program of Irish music on NPR hosted for years by Fiona Richie who speaks in a rich Irish brogue.  On weekends at our house we hear about the first ten minutes of it before one of us turns it off or to another station.  And that is because neither of us have developed an ear for rhythmic Irish tunes, the kind that are played by small combos at gatherings or in public houses.  To us they all sound pretty much alike.  The deficit is clearly ours, because we like many varieties of music and have always supported this cultural art form.  Every time I hear another Irish tune on the radio, the long-held notion always crosses my mind that I could write and program an Irish tune-composing algo that could readily pass the Turing test – i.e. people alternately listening to such machine and human composed music would in their aggregate judgments not be able to tell which is which.  Maybe some music major could do that in a graduate program.

Our language continues to languish under progressive pedagogy. So many words have lost their unique meanings as they are required  to carry excess semantic baggage that makes their parsimonious use obsolete and obfuscates their meaning, especially in today's political commentary.  My latest addition to this list of overburdened words is ‘hate’, ‘hatred’, ‘hateful’, et al.  (It joins established residents like ‘racist’ and ‘hero’.)  In days gone by, the semantic for using anything from the ‘hate genre’ was reserved for feelings and expressions of “intense dislike, or extreme aversion or hostility.”  Not anymore.  Today our liberal literary lightweights append the hate-word to any and every person, group, behavior, or expression that simply disagrees with any one of the limited number of shibboleths that for most progressives comprise their politics and worldview.  If you happen to disagree with some Democrat or communist’s prescriptions or assessments, and write or talk about it, that is immediately labeled as ‘hateful’ or ‘hate speech’.  And make no mistake, they are the final arbiters of such judgments, from which there is neither appeal nor available eleisons.  The real scary thing is that they all want Big Brother to become the all-seeing and powerful censor of everything that to them is hateful.

Mighty today, missing tomorrow. ‘Remember Visicalc?’ asks Christopher Mims (here) in the 13jul19 WSJ.  Visicalc was the first spreadsheet and killer app, and I remember the relief of switching to it around 1980 after spending a weekend programming a cash planning model on the HP-85 for an electronics manufacturing company I was just hired to turn around.  In those days it cost about $10K and over a week to have your accountancy firm do a cashflow projection for, say, the next 8 quarters, and $5K for every subsequent update of the model.  Once Visicalc arrived, I turned my people on to it and quickly became a spreadsheet ‘expert’ – suddenly the PCs had a real and unique business use.  Soon Lotus 1-2-3 came along and we all jumped on that bandwagon, until Bill Gates brought us Excel, and we’ve stayed with that ‘forever’ (while always keeping an eye out for the next better thing).  Anyway, the succession of spreadsheet makers illustrates the history and ongoing saga of companies making it big, and then failing by missing the newest big wave.  Next into the breech is Google according to Daniel Colin James in his very readable ‘This Is How Google Will Collapse’.  Many are now eagerly awaiting its demise, especially since it so obviously and salaciously abandoned ‘Do no harm.’

[14jul19 update]  Even the vaunted WSJ sometimes comes off the rails, as they did recently in a column written by some worthy claiming economist credentials.  He patiently explained to the reader that markets work and trades occur when buyer and seller value equally what they are willing to give each other in the trade.  You don’t need to be an economic maven to understand that such an arrangement is patently not true.  If both parties value equally what they already have, then there is no reason to go through the risk and bother of a trade.  It is ONLY when both parties view what the other has as being more valuable to him than what he currently holds that then make functioning markets and dealing possible.  When prices are set at value parity or higher, markets stagnate.  (Methinks the writer has strong grounds for demanding a refund on his tuition, since he can now demonstrate that they taught him nothing.)

[15jul19 update]  President Trump screwed up again tweeting the recommended return of the Democrats’ Squad members to their native countries.  With another swipe at the English language, Pelosi called his tweets “xenophobic”.  Representative AOC and her House rabble rouser squad have their origins in Somalia, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and Africa.  To be fair, Trump did advise them to go back to fix the obvious problems in their native lands.  However, IMHO he should have called attention to their outrageous policy proposals by pointing out that they are seeking to bring to America the same kind of policies and political methods that have devastated places from which they and/or their ancestors hailed.

