Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 28aug19

[How come none of our liberals respond to all the illegal alien rapists and murderers who are continually getting caught and arrested?  How would they respond to a pack of progressive lies like this yayhoo dispenses in his 'Capitalism's Last Gasp'?  BTW, we're going on a little trip that promises iffy connectivity, so please be patient.  Vielen dank.  gjr] 

Nevada County – economic disaster area

George Rebane

The more that wealth gets redistributed, the less wealth there is to redistribute.

This morning’s (27aug19) lead article in The Union by reporter Cory Fisher (here) informs the reader an awful lot about our community that most of us did not know.  It turns out our county is an economic disaster area with more working people than ever going hungry and having problems making ends meet.

According to local reports, “1 out of 7 Nevada County residents” (14.3%) were “food insecure” (term of art for hungry?).  Across all US counties 13.3% were food insecure, only 11% were in such dire straits in LA County, the country’s individual rate is somewhere around 12.5% (1 of 8), and all this in a land where over one in three of us are mysteriously fat. (more here)

Then we learn that the hunger rate in our county is not only high but screaming upward.  At the Food Bank the increase has been from 800 in May, 1,000 in July, and 1,200 in August – in other words our calorie calamity is reported to be growing at about 150% annually.  We are told this is causing our non-profit food distributors financial hardship for two reasons – increase in the county’s hungry population and a reduction in charitable contributions because of Trump’s new tax law.

Somehow the truth about the tax law and its restrictions on charitable giving is completely opposite.  The standard deduction has more than doubled to $24K for joint filers and it does not limit giving at all.  All it has done is caused more people to take the standard deduction instead of itemizing deductions such as their former charitable gifts.  This little feature has induced many people to then just skip the giving, not because they have less money, but because there is no need to give to get the tax benefit. (more here) But that’s not what the article impugns.  Somebody forgot to include that character still counts, even under the new tax law.

And the overall problem of falling income making it hard for our county’s residents to make ends meet – it then appears that our workers did not share in the country’s benefit from the tax cuts that increased lower and middle class household incomes by an average of $2,000.  (More here) When you factor in the doubled tax credits for kids, the average family has even more dollars to spend.  And here is a summary of the real impact of the Trump tax cut.

So, while the rest of the country is enjoying historically low unemployment, rising wages, and paying lower taxes, in Nevada County our poverty rate is estimated to have started increasing again after Trump was elected.  He even caused a bump in climate change that started more wild fires, which then raised county residents’ insurance rates that forced some of them to move.  The takeaway is clear, it’s only California’s enlightened public policies in housing, homelessness, education, fighting capitalists’ greed and global warming that have somehow kept body and soul together.

In the real world "Americans in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners buy more consumer goods and services than the national averages for people living in most of the wealthiest nations of the world, including those in Europe." (more here)  How can this be?  Well, for all of you who have consumed the media-delivered poverty rate for Americans, Cato’s ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’ may shed some new light on reality.  All said and done, the piece did make me wonder why Nevada County is under the reported curse.

Dropout Derby - 23aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Moulton among the dear departed.

An Illustration of Liberal Ethics, Morals, Logic, …

George Rebane

The 22aug19 Union has a prominent column by Ms Susan Rogers, a very liberal member of the newspaper’s editorial board.  There in ‘Plenty of shame to go around’ she equates the thuggish behavior of county Democrats at Representative LaMalfa’s recent town hall, with the congressman’s socio-political ideology as expressed through his legislative work.  There is no doubt that the much-reported misbehavior of our local liberals seeking to disrupt a public meeting was something in which no American should take pride.  However, to diminish the louts at the meeting by impugning that LaMalfa shared an equal if not greater blame for the encounter is a down-home illustration of how far beyond the tipping point has progressed our national polarization.

In her column, Ms Rogers lists a litany of the congressman’s legislative actions and policy positions each of which she peremptorily labels as “shameful”.  We are not here confusing ‘shameful’ with, say, ‘erroneous’ or ‘misguided’ or even ‘ignorant’.  The woman illustrates how the liberals’ worldview puts people with whom they disagree onto a morally lower level of human beings – people who purposely behave in a manner that is shameful in our society.  And the basis on which makes such a comparison of bad public behavior at an event with a politician's longstanding ideology defies logic.

In our culture, shame is lavished on people who have purposely done something dishonorable, improper, illegal, etc.  The so accused is then supposed to respond to such a judgment by exhibiting some form of contrition in the attempt to make amends.  Attacking a politician on moral grounds for expressing his beliefs through his work, beliefs of which voters who put him in office were aware, is beyond the pale of political discourse, save the kind that is meant to further divide us.  And it does confirm our divisions since she means to put the rest of us who support congressman LaMalfa into an equivalent condition of shame.  I, for one, reject both her accusations and her hubris in ascending to heights from which she dispenses such lofty, unexamined, and perfunctory judgments.

