Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 27dec19 (updated 31dec19)

George Rebane

Well, here are a handful of observations on the progress the progressives are making to fundamentally transform America into a second-world autocracy that will look nothing like what our Founders intended to bequeath us, and nothing like the America many of us older folks have enjoyed and learned about.  And about which the younger generations have been kept in the dark, discontent, and expectant that the nation is in dire straits and will be saved only by fulfilling the objectives specified in Agenda21 (now Agenda2030).

Sandbox - 26dec19

[I solicit nominations for the next Democrat/lamestream Big Lie re/issued before New Year's Day that will impact the largest number of the nation's light thinkers.  The same invitation is issued to our leftwingers about Republicans.  gjr]

Christmas 2019

Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.  Matthew 1:23

George Rebane

Another tumultuous year is ending with celebrations for peace and joy.  The Rebanes count themselves among the diminishing number of American Christians who still wish their family and friends, and RR readers of all persuasions a season of remembrance and reflection on what has been bestowed on this third planet, circling a modest star, making its way with billions of similar stars in a galaxy that populates this universe with uncounted trillions of other such galaxies.  Christmas still reminds many of us that we are among the blessed in our seeming insignificance.

Scattershots – 23dec19

George Rebane

The persecution of Christians, almost overwhelmingly by Muslim extremists in their lands, and leftwing secular humanists in more civilized regions, is picking up steam.  The latest of about which the lamestream is silent today goes on in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.  There the Fulani Muslims have taken up gun and machetes against entire villages of Christians.  These attacks take place all over the country and consist of the most horrendous acts of violence against innocent and unarmed civilians, leaving behind the dead and mutilated.  Lop amputations are again the favored way to leave survivors who can then relate the horrors of the ‘religion of peace’ to those yet to be visited.  The government’s military is in cahoots with the religious fanatics, showing up late, if ever, and then confiscating anything that looks like an implement with which the surviving villagers could defend themselves, citing the national law against civilians bearing arms, no matter how primitive or useful they are as a farming implement.  (more here)

Boeing’s grounded 737MAX may be the final instigation for the long-talked of conversion to take human pilots out of cockpits.  The modern commercial aircraft is so complex that it needs a lot of smart machinery to operate it.  And that requires a much more extensive training curriculum for today’s pilots than what they are used to, and of what many (most?) are capable of executing in the cockpit, especially during anomalous or emergency conditions.  We have demonstrated that large drone aircraft are capable of operating autonomously over wide areas and/or with ground-based pilots who primarily monitor flight.  The 737MAX will fly again, there is too much pressure to increase passenger air traffic, and too few airplane models and manufacturers to satisfy the demand. (more here)  But now the productive dialogue has begun between manufacturers, regulators, and airlines to plan for the inevitable advent of smart, autonomous, and much safer aircraft; especially when suborbital hypersonic aircraft are introduced with flight profiles that require orders of magnitude more complex decisions to be made and correctly executed in milliseconds.

‘American Liberty Depends on the Deep State’ argues noted historian Francis (“the end of history”) Fukuyama.  He ties his lamentably weak arguments to an unfortunately partisan definition which is more true than false.  Today’s ‘deep state’ is the ‘administrative state’ of yesteryear that is now composed of “unelected officials who are supposedly partisan Democrats ready to do anything to undermine the Trump presidency.”  In the sequel he ignores the overwhelming evidence that gives credence to such a definition.  He claims that all “modern democracies” like the US need deep state governance “because it is crucial to fighting corruption and upholding the rule of law”, ignoring the record of the wide incidence of corruption and criminality that hides in a byzantinely structured deep state.  Fukuyama lauds the supposed meritocracy of the deep state establishments of Britain, France, Germany, …, without any comparison of the relative benefits over the US that these countries have enjoyed.  The Pendleton Act of 1883 was supposed to make our civil service a meritocracy.  As we all know, it did not.  Our historian ends his apologetic for the deep state with a red herring, citing a scenario in which our president (hint Trump) refuses to leave office at the end of his term and orders the military to protect his stay.  Then it would be only through the good graces of the deep state that such a president would not be defended and would have to vacate his office.  Astounding!

