Rebane's Ruminations

It’s Still the Economy, Stupid!

George Rebane

While Messrs Smith, Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, and Freedman explained it all, Mr Henry Hazlitt succinctly summarized the whole thing in his classic, Economics in One Lesson (1946).  This book has become such a fundamental text, that you don’t even have to buy a copy of it any more.  It is now online in its entirety - many of us did buy it, having read it long before the internet, and now displaying it on the bookshelf for dinner guests.  The Foundation for Economic Education features it here.  For readers wishing to free themselves from the stifling Marxist economics that our progressives use to mismanage both our national and state economies, I strongly recommend checking out FEE’s ample and informative offerings on economics and society.  See also the Mercatus Center.

America is such a blessed country that illustrates the economic principles taught by the above giants.  An example of this is the graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shown nearby.  It shows how Obama’s leftwing economic policies held back the nation’s recovery for eight straight years, and what happened during the first three years of President Trump’s administration when the straps on free markets were loosened a bit (they still need to loosen much more).

This information appeared in the 11jan20 WSJ under a piece titled ‘The Economy’s Inequality Dividend’.  When posting such compelling data that exposes and illuminates another Big Lie of the Left, it is always interesting, revealing, and entertaining to read the countering apologetics from the chorus of collectivists who dare to venture into this arena of ideas so foreign to all they have been taught.  Albeit, there are not too many of them, for here as elsewhere, discretion is still the better part of valor, especially of the misguided kind.

Coincidentally, today the 11jan20 Union published an excellent supporting column by Mr Jim Driver (here), who offered ‘Twelve Real Economic Facts’ first published by FEE.   Here we present them as published.

1. In any freely chosen economic exchange, both parties will, at least in their own minds, benefit from the exchange. This is called “Gains from Trade.”
2. The value of any good or service can only be determined by the individual human mind. This is called “Subjective Value.”
3. Nothing is free. The cost of anything that you want is what you are willing to give up, to get what you want. This is called “Opportunity Cost.”
4. Economic wealth, in a free society, does not come from “a top down planned economy created by so called experts” but from individuals’ actions that result in unplanned outcomes for the whole society. This is called “Spontaneous Order.”
5. Individuals act to maximize their own reward. This is called “Incentives.”
6. Cooperation between individuals creates value when a seller can produce a given item or service at a lower cost than the buyer would spend to produce it himself. This is called “Comparative Advantage.”
7. No one person or group knows enough to plan (and force) social outcomes, because information necessary for social order is distributed among its members and revealed only in human action. This is a “Knowledge Problem.”
8. In addition to the tangible and quantifiable effects, there are quite often invisible costs and unmet opportunities to any action or policy. These are often called “Unintended Consequences.”
9. Institutions influence the decisions that individuals make. For example, property rights by definition can only exist when ownership is vested in the individual and not in the commons. This means that “Rules Matter.”
10. Each person makes choices with the intention of improving his or her condition. This means that “As Individuals, the Actions we make are Purposeful.”
11. Voluntary association permits people of all backgrounds to interact peaceably, create value, cultivate personal character and build mutual trust. This helps create “A Civil Society.”
12. Wealth is generated whenever someone, by acting on an opportunity to gather under-used, or misused, or undiscovered resources or ideas, creates value for others. This is called “Entrepreneurship.”

RR's longtime assiduous readers will recognize that the above flies in tight formation with my credo, and the part of Rebane Doctrine published in these pages over the years.  My duty, as I see it ;-)

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

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.)

Scattershots – 28feb19 (updated 2mar19)

George Rebane

Trump won big in Hanoi.  By walking away with a smile when the Ugly Fat Kid overreached by offering to give some to get all, our president maintained his creds and caused the UFK to call a midnight news conference to claim a misunderstanding – ‘No, no, no, we didn’t demand that all the sanctions be lifted.’  Bullshit; Trump would never have left had not the UFK overplayed his hand.  Now, with visions of a prosperous Vietnam in his head, the UFK will be ready for some real give and take – I predict that he will seek the next meeting before the end of this year.  In the meantime the friendly parting will maintain the UFK’s good behavior – no testing.  All in all, a brilliant piece of foreign policy with a country that for 60+ years no other president has made any progress.

RR has concluded early and often (here) that our Millennials are America’s dumbest generation – both they and their parents were ‘educated’ in leftwing unionized public schools.  That most of them now view socialism favorably over open market capitalism gives abundant testimony that they will readily vote America into tyranny.  The culmination of dumbth indeed.

Union columnist Terry McLaughlin reminds us (here) in detail of how biased and one-sided are our lamestream media.  After two years of investigating Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia to throw the 2016 election, on 12feb19 NBC reported, “After two years and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not uncovered any direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. That's according to sources on both the Republican and the Democratic side of the aisle."  During this time the lamestream devoted more than 36 hours of intense coverage attempting to convince America that the evidence for collusion existed and was about to be released.  Instead of banner headlines for this announcement, all the lamestream outlets together basically ignored the bipartisan announcement from the Senate committee.  “But just take a moment to sit back and compare 2,202 minutes of media coverage of potential collusion with Russia — with supposedly unbiased journalists accusing a sitting American president of misconduct, lack of patriotism, impeachable offenses, or worse — to the less than one minute of coverage within the first 48 hours of an announcement that no evidence has actually been uncovered in a serious two-year bipartisan investigation, and it is abundantly clear why many Americans have lost faith in the honesty and trustworthiness of the media.”