NYC’s DeBlasio is now hands down the top Democrat big city incompetent idiot.  Single-handedly he has reversed the city’s years-long declining crime rates by denying the legitimacy of its justice system.  In the process “He propagates the smear that the majority-minority NYPD unjustifiably targets minorities when conducting street investigations. He knows there is nothing racially proportionate about reported violent crimes in the city, which in the busiest precincts affect only minorities. His posturing and gamesmanship provide fuel for the worst kind of conspiracy theories and hate speech against officers. Never has a mayor been more disdained by his police.”  Lest you think this turkey is the current Lone Ranger in these generations long urban disasters of governance, DeBlasio is joined by like-minded incompetents from his party in a long list of cities that begins with San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.  (more here)

[16jul19 update]  "We have a really hard time (“connecting with voters”),” Sen Hirono (D-HI) lamented (here), "and one of the reasons it was told to me at one of our retreats was that we Democrats know so much, that is true. And we kind of have to tell everyone how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain."  Unfortunately, that is neither true nor anywhere close, as Will Rogers said, “It’s not what you know that worries me, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”  However, she did nail the Dems’ attitude about their constituents; intellectually they are a challenged lot as we have pointed out for years.  And Sen Hirono herself is one great example of a Deficit Diva leading her flock of gimmes.  (H/T to RR commenter for digging this out.)

Berkeley SETI Research Center visit

‘Any sufficiently advanced civilization will have capabilities that seem like magic to us.’ A.C. Clarke.

‘Where are they?’  Enrico Fermi

George Rebane

“The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is a ten-year program that represents humanity’s most significant effort to date to quantify the distribution of advanced life in the Universe.  Listen uses the world’s most powerful observing facilities (including the Green Bank Telescope – the largest steerable radio telescope in the world) to search for signatures of technology.  Additional Listen facilities include the 64-meter Parkes dish in Australia, and the Automated Planet Finder telescope in California. …”

Launched with $100M budget from a private donor, Breakthrough Listen (BL) at the UC Berkeley’s SETI Research Center (BSRC) has become the new “800-pound gorilla” in the community of organizations searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence.  The program is directed by Dr Andrew Siemion, and the center is ensconced in the university’s School of Astronomy (Campbell Hall).  BL is staffed by about twelve post-doc researchers and engineers, and doubles its staff with student interns and paid associates from all over the country.  The community’s former lead organization is the SETI Institute located in San Jose that operates the Hat Creek Radio Telescope (described elsewhere on RR).  Other SETI research organizations are located at UCLA and around the globe.  All of them vie for time on the growing number of huge radio telescopes in various countries.

RR readers are familiar with my lifelong interest in cosmology, AI, Singularity, and the evolution of intelligence.  The discovery of ETI will shake our human civilization to its roots, and contact with such an advanced civilization will definitely set the course for our future or terminate it.  So you can see the importance of answering Fermi’s plaintive query.  Most of us students of ETI ‘know’ they are out there or already among us.  My own focus in this research was summarized in ‘A copernican answers Fermi’.  (However, there are still some significant doubters like Nick Bostrom of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute who explains here his hope that SETI will find nothing.)

I explain my own cosmology in the referenced copernican answer.  It dovetails somewhat with the school that holds ETI to be highly probable, however, I have some differences - specifically, that a specie’s bio-intelligence is the initial yet brief phase in the evolution of its civilization.  This dictates that such civilizations have a unique constraint imposed on their detectable electro-magnetic (EM) transmissions – these EM transmissions will last at most two or three of our centuries and then ‘blink out’.  This is a crucial argument which, when analyzed quantitatively with the latest data on exoplanets, produces a remarkable conclusion.  Intelligent life in our galaxy (hence in the Universe) is abundant, yet very hard to detect with searches of the sky for EM ‘techno signatures’.  Therefore, I foster alternative approaches be attempted to discover and contact ETI.

So I sent a copy of ‘A copernican answers Fermi’ to Dr Siemion at the BSRC, and much to my surprise I received an answer within a couple of hours inviting me to visit him, have a tour of the research center, and have lunch to further discuss my ideas.  He also sent me a copy of ‘Area Coverage of Expanding ET Signals in the Galaxy: SETI and Drake’s N’ by Claudio Grimaldi, et al – a group of Swiss and American astronomers that includes the well-known Frank Drake.  Coincidentally, the paper was published about the same time last year as my own research along the same lines.