More left-leaners than right-leaners now appear to make up the cohort of RR commenters.  This is apparent from just a simple count of the handles used by the progressives.  I have no idea how the total readership breaks down, but I suspect there are at least as many of the Left as of the Right.  It is certain that they follow the content of this website with great interest and attention, taking every opportunity to counter the slings and arrows we launch against their ideology cum religion.  As I have stated for years, their presence is more than welcome, else we would be an echo chamber as are almost all socio-political sites of the liberal persuasion.  A local leftwing weblog serves as an ample illustration of the effects of such censorship of opposing thought.  Well, that’s not the entire reason for its dearth of comment streams – it is also poorly edited, filled with bulletin board boring and narcoleptically numbing topics, and empty of any intellectual challenges to its occasional stasist and statist progressive mantras.  However, for completeness we do feature it in Our Links found in the left panel.

Stephen Miller, Trump administration senior adviser and a Jew, is an example of a target of leftwing attack as being anti-Semitic simply because he cited news reported on Breitbart.  These Democrat congresscritters want him fired. (more here)  They accuse him of "documented support for white nationalist and virulently anti-immigrant tropes (which) is wholly unacceptable and disqualifying for a government employee."  There is no evidence of either that they can present or that even exists.  Mr Miller is white and presumably a nationalist.  He is not anti-immigrant but simply against illegal entry into the United States.  So none of the accusing Democrat Jews can give a coherent definition of nationalism or show why embracing such a socio-political stance is somehow toxic to this country.  Neither can they defend porous borders that permit the illegal entry of hordes of foreigners with unknown diseases, crime records, skill levels, disjoint cultures, and doubtful allegiance to everything that America has stood for in the past (before our anti-American left has begun making its mark).

'OK Boomer!'

Woke free speech is now defined as the right to interrupt others' speech.

George Rebane

‘OK Boomer!’ is the new dismissive epithet directed at anyone older by Millennials and post-Millennials (e.g. Generation Z).  Its most common usage is as a retort to attempted guidance from the older generation, today simply known by the label ‘Boomer’.  Baby Boomer (born 1947-64) is now passé and too restrictive.  The young moderns would like to simplify things as much as possible in order to function in a society that endowed them with a terribly deficient education and lexicon.  They resent learning that they are forced to make do from the dark side of the great knowledge gap, and they justifiably take exception to that.

But they are overreacting.  Instead of attempting to correct their deficits, they reject wisdom a fortiori if it comes from those who have been successful in life.  ‘Boomer’ is now attributed by some to be the new N-word, especially when directed toward white male seniors.  And ‘OK Boomer’ is delivered as the blatant rejection that conveys, ‘You have nothing to teach us.’

So here is a generation who have yet to develop skills that can continue creating wealth at any level close to their plans to then take that wealth from other people, and spend it to create a world like that which their Marxist mentors have taught.  And they are now so stupid that they refuse to do what previous generations have done since time immemorial – stand on the shoulders of those who built and work the world which today gives them the ability to create a future without a successful past.

Risk Analysis with Subjective EMAB Distributions

George Rebane

A few years back I introduced to our more technically oriented readers a new approach to capture and work with subjective random variables.  In ‘Predicting with Expressed Beliefs – a formal approach’ the Mode Augmented Boxcar (MAB) probability distribution was made available in a report which described its derivation and various useful applications.  Among the advantages of EMAB is its compatibility with Bayesian analysis.  In this piece I share with readers the Expanded MAB (EMAB), present its formal derivation (TR1908-1), and provide two tools that further explicate and support its uses.  You can download all three files here –

Download TR1908-1_EMABderivation

Download EMABworksheet

Download ProposalRiskAnalysis2

The following scenario illustrates but one of the many uses of EMAB, and assumes that the reader is generally familiar with the MAB distribution.