Dropout Derby - 21aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Inslee bites the dust.

Sandbox - 20aug19

[I suppose doing the poll dance will continue as the hot topic and entertainment du jour.  At this stage of the campaign, that's much like watching 'snow' on a TV with signal loss.  gjr]

Scattershots – 20aug19 (updated 23aug19)

“nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort”, William Ewart Gladstone (1809 – 1898)

George Rebane

I’m old enough to remember when TVs were the big new whizbang thing.  We common folks were then told of all the wonders that a live screen with sound would be bringing into our living rooms.  And then came computers, and the news was full of how businesses were doing this and that with those new-fangled number crunchers.  After that it was the internet, and we learned to expect all of its wonders, and now we read the breathless reports of AI starting to do all things good and also its (biased, gasp!) dark side.  All of those technologies quickly faded into commonplace roles in our lives.  The next big thing will be personal AGI (artificial general intelligence) companions whom we will demand and trust more than fellow humans.  And this will scare the crap out of autocratic governments – keep your eye on Sacramento and DC.

Meritocracy is a bad thing in modern society, so points out a recent article in The (leftwing) Atlantic. (H/T to Sandbox commenter)  It causes all kinds of bad psychological problems and promotes inequality – kids from richer homes are smarter than those from poorer homes (Stop the presses!).  Therefore, they wind up working ridiculously hard in school and the workplace, and get stressed out as they dominate the 1% class.  The solution, force universities to admit a certain percentage of the dumber students.  Or maybe in the future the smarter ones must have a noise making chip implanted into their skulls to disrupt longer thinking processes, or maybe the too smart ones will just be culled by the state like shown on a Twilight Zone episode long ago (here).

A Pence/Harris VP debate next year is anticipated with some glee by our liberals.  They can just see Harris taking down VP Pence in a one-on-one encounter.  I would counsel a little trimming of such hopes because Mike Pence is not a Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris is definitely not the brightest bulb on an otherwise dimly lit Democrat tree.  Harris commands little to no basis for arguing substantive issues; all she can do is attempt to sway the lightly read with emotional anecdotes.  These the VP can easily dispatch by pointing out the aggregate impacts that such radical leftwing policies have delivered elsewhere, and now portend for the country.

Preventable man-made global warming (PMGW) ascendant. Notice the increased hysterics in the media about all the disastrous effects caused by PMGW.  Time after time the warming data is shown to be politically motivated hokum, but that makes no never mind to the fear mongers (the lamestream does not air that side).  The new level of hysteria is being ramped up by the Dems for 2020 as a back-up argument for their policies that promise to deliver the country's new socialist sunrise.  The message – capitalism causes PMGW that will kill the planet, socialism is the only hope to save mankind.  A good fraction of our electorate has been carefully cultured to uncritically embrace such arguments.

[21aug19 update]  “… the clicking of jack boots and rifle bolts.” As witnessed on RR over the years, this is the form of governance legions of leftists have convinced themselves that conservative America seeks.  They ignore that it is and has been only the goose-stepping collectivists that have constructed leviathans in which citizens are kept in line by such displays and applications of state power.  But true to Lenin and Alinsky, they were taught early to counter political opponents by loudly accusing them of one’s own worst practices.  And as history has shown, you can fool enough of the people all the time to bring down somnambulant republics.

[22aug19 update] ‘Americans Are Richer Than We Think’ write economists Phil Gramm and John Early.  The Democrats and their lamestream lapdogs have done all they can to convince America that we live in a bad economy that doesn’t benefit anyone but the rich, and (go figger) they turn around and tell us that our good economy is about to take a dive.  And all will be well again once we fundamentally transform the country and put it on a firm socialist track. Such reasoning fits well with the liberal mindset.  Gramm and Early present loads of data that debunk the leftwing's advertised misery of the middle class.

Russ Steele has an excellent idea on how to take a census of rural folks who don’t have access to broadband.  Everyone has been trying to get their hands around that problem in order to come up with good public policies that enable government and the private sector to work together in correcting this deficit.  Russ suggests that we use the upcoming census to gather this data.  The details are in his 22aug19 ‘Overwhelmed and Under-counted’ letter to The Union.

US acquiring Greenland. Trump’s recent proposal to Denmark on the reprise of this idea (first proposed under President Truman) has been peremptorily identified as looney by the Left (and a few on the Right), and offered in the lamestream as further evidence that The Donald’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.  Now I don’t particularly agree with the way that our president again introduced this proposal; it should have been done quietly at lower levels of diplomatic contact.  But on the overall concept, I think that there exist several approaches in which that piece of strategically located and resource rich real estate can benefit both us and the Danes if the US got or shared sovereignty over Greenland.  The Left in their mirth appear to have put as much thought into the matter as do hyenas before beginning their bouts of ‘laughter’.  (Here is a more sober discussion of this in Politico, and here is Sen Tom Cotton's overture last year.)