The interesting difference between my paper and Grimaldi’s is that his analysis indicates that Earth should now be bathed by EM transmissions from millions of ETIs in our galaxy, and my analysis shows why we are most likely NOT able to see any such transmissions from the same millions of intelligent civilizations living in the Milky Way.  In short, I answered Fermi, and Grimaldi instead increased the conundrum to a new level – why then are we not able to see the millions of ETI transmissions washing over Earth?  (BTW, consider the above 'Mercator projection' graphic showing the galactic plane and exoplanet locations, and an archive of over 4,000 recently discovered exoplanets that NASA just released – here.)

Dropout Derby Update - 9jul19 (updated)

George Rebane

OK, Swalwell bailed yesterday 8jul19, and today that in/out/in again Tom Steyer threw his hat into the Dems' candidate carousel ring.  Tom Steyer will be #26 in the Dropout Derby, and those who wish can resubmit their dropout lists by inserting Steyer's number into their existing list with no other changes in their ordering.  These will be accepted before the next Dem comes to his senses and hits the silk.  And I'll do this update only once on the scoring and then lock down this competition with 26 declared candidates, 25 remaining as of today.  Additional hopefuls will be ignored.  The fun has already begun.

[update]  Mr Tozer submitted his updated dropout list.  You'll notice that he put Steyer in exactly the same place that I did (we did not consult).  The figure below shows the current dropout lists.  Those with zeros at the end have not updated and are invited to do so.  The 'CumScore' row lists the cumulative score to date as the dropout continue.  (You'll note that I'm bringing up the rear.) Recall that each dropout's score is equal to ((26-1) - miss distance)/(26-1).  Miss distance is the absolute value of (dropout list entry - actual dropout location).  If you nailed it - miss distance is zero - then your score for that dropout is equal to 1.0 .  If you would have put Swalwell (#20) in position 26, you would get a zero score added to your cumulative score.  Of course, no one did that, and as the dropouts proceed it will be more difficult to get low scores, but perfect scores will always be possible.

Sandbox - 9jul19

[Epstein, Epstein, Epstein - how many politicians will you threaten to take down if they send you to the big house?  gjr]

Loony Tunes – 6jul2019 (updated 8jul19)

George Rebane

To our categorical ‘observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man’, we must add a section in which, from time to time, some real doozies can be collected and commented.  We all witness and shake our heads at them as they appear in serious publications and outlets.  This morning we start with a couple from our own Union and the ultra-serious coronet of capitalism, The Wall Street Journal.  The record would be incomplete should we omit such observations and interpretations as a seminal characteristic of our times.

Nevada City resident Ron Lowe, writing (here) in the 6jul19 Union, is astounded to discover “that liberty must be kept by force”, and that the country is now so polarized that “crazy Republican white religious extremists” are actually ready to defend their liberties with the use of force.  This worthy has never heard of the American Revolution and the conditions that gave rise to it.  His fervent hope today is that our government has “contingent plans to call out the US military to quell these Republican radicals if they start their revolution against America.” (emphasis mine) In his letter he makes it clear that citizens’ right to bear arms sufficient to resist an autocratic government is anathema to the social order of his liking.  I wonder what free nations he knows of that did not gain their freedoms through the use of force, and then remain prepared to use force to maintain those freedoms.  In embracing such beliefs Mr Lowe has plenty of company.  (My own opinion on such use of force by the citizenry was covered here and here.)

Then we have author, war correspondent, and journalist Gordon Dillow who writes a sober ‘The Asteroid Peril isn’t Science Fiction’ in the 7jul19 WSJ.  He goes to great length to describe the peril and inform us that we have no answer for “what to do about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth”  So what’s loony about such an alarming dissertation?  Well, in outlining ways in which mankind could counter such cataclysmic catastrophes, most of which will not work, he considers an approach that has the best chance of working – using a nuclear bomb to divert/destroy the asteroid – and then tells us that this is not a viable alternative.  Why?  (Seatbelts please) Because “the nuclear option faces serious hurdles in the real world. Sending nuclear weapons into space … makes lots of people nervous and could violate international treaties governing the militarization of space.”  There you have it.  Millions would die, or even civilization could end, and it’s all worth it if we can keep lots of people from not getting nervous about “nuclear weapons in space”, especially if this may “violate international treaties …”.  In publishing this piece, I don’t know whether the WSJ editorial staff decided to pull our collective legs, or they just overlooked Dillow’s ‘reasoned’ basis that opts for wholesale human annihilation.  Now imagine such an argument being brought up in the White House war room while our senior leaders consider how to counter a killer asteroid heading for Earth.  Should they then just shoot the sumbich on the spot, or take the time and effort to seek psychiatric aid?