Suppose you head up an engineering company contemplating responding to an RFP, and want to know the financial risk in doing the job were you to win the contract.  The work will be done and billed on a ‘cost plus’ (cost plus fixed fee) basis.  There will be four separate deliverables D1, D2, D3, D4 that are to be produced in sequence – each succeeding deliverable must be tested with those previously completed.  Due to job particulars, the fee percentages F_i on related costs C_i of each Di (i = 1, … ,4) will be negotiated individually.  The customer also states that the entire project must be completed within a time interval T_C = 60 weeks of contract start date, and that 1% of the total contract price will be subtracted for every week late of all deliverables.

Sandbox - 19dec19

[Now that the impeachment kabuki has ended, the Senate trial will begin.  But before that can proceed, Pelosi will try to squeeze some more preconditions out of McConnell before forwarding the House’s articles of impeachment.  The cynical humor of the whole process goes on with Democrats continuing to accuse Republicans of unfairness along every step of the way, paying no never mind to having conducted the most blatantly partisan, unfair, and corrupt congressional circus in Congress’s long history.  But the real story is again the ever-widening chasm between what now clearly are two Americas attempting to share the same government and territory while holding diametrically opposite worldviews and objectives.  gjr]

When Compassion Kills

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 December 2019.]

‘Tis the season of peace, joy, and giving, of both the complimentary and compassionate kind.  Every year during these weeks we are deluged with pleas to open our wallets for uncountable good causes.  ‘Twas ever thus.  But compassionate giving on an international scale has often been the precursor, if not the actual cause, of the subsequent death for tens of millions.  And as a nation that continues to give and has given lavishly in the past, this should give us Americans some pause as we reflect on the history of such gifts.

Recently published is one such history of a program of compassionate giving that turned out to give rise to the subsequent deaths of 20 to 30 million Soviet farmers in the 1930s.  The book is The Russian Job – the forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin (2019) by award-winning historian Douglas Smith. (reviewed here)  In it Smith describes in devastating detail of how during 1921-23 the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, working over a vast land area, saved 10 million Russians from certain starvation.

A Progressive’s ‘Common Ground’

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

George Rebane

Sierra Business Council CEO Steven Frisch took to task my criticism of Terry McAteer’s Union column (here) in which he glossed over the real problems that California has under Democrat leadership.  Along with McAteer, Frisch also appears to be blind to California socialists’ homegrown catastrophes, and counsels those who would point them out to “stop acting like a bunch of babies and work together."

Sandbox - 13dec19

[“But Conservos made zero, ZERO arguments regarding the constitutionality of what Trump has been doing...”  One of our liberal commenters sought to make a curious point with this statement re Trump being impeached.  There is nothing in the Constitution about a president’s ‘abuse of power’ or ‘obstruction of Congress’ – these are political charges fashioned entirely out of whole cloth by Democrats desperate to somehow cripple the president going into the 2020 election.  Therefore, ‘constitutionality’ need not even enter into any defense argument.  Just pointing out the Democrats’ political perfidy is enough to indict their motives.  gjr]

 

Scattershots - 10dec19 (updated 16dec19)

George Rebane

Factory workers now starting to require college degrees – ‘American Factories Demand White-Collar Education for Blue-Collar Work’.  We saw this coming some years back in these pages and described the process in some graphic detail (here).   Given the acceleration of technology in general and AI in particular, that was not a hard prognostication for those of us in the field.  The million plus manufacturing jobs added since the recession are tilted definitely to those with “the most complex problem-solving skills”.  Numeracy as a requirement is understood, and that’s just the start of advanced skill sets required on today’s factory floors.  Correspondingly, the jobs requiring the least skills have declined during this same interval. (more here) 

University of California is sued by leftwing activists to drop SAT and ACT admissions tests. (here)  From the battery of available standardized tests for high schoolers, SAT and ACT both remain as the most reliable predictors of college and post-college success.  But this is discriminatory according to the plaintiffs because “According to College Board data from this year, 45% of white students who took the SAT in California scored at least a 1200 out of a possible 1600, and 55% of Asian students did, compared with only 9% of African-American students and 12% of Hispanic students.”  So going along with the remainder of the Democrats’ program to destroy America’s public education institutions (more here), we now have a full court press on our colleges and universities to drop academic merit as an admission requirement.  Instead, institute the double-dummy quota system so everyone can get a college degree.  (Why not make it a civil right and have government mail everyone a bachelor’s degree on their 18^th birthday?) Digest this news in light of the previous item above.