[23aug19 update]  Union publisher Don Rogers writes an enticing, yet in the end disappointing, meditation on the meaning of life in today’s paper.  In his ‘The Meaning of Life?’ he takes us on a short journey of futility while keeping hope alive, and then (trigger warning) summarily drops us off with “Life is what life does”? -86-  OK, but then why bother to lead us “befuddled pilgrims” by the nose to ‘It is what it is.’?  Actually, I’m just exposing my naivete here.  One should always temper one’s expectations when reading our beloved Union. 😉

On Smaller Governments and Corporations

"The skill of making and maintaining Commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules as doth Arithmetic and Geometry",  John Hobbes in the Leviathan.

George Rebane

Time to review some important tenets of my credo as they impact Rebane Doctrine’s prescriptions for the size and complexity of good governments, good businesses, and good organizations in general.  I do this so that I can reference it for the intelligent reader when the inevitable questions of governance and corporatism come up in these pages.  For the longtime reader of RR, there is really nothing new revealed in the sequel by this retired systems scientist and registered professional engineer in control systems.  However, it is the correct way of looking at the realworld, one that really works and has provided us the QoL we all enjoy.

I make this attempt at pedagogy to both educate and illustrate our unfortunate uneducables, many of whom are in positions of power.  Since RR is a socio-political blog, we shall see here the tragic error that underlies and makes dysfunctional all collectivist ideologies, especially in their approaches to governance.  We will then see the spectrum of responses that illustrate this.

The above diagram is a summary of how closed-loop, controlled systems work.  Stay with me.  The system to be controlled in a desired way is called the ‘Plant’, and the subsystem that wants the Plant to work in a certain way is called the ‘Controller’.  The Plant can be anything from a rocket heading for Mars to a Medicare for All program.  The purpose of building/developing the Plant is so that it can beneficially impact certain aspects of the ‘environment’ in which it is to operate – interplanetary space, a population requiring healthcare, a temperature regulated house.  The environment, of course, in return impacts the Plant, its operation, and sometimes even its structure.

To read the rest of this little missive, please Download Smaller Governments and Corporations

Demise of Capitalism?

George Rebane

The world’s population is stabilizing, if not starting to ‘stagnate’, and will soon start declining.  This argument and its impacts on humanity are presented in two newly published books – The Human Tide: How Populaton Shaped the Modern World (2019) by Paul Morland, and Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.  As a result, capitalism as we know it will disappear explains Zachart Karabell who reviews the books in the Sep/Oct issue of Foreign Affairs – ‘The Population Bust – Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It’.

The crux of that striking conclusion rests on the theory that capitalism remains viable only in an environment of eternal growth; once growth stops or reverses, then capitalism, as we know it, will collapse.  “If global population stops expanding and then contracts, capitalism - a system implicitly predicated on ever-burgeoning numbers of people - will likely not be able to thrive in its current form.”  But I have no idea where this ominous ‘predicate’ comes from.

Capitalism is fundamentally based on human nature organizing economies in an environment of open markets in which prices effectively communicate the supply and demand for goods and services.  Therefore, if demand slows down and then contracts, so long as open markets are allowed to operate, capitalists will adjust their enterprises accordingly.  The only aspect of such a contraction of available services and things for sale is its impact on the value of money. 

The value of any given supply of money depends on the amount of available goods and services it can command in transactions.  Its value, as reflected in open market discount (i.e. interest) rates will track the size of the economies in which it is used as the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value.  For example, the value of a lot of fiat dollars will decline if there is less to buy or build with them.  But again, such values will adjust accordingly as central banks ply their wily ways of taking money out of and injecting it into economies.  Granted, if human perceptions about markets change rapidly, then there will be financial shocks as the value of monies held by governments and the public also changes rapidly – after all, we must always remember that fiat money by its very nature is strongly faith-based.

So here we are in the pre-Singularity years as birth rates all over the world are dropping and populations are aging (older folks don’t consume as much as younger ones).  Advances in healthcare and productivity promoted through capitalism are making poorer countries richer, and encourage the richer countries to maintain growth through immigration. The current world population of approximately 7.6B will probably not exceed 10B by mid-century before it starts pulling back.  And given the impact of accelerating technology on systemic unemployment and income inequality, global population pullback is not something to be feared, but to be managed through judicious wealth distribution so as to maintain civil societies that continue to provide an increasing quality of life.  And once the Singularity does occur, all bets are off, as most then alive scramble to become trans-humans (q.v.).  For an entertaining and stimulating treatment of such a plausible future, I recommend Childhood’s End (1953) by A.C Clarke.

Dropout Derby - 15aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Hickenlooper has hit the silk.  The results gentlemen.