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, our favorite manager of the masses (here), has a new book On Freedom.  There he argues that too much freedom is really not all that good for us – “What if people do not know how to find their way?” - that certain unnamed elites should really be in positions to mercifully limit our choices to only the proper ones, and then “nudge” us to the correct one before we stray too far from the social ideal, this to be prevented by structuring the country’s “choice architecture”.  While Big Brother looms large in the background, Sunstein never quite explains “which of us deserves the exalted position to design and impose nudges on others, and for what ends?” (more here)  But not to worry, after the Green New Deal gets into gear, Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and AOC will know exactly how to set up such ‘exalted positions’; all we have to do is vote correctly in 2020.

Italy will offer Universal Basic Income real soon now.  They’re going to make up the shortfall for all people earning less than their poverty threshold – but wait!  If you subsequently get a job or a better paying job, then the government will cut back you UBI payments to the extent that your earnings exceed that threshold.  Now that brilliant tactic is really going to motivate people to go work and get paid less. (more here)  Finland already had to roll up its experiment with UBI because people got real used to living on unearned handouts and only put forth effort in the black markets to increase their (untaxable) incomes.  To their benefit, even a bunch of Italy’s leftwing politicians are worried about this UBI’s impact on the national fisc which, next to Greece, is Europe’s shakiest.  The UBI was ushered in by the electorate voting for socialist Luigi Di Maio who was able to marshal Italy’s byzantine legislative machinery to launch their UBI.  That’s what enough not-too-bright voters and socialists candidates can do – given our Millennials, along with Bernie, Liz, and Kamala, we should not be too sanguine when next year rolls around.

[2mar19 update]  The crippling counters by our leftwing politicians and courts to stopping illegal entrants and contraband is having the predicted impact – more people than ever are climbing border fences and walls.  Government stats cite “The proportion of foreign nationals attempting to cross the border illegally rather than reporting to legal ports of entry has risen in the past year, according to the data. Those crossing illegally made up 73 percent of all border crossings from October 2017 to January 2018 and then rose to 83 percent for the same period of time ending on Jan. 31, 2019, NBC News reported Friday.” (more here)  Why’s that?  Well, we all know that most entrants claiming asylum don’t have a leg to stand on, and before Trump they were admitted at legal crossing points, told to appear in a US immigration court at some future date, and then turned loose never to be seen again.  Today we tell such asylum seeker to stay in Mexico until their court date comes up.  But the overwhelming share of them know they can’t qualify for asylum, so they go back to Mexico and then attempt illegal crossings somewhere down the line where they think the border is most porous.  Today they’re coming in over such porous spots at just the underside of a million a year because we can't do the right thing and build the needed wall/fence border security infrastructure.  And the anti-American Left continues to trumpet through their lamestream outlets that this does not constitute a national emergency.  (BTW, the size of an army division is about 15,000 troops.  At 80,000 illegal entrants per month, that is like an invasion force of five divisions each and every month.  And we haven’t even started reviewing the growing dollar cost of illegals in the country.)

Journalism continues to falter

George Rebane

Journalism is a lost trade (art?), attested to by the justifiably low esteem journalists are held in by the reading public.  Jacob Gallagher attempts to make this point in his ‘Journalism Is Faltering but ‘Content’ Is Thriving’, and in the process makes a self-referential blooper.  His main thesis is that content - like editorials, movies, TV shows, commentaries, …, the stuff for which you access media - will survive in spite of the palpable deterioration of the journalistic wrappers in which they are delivered.  For proof, one need only to read a newspaper or listen to a news program (yes, even Fox News) to see the loose logic relating propositions and the liberties taken with language – today no one seems to know the structure of an unambiguously communicating grammar or the definition of the words used. 

(Even RR’s comment streams contain the lamentations of some readers who eschew the semantic compactness of what to them are ‘big words’, especially in previously unencountered sequences.  As reflected in the longitudinal studies on literacy available at the National Center for Educational Statistics, most of our fellow citizens would like to avoid complex concepts, instead demand simple thoughts in simple sentences, and not even too many of those strung together, thank you very much.)

And then Gallagher steps in it by claiming that “the concept of ‘content’ rose alongside social media, beginning with the launch of Facebook in 2004.”  Well no.  The man shows the deficit in his journalistic acumen, no doubt due to his inexperience and/or recently attempted education.  In fact, the notion of content was already mature at the birth of interactive multi-media products (remember PC controlled laser-disc players?) in the early 1980s, when we were developing content (the ‘payload’) ensconced in metadata along with new and delightful UIs (user interfaces or ‘wrappers’).  For broadcasts, the metric of Content Factor was also born, measuring the time fraction of content divided by the advertised duration or time slot length of the show.  (Today CFs for most entertainment programs on commercial TV are in the 0.55 to 0.75 range.)