A Different and Dangerous Impeachment

George Rebane

‘This Impeachment Is Different – and More Dangerous’ writes Lawrence Lessig in Politico.  He is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and according to my lights tilts a bit to the left.  But he has penned an insightful piece that more or less flies in formation and abets Rebane Doctrine on the Great Divide (you know, confirmation bias and all that).

Lessig correctly argues that the current impeachment imbroglio is not a rehash of America’s past impeachments.  Today, the plethora of politically polarizing media have so divided the country that both sides are totally sustained in their beliefs without even considering whether there is any middle ground remaining, and, if so, should we seek it out.  He points out that past impeachments were carried out by elite cadres operating, more or less, out of the public glare.  The impeachers were not pored over by the public, whose changing attitudes were not constantly apparent to the impeachers.  Today, Americans have a choice on how to view the impeachment process, and their attitudinal temperature is taken multiple times a day by countless polls.

Democrat Public Education – The gift that keeps taking

George Rebane

Public schools are a government institution, and its teachers are civil servants and public sector workers.  As FDR warned more than 80 years ago, unionizing public sector employees is a very bad idea, and that has proven to be true over the intervening generations.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in what has happened in our unionized public schools over the last half century.  The Democratic party has filled our classrooms with undereducated leftwing ideologues and propagandized union flacks, which accurately characterize the aggregate of America’s classroom cadres of ‘educators’.

What they have produced in this interval is an innumerate citizenry with minimal critical thinking skills and a knowledge base to match – more than one in four Americans do not know the structure of their governance and the three branches of our government, never mind knowing what each does.  Internationally, we are at the bottom of the barrel of developed first world countries, and this considering that we are still the world hegemon and the second largest economy on the globe.  Our youth’s academic achievement, upon which our future and wellbeing rest, is poor and stagnant, while we watch teachers strike ‘for the children’(!?) demanding ever more money for their pension funds, administrative staffs, and unions.

Take a look at the most recent PISA test scores just released.  The Asian countries, led by Red China, are eating our lunch in each of the three critical academic categories – reading, math, and science.  (more here)

All this while daily, without being aware, we relinquish more freedoms to the state in the false promise of more prosperity and security.  The Left has been faithfully following Lenin’s dictum on education, and achieving the predicted results.  We now have an electorate half of which consists of a cohort of compliant slogan reactive sheep, ideologically herded by a lamestream media totally beholden to and the hand servant of the Democrat Party.  It is difficult to believe that our poor schools are just the natural result from being staffed by two generations of incompetent teachers.  But it is easy to cite reams of evidence from their own ‘educational literature’ that the product our academic factories produce is the result of a purposive and cynically conspiratorial effort by the Left.  And all this for the objective of weakening America internally through compliant collectivism so as to eliminate it as an impediment to globalization.

Once more we turn to Thomas Jefferson – ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  The Democrats live by it, and the Republicans don’t have a clue.

Consciousness and uploading your mind

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 December 2019.]

OK, let’s try something different this week.  This being the Christmas season and all, it’s time to think about our souls and eternal life.  Well, on second thought, maybe we should back off on all that divisive spiritual stuff, and just take the secular humanist look at immortality which, since the sci-fi novels of the 1950s, has focused on ‘uploading’ the contents of your brain into some super-computer, or a phantasmagorical robot, or cyborg which then in principle can live forever.

Dropout Derby - 3dec19

George Rebane

It's a relief to see that no-count Kamala Harris get out of the race.  To indicate the level of politicians who cause grief to California, given Hillary or Kamala, I would take Hillary in a heartbeat.  And now that the Christmas season is upon us, I expect a lot more of the Dem clown car occupants sans traction will start hitting the silk.  Imagine dragging your staff through the holidays, having to go to your campaign offices, and knowing the handwriting is on the wall - this campaign ain't goin' nowhere nohow.