Steven Frisch answered, yet again (updated)

George Rebane

Mr Steven Frisch is one of, if not the, leading leftwing intellectuals in the northern Sierra.  He earns his keep as CEO of the Sierra Business Council, a cynically named non-profit, progressive NGO that promotes all manner of leftwing policies and causes in this part of California.  SBC also consults to regional government jurisdictions and agencies in their implementation of ‘sustainable development’ as most easily discerned by the recommendations contained in the UN’s Agenda 21 objectives and the initiatives promoted by its derivative ICLEIs across the land.  RR has covered A21 issues for many years and devotes an entire category to it under which are gathered the relevant commentaries and postings.

Mr Frisch has seen fit to visit these pages with some regularity to debate issues with which he does not agree in my commentaries and in the attendant comment streams.  As a liberal and progressive, his approach to debate is primarily to either misrepresent what has been written, or to attack strawmen that he constructs with the standard liberal shibboleth, ‘We know what he really meant.’  The sequel of this post amply illustrates this mode of attack.

In past screeds Mr Frisch has called me ‘unpatriotic’, ‘un-American’, ‘traitor’, ‘racist’, …, and recommended my departure from everywhere that ranges from Nevada County all the way to shores of the USA.  In my turn, I consider the two of us to have been brought up and now live in different universes.  With some assuredness, lavishly documented here over the years, I can state that Mr Frisch knows next to nothing of the areas in which I claim some expertise.  I’m sure he reciprocates that sentiment.

My response to Mr Frisch here is motivated by an extensive comment that he saw fit to post this morning under ‘Scattershots – 12aug19’.  It is reproduced hereunder in its entirety, along with my responses interleaved in italics.

The Lone Wolf Killers

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 August 2019.]

Each spate of mass shootings reveals yet another aspect of current American politics and how easy it is to manipulate the country’s masses.  As a result of the El Paso and Dayton massacres we are drenched in daily calls to ‘do something’, anything to stop rightwing ‘racists’ and ‘white supremacists’ from continuing their reign of terror wherever innocent people gather.  The ‘do something’ cries have reinvigorated our Second Amendment opponents to take more “common sense” steps on the road to total confiscation of guns.  Currently these steps involve more background checks, red-flag laws, and, of course, the ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’.  (more here)

Non-political experts continue to tell us that neither the current background check laws on the books, nor the newly House-passed Background Checks Act would have stopped any of these killings by first-time lone wolves with clean police records.  Nor would red-flag laws, already on the books in many states, provide any guarantee of prevention, since people naturally hesitate to apply them because of their high false alarm rates and their impact on personal relationships.  This latter point was highlighted by psychiatrist Richard Friedman in a recent NYT op-ed where he stated that “experienced psychiatrists fare no better than a roll of the dice at predicting violence. The evidence suggests that while red-flag laws do stop suicides, it isn’t clear they prevent mass shootings.”

And our progressives, including the Democratic candidates, declare that the real problem for such indigenous terror is the presence of a persistent and burgeoning number of ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ Americans.  According to these leftwingers, the problem now is so bad that all of President Trump’s supporters can be classed as ‘white supremacists’.  It is this massive body of misfits that spawns the killers of innocents among us.  For such progressives, America is still a racist country overrun by white supremacists who continue to deny people of color their legal and constitutional rights.  These assertions are ludicrous on their face as argued by among others, historians such as Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute and David Harsanyi of the Federalist.  America is the overwhelming destination of emigrants from all over the world, and over 90% these emigrants are people of color, most of whom clamor for entry from Hispanic America and Africa.  So, what do all these would be immigrants know about white supremacy in the United States that Democrats don’t know?

Scattershots – 12aug19 (updated 14aug19)

George Rebane

A long march to protest over-regulation in California is planned to start on 13 August in Vinton (the northern terminus of Hwy 49) and wend its way through 300 miles of rural mountain and hill country roads to end in Oakhurst on 25 August.  It will be done in daily segments which takes it through Nevada City/Grass Valley on 16 August.  People are asked to join it and/or encourage the marchers as it passes through their communities.  This grass roots civic action is the latest expression of desperation with encroaching governments at all levels that daily increase their constraints and constrictions of movement and use of public lands a la A21.  It’s to be seen how such efforts will be received and persist in a state that no longer reflects our inherited culture and values from a fast-fading America.  More here.

President Bill Clinton’s 1995 SOTU speech to Congress on his “illegal alien” policy.  Since Clinton spoke, the situation has gotten orders of magnitude worse with today’s unlawful ‘undocumented immigrant’ policies and programs promoted by our anti-American Left.  Take a look at this 90 second video, it is one that Republicans should play continuously until November 2020, if they had the balls.  Sadly, that will never happen.