[8jul19 update] One of the looniest tunes from the Left playing out today is their legions of public school teachers continuing to declare their heartfelt concern for the education and welfare of the children they are paid to educate.  As we have documented for years in these pages, nothing could be further from the laughable truth.  The Democratic party and their union minions/handlers (take your pick) have taken America’s public education to new lows with every passing decade over the last half century during which they have been in charge.  The 8jul19 WSJ published ‘An Education Horror Show – a case study in public school failure and lack of accountability’.

The latest posterchild of this ongoing tragedy of America’s culture is the Providence, RI public school system, an horrific example that was pointedly not even mentioned at the past weekend’s NEA convention that saw prominent visits by a phalanx of Dem presidential candidates.  I urge you to read the details such as the testing which demonstrates the Providence’s pedagogic plague in which children get dumber the longer they attend the city’s schools.  There is much more involved here.  And all of it in a district that “spent nearly $18,000 per pupil in 2017—about 50% more than the national average.”  Finally, to put a bow on it that applies across the land, the incompetent, cynical, and shameless “Democrats as ever blame a lack of funding”.

Happy Fourth, if you can (updated)

George Rebane

This patriotic graphic was posted on last year’s 4^th of July.  Continuing our national trend, this year’s celebration has gotten a bit more tense.  We now have invented and baked in the country’s psyche the national notion that everything ante-bellum that was part of American history is fair game to be attacked, withdrawn, denied, silenced, or destroyed.  The latest is the very familiar Betsy Ross flag, the first Stars and Stripes to grace our newborn country with its familiar ring of thirteen stars for the original thirteen colonies.  No more.

Picking a Politically Proficient Heritage

George Rebane

Kamala Harris’ insistence that she is African-American, in spite of the Jamaican detour of her father’s lineage, raises an interesting and, perhaps, important point on how we claim our racial roots in this age of political correctness. (more here)  Not imposing any reasonable limits on climbing up our ancestral tree would, of course, allow each of us to call ourselves African-American.  That would effectively kill that label’s semantic in American politics.

(A language derives its power from the accuracy and precision of its words or lexicon which allows its users to readily discriminate between shades of meaning.  Therefore, the more words - precisely defined, meticulously preserved, and correctly used – within its lexicon, the more effective are the communications that a language supports in the sense of enabling complete, clear, and compact messaging.  Semantically prostituted words with multiple meanings are inefficient and ambiguous, and require additional discriminative words to correctly communicate ideas and assertions.  Today’s English is a mess created by our educational system.)

So, how far back should we go in claiming and projecting our ethno-racial heritage?  In my case, I could call myself a Mongo-American since my racial derivation is from the Finno-Ugric segment of Europe’s Nordic clans.  The Ugric tribes originally migrated westward from Mongolia, leaving some in the Ural Mountains of Russia before spreading out into eastern Europe.  Estonians and Finns are genetically identical, and both speak what modern linguists call a Finno-Ugric language.  Or perhaps I should proclaim myself to be an Ugric-American.  I don’t know, but Estonian-American sounds as bland as Jamaican-American.  Neither effectively communicates its aggrieved past as required in today's proper public use of identity politics.  So what kind of hyphenated American are you?

Anything to undermine America (updated 7jul19)

George Rebane

The Democrats and their lamestream media are now in high gear doing anything and everything they can to undermine this administration and weaken the US in the eyes of its adversaries.  The first and most important victims of the Left’s lies are their constituents relegated to the low end of the bell curve on smarts.  As evidence, they are so bamboozled by the sleazebags that only 17% of them believe that Trump’s tax cuts benefit them, when IRS data shows that almost everyone benefited from the tax cuts.