Sandbox - 3dec19

[From the last Sandbox I will repeat my 920am invitation.  'Paul, you guys continue going after the low-hanging fruit on Trump. Why don't you instead take on something more meaningful to Americans? - your assertions that tax rates don't affect economic behavior, or 'border walls don't work', or more regulations encourage commerce and entrepreneurial activity, or capitalism has created all the world's ills, or bigger government taking on a bigger share of the economy is better, or people are indifferent to living among others more like themselves, or ... .  There are so many things you guys believe in that you should really attempt to substantiate instead of displaying your ongoing spasms of TDS.' gjr]

Dropout Derby - 2dec19

George Rebane

Sharp-eyed readers informed me that I missed former congressman and retired admiral Joe Sestak dropping out yesterday.  That has been corrected in the illustrated data below.  Gov Bullock of Montana withdrew today; another Democrat who was unclear on the concept and fates of those unknowns who entered the party's 'Y'all Come!' candidacy for president.  In our Dropout Derby the Estonian Fox has jumped into the lead again.  Many thanks for the correction.

 

Democrats’ Big Lie #4688 – Voter Suppression

George Rebane

Voter fraud in America is real and bipartisan according to evidence presented by the Heritage Foundation.  To combat voter fraud, states have instituted “voter identification laws and programs to clean up wildly inaccurate voter rolls to help verify that only eligible individuals are voting, and that they are casting ballots in the jurisdictions where they actually reside.”  California recently had to be taken to court to start removing over 5 million inactive registrations from its voter rolls.  Pew reported back in 2012 that “one out of every eight voter registrations were inaccurate, with 2.8 million people registered in two or more states.”  And across the country, hundreds of counties record more registered voters than they have residents.

These visible and verified instances of voter and voting data are “just the tip of the iceberg” of vastly more cases of people voting fraudulently.  But for some reason known only to our legal beagles, manifest voter fraud is hard to prove in our courts.  However, most revealing, re the bipartisan argument, is which party is in perpetual denial that significant voter fraud is happening, and overwhelmingly opposed to combating the country’s efforts to field fair and honest elections.  (more here)

And the Democrats are equally busy on the other side of this coin.  Here their longstanding and comprehensive propaganda involves keeping alive and growing where possible, the message that Republicans are eternally engaged in the suppression of minority voting.  (Now this is really rich, coming from the party that invented minority voter suppression and practiced it for generations, and continues doing it to this day while hiding under the Alinsky argument.) 

This is a really cynical Big Lie that the Democrats direct toward the most vulnerable and least educated minority constituents who have demonstrably minimal critical thinking skills and even less motivation/ability to discover the truth for themselves.  Instead they listen to existential racists like Mad Max Waters, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris.  These Democrat demogauges, echoed by their lackey lamestream, continue to lie to their black and Latino voters that there exists an active and effective national program of minority voter suppression carried on by Republican conservatives.

Their latest ‘evidence’ of this is the defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams who refused to concede defeat because of supposed “voter suppression”.  Again, nothing of the sort happened.  What really defeated Abrams was the increase of black voter registrations from the last midterm which “actually topped white voters in percentage terms, 68.4% compared with 66.8%.”  When you really dig into the actual voting data on nationwide black and Hispanic turnout – “despite voter ID requirements, registration checks, and limits on early voting in some states” – you see the real percentage increases as cited by the US Census Bureau.  The details are even more damning to the Democrats, whose Big Lie actually does cause many minorities to believe that their votes won’t matter anyway because, out of frustration, many of their neighbors will not vote.  And such big lies continue keeping minorities compliant and on the plantation where Democrat political leaders unanimously believe they belong.  (more here)  

These are the kind of Democrat big lies we will keep covering as the Left continues their attempt to focus the country’s attention on Trump’s foot-in-the-mouth braggadocios and impeachment circus, instead of his accomplishments which daily benefit almost all Americans.  And as always, I invite progressive readers to present substantive arguments/data that counter the above commentary.