[13aug19 update]  ‘Never Again’ Means Nothing If Holocaust Analogies Are Always Off Limits. This WaPo op-ed is one of the most ignorant pieces of writing I have read in a coon’s age.  Author Danya Ruttenberg attempts to excuse AOC’s comparison of our deporting illegal aliens to Hitler sending Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.  Such comparisons are especially damaging and divisive to the mildly educated minds that populate our land and now embrace socialism, they don’t have the historical background to parse the ridiculous analogies Ruttenberg presents in her column.  You have to read it yourself to understand the new directions of the Left’s propaganda machine.  Is this another one of their Big Lies?

[14aug19 update]  That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a good looking yet abysmally ignorant shill for the DNC’s radical left wing is known to all who pay attention.  She was elected by the fewest of voters from her district, and receives campaign contributions from fewer still – 10 in the first half of 2019.  Her re-election campaign is funded by unknown sources outside her district, and she is handled by equally mysterious agents who consider her and her ‘Squad’ as extremely useful idiots used to manage the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party in fashioning its image as the election season heats up.  (More here)

Sandbox - 11aug19

[Gun confiscation in disguise is the topic du jour, and the disguise has now become a very thin, translucent veil still useful for fooling some of the people all of the time.  gjr]

Democrats’ Big Lie #3671 – America’s economy

George Rebane

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, our Left has marshalled their legion of liars to spread the word to the lightly read that Trump’s revamping of our economy to historical levels has not happened, and that only the top 1% derived any benefit from the tax cuts and regulation rollbacks.  This kind of concerted lying campaign does immeasurable harm to the lower half of the IQ curve, causing these folks to vote against their own self interests.  But that makes no never mind to our progressive Democrats; do whatever keeps and increases your power, and bamboozling the snuffies has always been part of the drill.

It’s instructive to take a look at the magnitude of this particular stream of lies from the Left that started back in Obama’s time when we were assured that a max of 2% annual growth was going to be “the new normal”.  And, of course, Team Obama demonstrated that dictum over his tenure which averaged growth under 2%.  These people pulled every trick in the book to stifle the economy and keep workers’ wage growth essentially flat, all the while lying that they were helping the little guy and middle class.  The little guys took it in the shorts also as the Dems boosted the minimum wage wherever possible so as to make the lower rungs of the economic ladder ever more inaccessible to our unskilled and youngest workers starting their careers.

Conservatives and capitalists have known for generations that a rising tide lifts all boats, in direct contradiction to the Left’s teaching that the only friend of the poor and unskilled is big and bigger government.  Here’s a graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate the difference between Obama and Trump (filched from the 5jul19 WSJ).

By 2012 it was clear to most Americans that Obama was a socialist who had little interest in implementing demonstrated economic principles to recover the economy from its 2009 Great Recession lows.  I waxed eloquently on this in my ‘What Recovery?’ essay.  In that piece I presented a clear and concise systems flow diagram for how the GDP is calculated from its major components.  It even pointed out how and where the government just pisses away generated wealth.

Most of us don’t have a clue when talking about economic recovery and growth.  Recovery is in the eyes of the beholder, and economic growth is not experienced as a one size fits all – different sectors benefit differentially from any given level of quoted aggregate growth, as the following graphic illustrates.

America’s economy has grown in a remarkably constant range of 3.3-3.4% annually from 1880 to 2008 on the eve of the Great Recession.  To explain the different recovery flavors, I indicated such an exponential growth as the green line in the above graph taken from ‘The Recovery Rigamarole’.  The arbitrary GDP amounts shown vary as a function of time, say, in years.  At year 40 a recession/depression occurs that takes the GDP from around 225 down to 135 over a ten year period.  At year 50 the economy begins to recover.  But from there several 'recovery' paths are possible, three of which (R1, R2, R3) are shown.  At this point it’s important to keep in mind that if the economy’s dip (red line) did not occur, then it would have continued growing at its long term (green line) rate – e.g. at year 50 it would have been about 265.

R1 is clearly a true recovery that regains the long-term growth curve.  R2 is a more tendentious recovery that does achieve the pre-recession growth rate, but perennially lags the sans recession GDP growth trend.  And finally, R3 is at best a propagandized faux recovery, achieving neither the pre-recession growth rate nor its long term trend.

The continuing dissemination of this Big Lie about Trump's economy by the lamestream is one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the ongoing progressive propaganda onslaught through the auspices of fake news.

 

The tragically populous tails of terror (updated 10aug19)

George Rebane

Last weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings are today’s national conversation, a conversation that does not yet communicate much beyond the emotional demand that something must be done.  The conversation is yet a babble that has little reason, meaning, or direction in either working toward a shared understanding of the problem, and most certainly not toward any shared understanding of possible solutions, were they even to exist.