And to put a ribbon on it, only 47% of Americans believe that Trump’s policies pulled the economy out of its Obama doldrums of under 2% growth, making no never mind of the fact that when Trump took over the GDP growth rate jumped over 60% and has remained there.  The lamestream has made certain than none of these light thinkers ever hear of Obama’s famous prognostication, “To get the GDP to grow at 3% again will require a magic wand.”  Well, our current president most certainly has that magic wand, which today’s market underlined by finishing the highest June gain in over 80 years.  (For the non-investors, the summer months beginning with June are historically the doldrum months on the stock markets.)  In spite of all this, the Dems have convinced 53% of Americans that Trump is mishandling the economy.

On the foreign policy front, Trump has exposed longstanding and dramatic shortcomings in our agreements for trade, mutual defense with allies, nuclear proliferation by rogues, and border security.  For decades America’s position in each of these areas was being taken advantage of by nations who saw us as weak and without direction.  Trump has changed all that, and in every area he has gotten people off the dime and things moving.  Now the feckless Democrats are criticizing him and telling their know-nothings that Trump is not doing any good because he hasn’t solved all the decades-old problems in his first two years in office.  And none of them, not a single one, has anything better to offer than to stick our head back in the sand and let friend and foe steal us blind.

In the meantime, the Democrats have totally abandoned their former positions and goals, as they have wrapped themselves in socialism to tout Marx’s message to the masses of the western hemisphere, ‘Workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!’  And where do you think that all of this uniting of the workers will take place as our formerly porous borders disappear completely?

[2jul19 update] This painting by Jon McNaughton titled 'National Emergency' says it all.  (H/T to reader)

[3jul19 update] A regular reader suggests that to better understand what the Democrats in Congress and our own leftwing socialist commenters share as worldviews and objectives to strive for can be found in the Jacobin Magazine.  Take a look at the real meaning of free speech as we celebrate an independence they are working to take away.

[7jul19 update]  Here’s another big lie pushed by one of our favorite communists, Umair Haque, who writes ‘The origins of America’s unique and spectacular cruelty’.  America is the one nation in the world that has THE preeminent culture of altruistic giving to those afflicted and less fortunate.  Yet this propagandist exercises his 1A right to constantly reel off lie after lie about America, Americans, and our role in the world’s community of nations.  The importance of his thought is that it is shared by almost all the Democrat presidential candidates who daily echo his words.

Ruminations - 1jul19 (updated 2jul19)

George Rebane

George Boardman writes ‘Trump wants to turn the 4^th of July into a political rally’ in the 1jul19 Union.  Students of American history know that patriotic holidays, especially the 4^th of July, have been used by politicians – incumbents and wannabes – to meld their message within a patriotic mantle.  It is the recently educated who have no knowledge of our country’s past, and today are using everything to excoriate Trump.  I could have sworn Mr Boardman to be old enough to know better.

Kamala Harris owes her career to being a privileged mulatto – Jamaican father, Indian mother – which in today’s racial labeling allows her to call herself a black - “I am black and I am proud of it.”  She has played the black card for advancement all her life, and now she is beating her fellow Democrat presidential candidates over the head with it.  And it might even get her the nomination, unless one of her opponents has the courage to tell voters that her claims of having risen through racial discrimination is just politically motivated bull crap.

Bullet buying background checks start today in California.  This new law will have no impact on criminals and their use of firearms to commit crimes.  But it will further constructively restrict the Second Amendment rights of the state’s law-abiding citizens.  And after all, the constructive confiscation of guns is the objective of all socialists, especially those still in denial.  The objective has always been to restrict guns to government and criminals, and out of the hands of citizens who might one day choose to revolt as autocracy evolves into tyranny.

[2jul19 update] Under Obama, porous borders admit a dull roar of illegals who are incarcerated with children in separate quarters.  Millions are subsequently deported under our immigration laws, Republicans promote border security infrastructure, but do not criticize the stark detention quarters.  Under Trump, Democrats issue international invitations to disgruntled foreigners to enter the US illegally with promises of amnesty and citizenship.  Millions respond, creating a security and humanitarian crisis at the border.  The Democrats refuse to fund either border barriers to slow the flow or increased detention facilities to house the illegals as required by law.  Instead, they attack the president and Republicans for “separating families” as our law requires, and having created the crisis by not allowing free access through our border, sufficient welcoming succor at our border, and the unvetted and unconditional release into America’s interior.