The little contribution here is only to record my own perceptions and feelings, and not offered as some definitive insight, the application/adoption of which would miraculously relieve our national pain.  The overarching insight is that all these nativist massacres (as opposed to those motivated by foreign ideology/theology) are the inevitable result of a growing cultural deficit.  The population distribution of cultures has become flatter as the former dominant cultures are practiced by ever fewer people – in a statistical sense, the tails of such distribution of multiple cultures are becoming fatter, and therefore more populous.  This means that the number of people who invent, join, practice new and extreme cultures and belief systems is rapidly growing.  The inevitable result of such an amalgam is that more and more individuals are out there on the borderline of doing something to act out their recently acquired and strongly held beliefs about what is wrong with the society in which they find themselves.  And with more on the borderline, more are likely to cross it with the results we see.

Sandbox - 6aug19

[We will now have to dissect the when and how President Trump was the prime cause of all these massacres.  And one thing is clear to many of our tight thinkers, the man is able to make such things happen in cities where he previously held a campaign rally.  So finally, after all the years of mass shootings, we have identified their cause.  Socialist science marches on.  gjr]

Scattershots – 6aug19 (updated 11aug19)

George Rebane

The true costs of ‘renewable energy’ are both unaffordable and hidden. Those of us who can do arithmetic have known the unreported high costs of renewable wind and solar power for years, and how the climate calamity acolytes and the lamestream have suppressed reporting the costs of making the world work with renewable energy.  Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute writes a short, fact-filled piece on the matter in the 6aug19 WSJ (here).  He cites the work of the International Renewable Energy Institute based on the demand forecasts of the International Energy Agency.  The bottom line is that if you take into account the ‘cradle to grave’ costs and environmental impacts of spreading solar and wind power production worldwide, then humanity will have an existential disaster on its hands.  The amount of mining, transport, construction, and waste elimination required swamps all conceivable benefits from such ‘clean power’ which will turn out to be the dirtiest and most expensive that we can attempt to buy.  As an example, “building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.  And these materials will have to be mined, manufactured, and assembled in not so very nice places according to the Sydney-based Institute for a Sustainable Future.  None of this is known to our garden-variety progressives (some in these pages) who continue to mindlessly tout subsidized ‘clean energy’ and claim its unrealizable economic benefits.

‘1984’ has arrived on campuses.  “Bias response teams” are now an established institution on most college campuses, and the disease is spreading rapidly.  Christian Schneider reports (here) on “a chilling look inside colleges’ systems for reporting and policing offensive speech.”  The growing archive of such petty incidences of one student snitching on another, often unsuspecting, student is testimony to another of the progressive-promoted illiberal insanities in our society.  Reading the record of cited incidences is simply mind-boggling to most of us.  The accused offenders are then required to present themselves to the schools’ administrative “diversity” panels for examination of their violations.  As with sexual abuse allegations, there is no appeals process, and such allegations go on the students’ records which may later be used to impact careers and other life-opportunities in these looney tunes times.  For all this, go thank your local leftists who have enthusiastically made all this possible, and continue to do so with every ballot they mark.

[update]  Tonight on FN we saw an ugly leftwing mob assembled across the street from Majority Leader McConnell’s house with signs and flood lights screaming unspeakable epithets at the senator and people to “Stab him through the heart!” and “Cut his fucking throat!”.  How many lamestream outlets showed this?  How many rightwingers have gathered to put on a scene like that in front of Democrat politician’s house?  Biden and Booker both stated that they want to “beat up” President Trump; how many Republican politicians have ever come even close to such violent language against a Democrat President.  And none of these are isolated incidents carried out by some backwater communists, these are carried out regularly by mainstream leftists all across the country.  In progressive circles and in their lapdog lamestream media President Trump is regularly referred to as a “white supremacist”.  Where is the evidence for that?  I join with Victor Davis Hanson and most other conservative commentators in declaring that I have never met a rightwing white supremacist, nor do I know of anyone who has ever met such a person.  Yet the lunatic Left continues to accuse all of us daily of being white supremacists.  (check RR comment streams)  It is these insanely cynical asymmetries that confirm our having passed the tipping point and promoting the Great Divide.

[8aug19 update]  To further confirm the tsunami of censoring conservatives that is sweeping the country’s media, Twitter concluded that the video I reference above was too damaging to the progressive narrative about who actually are purveyors of hate and violence.  CNBC reports that “Twitter locked Mitch McConnell's campaign Twitter account, Team Mitch, for posting a video of a profanity-laden protest outside of McConnell's home in Louisville, Kentucky.”  (more here)  You literally cannot make this stuff up – politically motivated censorship is now a daily happening, most of it not visible.

[10aug19 update]  ‘Shaming’, even FN doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, and plays patsy to the Dem candidates’ attempt at that in their desperate attempts to intimidate President Trump.  These political sleazebags, now joined by Uncle Joe, are all claiming a direct causal relationship between Trump’s public speech and the El Paso and Dayton killings.  This is supposed to shame the president.  People who still care about the language know that a person accepts shame only when 1) he acknowledges the veracity of the allegations against him, AND 2) the society around him also embraces the same allegations.  Neither of those conditions exist for Trump re the massacres, nor the 100M+ Americans who are paying attention.  The desperate scumbags who seek to make such ludicrous claims stick don’t have a clue about this, and are mainly relying on the segment of their constituents who are innocent of current events and most other things that quality education delivers.

[11aug19 update]  Leftwing dumb is definitely a terminal mindset. Any kind of discussion with them is nigh impossible because they fail the basics of an IQ test that asks questions about whether this is like that, and if not, what is the difference.  Years of examples of such deficit thinking are archived in RR comment streams, and today we see it in the comments under Jo Ann’s recent Union piece (here) about the treatment LaMalfa received at the hands of the leftists when he visited here.  The Union leftwing commenters equate the crowd’s cries of ‘Lock her up!’ at Trump rallies with their own thuggish behavior of shouting down a congressman of the opposite party.  They haven’t a clue that one set of voices is in support of the speaker, and the other set of voices is meant to disrupt a speaker trying to respond to his audience.  To those pinheads these two situations are identical, and they consider their loutish behavior as Democrats to be a proper response to the Republican audience’s behavior at a Republican rally.  Is there someone with even garden variety smarts on the other side who can see a profound difference here?  Exit question: how often do you see Republicans do that when a Democrat comes to speak?  (I don't usually comment on Jo Ann's columns, but this time the number of butt-stupid responses was overwhelming.  H/T to GregG and ToddJ for their valiant attempts to explain the matter in that comment stream.)

The Lamestream’s Russia Collusion Illuminated

George Rebane

Holman Jenkins in his ‘What Ails the US Press?’ expands the strong point, much massaged in these pages, that “the media’s lack of interest in the Steele dossier amounts to collusion in a coverup.”  In this 3aug19 WSJ piece he lays it out so well that I decided to let RR readers crawl under the paywall and read the whole thing themselves

Dropout Derby Updated 3aug19 (addended)

Dropout Derby update.  As of 3 August 2019 with Democratic candidates 20 and 24 having bailed, the following is the cumulative score tally (bottom row).  The number/name key is found in bottom figure.

[Addendum]  One of the participants requested that I reprise the scoring algo with examples for a couple of the participants.  The indicated ‘CumScore’ line contains the updated cumulative scores of the participants that account for all the dropouts to date – currently #20, then #24 as shown in the ‘Actual’ column.  CumScore is the sum of the individual scores for each predicted dropout candidate.

A perfect prediction occurs when the participant’s dropout location matches the actual location in the sequence of dropouts.  When there is a difference between a candidate’s predicted location and the actual location, then the prediction error is the (absolute value of the) difference between the two locations.  The maximum possible difference value with 26 candidates is 25.  So if a participant missed it by, say, 5 = predicted position minus actual position, then the relative error is 5/25 = 0.2, and the score for that prediction is the complement, 1 – |5/25| = 0.8.  This yields a perfect score of 1.0 if the two positions match, and 1 - |25/25| = 0 if they maximally mismatch.  CumSum is then the cumulative sum of all the participant’s individual candidate scores.

As examples, we’ll calculate the indicated CumSum scores for EstFox (1.40) and WaltB (1.24).  For EstFox the first dropout difference is |7-1| = 6.  Therefore 1 – 6/25 = 0.76.  The second dropout yields a difference of |11-2| = 9, giving the candidate score of 1 – 9/25 = 0.64.  The sum of these individual scores is the indicated 1.40 = 0.76 + 0.64.  For WaltB we have the first score as 1 – |19-1|/25 = 0.28, and the second as 1 - |1-2|/25 = 0.96, for a total of 1.24 = 0.28 + 0.96.  A perfect score at this point in the dropout sequence would be 2.0.  This says that at the end of the competition when the last candidate ‘drops out’ to be the party’s nominee, a perfect score would be 26.

Along the same vein, we can also compute the ‘normalized score’ at every dropout in the sequence by dividing the participant’s CumScore by the perfect CumScore to date.  The perfect normalized score would then always be 1.0 as the competition proceeds.  Using the above examples, the normalized scores would be for EstFox 1.40/2.0 = 0.70, and for WaltB 1.24/2.0 = 0.62.  The above table has been updated and corrected to show both the CumScore and NormScore for each participant.  (H/T to commenter who noticed error in calculating the CumScore of participants who did not update their dropout lists when the last three Dem candidates entered the race.  Such missing entries will receive a zero score for the dropped out candidate.)

Ruminations – 3aug19

George Rebane

Our favorite double-dummy communist, Umair Haque writing in Medium, continues his dive into the abyss of ideological idiocy with his latest essay attempting to explain ‘fascism’ to American readers.  In a piece titled ‘America Is Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism’ he does a great job of confusing the matter even further on his journey into regions of history and semantics in which he is a complete naif.  It’s worth a read though, if only to understand how our lightly-read are swayed.

George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility is the latest book to go on my reading list.  The sometimes conservative commentator has enjoyed a long career purveying his right of center ideology in the media (a regular on NBC, MSNBC, WaPo, and the National Review).  Will is both an anti-Trumper and an anti-Republican who shares my belief that our country’s march to collectivism has passed the tipping point, and that conservatism is in a terminal decline – the “Right’s losing battle against progressivism.”  (more here)

For a little light-hearted, local comical relief, I direct your attention to Terry Lamphier’s ‘Grass Valley’s burning desire for growth’.  There I challenge you to discover Mr Lamphier’s point of the article, save his eternal opposition to the county’s growth.  The man continues his established tradition of writing articles both long-winded and opaque.

Sandbox - 2aug19

[Interesting discussion from the last sandbox on Baltimore, shithole cities, and the misguided attack on Kushner and other investors in companies willing to provide housing in crime and drug infested ghettos.  The simple-minded accuse such investors of being "slumlords" with the same logic that investors (like me) can be accused of causing the opioid epidemic by investing in pharma companies or killing women and children in the mid-east wars by investing in defense industries.  Go figger.  gjr]

Tariffs – who really pays

George Rebane

President Trump’s current tariff wars are definitely having a mixed impact on economies in the US and around the world.  His claim that ‘China is now paying us billions in tariffs’ is patently false.  But most people still think that tariffs on Chinese imports now consist of the imported goods plus a check for the tariff amount written by someone in China.  And that a 25% tariff on Chinese imports will increase their price for such goods by 25%.  Not so.

Tariffs on imported goods are paid for by the US registered importers to our Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency within 10 days of the goods landing in the US, which monies go into the Treasury's general fund of tax collections.  That, of course, increases the cost of doing business since the importer must now increase his, usually financed, operating capital by the amount of the tariff, thereby increasing both the direct cost of what he buys, and also adding the cost of financing the tariff amount. (more here)

To see how the tariff impacts us on the receiving end, consider the rule-of-thumb breakdown of end-user price.  For most things the ‘one-thirds rule’ applies – 1/3 to the manufacturer, 1/3 to distribution, 1/3 to the retailer (end-seller).  That means that the distributor (distribution channel) charges the end-seller twice its cost(s) for the item, and the end-seller then adds 50% of his cost to arrive at the price the end-user must pay.

So, let’s look at a pair of athletic shoes for which the consumer pays a pre-tariff $100.  The Chinese manufacturer sells these out the door for, say, $32.  The importer (distributor) must pay, say, a 25% tariff on the goods, or $8 to the CBP for a total cost of $40 for the shoes at the port of entry.  Now how much of that additional $8 cost he passes on to the retailer depends on what kind of a hit he’s willing to take on his profit margin.  Say, he’s willing to swallow half the increased cost, so he sells the shoes to the retailer for 2*($32 + 0.5*$8) = $72.  If the retailer now followed the one-third rule, then the price for the end-user consumer would be 1.5*$72 = $108, or an 8% price increase.  Being sensitive to the price-demand curve (you sell less of what costs more), the retailer may decide to swallow, say, 25% of his increased cost, or 0.25*($72 - $64) = $2.  This brings the consumer price of the athletic shoes to $106 or a 6% increase to the American end-user that was caused by imposition of a 25% tariff on such imports.

You can, of course, play this game with different numbers, for example starting with the Chinese manufacturer also discounting his out-the-door price of $32 to keep his shoe sales volume up.  Anyway, this should give us all an idea how and where tariff charges impact everyone in the process of getting imported stuff into the hands of end-users.  (Those wanting to play with these numbers can now see the effect on end prices by also considering the slightly more complex intermediate ‘end pricing’ of imported components ordered by US manufacturers making goods for US and foreign markets.)  And when all is said and done, everyone in the described chain will hold their breath to see how much the end-user will balk at paying the increased price and thereby lower the sales volume for the shoes, which effect will ripple up the chain impacting all kinds of decisions about what to pay, what to charge, and from where to buy.

In sum, the penalty that China (or any tariff assessed country) pays is that 1) they will sell less of the stuff to end users who have to pay a higher price, and/or 2) manufacturers and distributors on the receiving end will inevitably try to obtain the same stuff from countries that are not tariffed so as to regain their profit margins while lowering end user prices.  When, like China, you have entire industrial sectors geared to make goods for the single largest market in the world, tariffs on the receiving end do impose many forms monetary and financial penalties at the source end.  But make no mistake, the pain of tariffs is felt by all sides, and Trump needs to make that clear instead of spewing only the ‘China pays’ bullshit to the American electorate.  (Don’t mistake this screed as an assessment of the strategic wisdom cum effectiveness of today’s tariff trade wars; that is another discussion altogether.)