Journalism’s Mea Culpa?

George Rebane

Was interested to see the nearby full-page ad in the 3jan18 WSJ.  Given that ignorance, indifference, ideology, illiteracy, … are all qualities that often decorate and distinguish their ‘factual, fair, and balanced’ work products, RR has long viewed the journalism profession with a gimlet eye (here).  But now things have apparently gotten so bad that international associations for journalists openly admit that “reporters worldwide” have come to report “falsehoods”, perhaps even unwittingly, for which now organizations such as the International Center for Journalists go to great pains to advertise their ability to “empower” workers in the field to “produce reliable coverage using new technologies and best practices(sic).”  Well, then what kind of unreliable coverage have journalists been producing using their old technologies and sub-par practices?

In any case, this appears to be a step in the right direction when the industry begins to publicly admit that it has not been performing up to snuff while wallowing in the rising tide of fake news and “falsehoods”, much of it auto-generated to promote agendas and sustain favored ideological narratives.  The ICFJ website is worth visiting.  While their mission statement is commendable, methinks their orientation is not as innocent as they would have you believe.  Mostly, I wonder what are their methods of ‘empowerment’.  But since they are also funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they can’t be all bad, can they?

Racialism Rising

George Rebane

Racialism – the ideology, based on a heightened consciousness of the race of others, that promotes racial divisions and strife to hasten the breakdown of large sovereign nation-states on the road to a unified global world order.

In America there should be as little room for racism as for racialism.  We Americans should equally reject racism and racialism.  In recent years racialism has been on the rise, and is now the new rallying cry for those who want to fundamentally transform America.  In a land as large as ours there will always be some few who will exhibit their racism.  But our overall progress toward racial equality in the last decades has been under-reported as author and Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recently highlighted (here) to counter the current spate of racialist events and lamestream hysteria (see also ‘Kneeing Our National Anthem’).

Most people agree on the various definitions of racism as including “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement”. (more here)

But racialism is a useful term the definition of which is still in flux.  Many/most dictionaries take the lazy way out and define racism and racialism as being synonymous, thus wasting the label for a useful semantic in our language.  Thoughtful authors have attempted to distinguish between the two words without making much headway.  An example of this in a 2015 issue of HuffPost is Peter Schuck’s ‘Racism and Racialism Are Different’.  Therein he does the best he can with the “widespread confusion between racism, which is hostility to blacks based on their supposed inferiority, and what I call racialism, which is a heightened consciousness of the race of others.”

With my own more robust definition of racialism, I hope to avoid ambiguity and inform my readers of how I will use the term.

Those who keep up with America’s changing socio-political landscape know well that the case against racism has been well made between our shores, yet the case against racialism is muted and has been suppressed.  Actually, more than that; there are prominent political factions for whom racialism is a fundamental component of their political toolkit.

I am of the school that holds former President Barack Obama to be the pre-eminent racialist of our times, a job at which he excels and still champions.  As cultural Marxists (q.v.), he and his already realized at the turn of the millennium that racialism had been a fallow field that needed cultivation.  The history of Obama’s rising to the occasion in the ascent of his own career is meticulously detailed in the recently published dispassionate biography – Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama - by Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Garrow which is competently reviewed (here) by H.A. Scott Trask in the October 2017 issue of Chronicles.  Therein Garrow recounts and documents Obama’s own racial sensitivities in his early desire to be seen as a racially uncompromised black, even to the point of shedding his first true love – Sheila Myoshi, a multi-racial lady deemed too white to support his auto-identified “destiny” to become America’s first ‘black president’. Obama’s subsequent hitching with Michelle, who in her own words is “as black as it gets”, gave him the needed optics to climb the South Chicago political ladder.   (“If I’m going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”)

As Obama was well on his way to the Democratic candidacy and then on to be elected in 2008, prominent politicians of both parties opined that the man’s success was based on the careful nurture of his race and his racialism.  (Democrat Gerraldine Ferraro, a Clinton backer, paid with her political life for stating the obvious, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.  He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”)

That racialism is now the political tool of choice for the Left is also evident on the grassroots level if we can use the recorded sentiments of local liberals.  When I recently brought up Obama’s race-based ascent to the presidency, using the SBA set-aside Section 8 metaphor, I was immediately branded as a racist for that argument in another comment thread debating the qualifications of recent presidents.  A casual perusal of these pages quickly reveals that most leftwing RR readers are racialists, furiously gleaning the ideological harvests for any remnant of potential racial bias, thereby alleging non-existent schisms in the face of the obvious chasm which separates our widely disparate views about the coming world order.

As a coda, I want to point my readers to an excellent Other Voices commentary on racialism – ‘Deliberate Turmoil and Chaos at Every Turn’ – by Frank Chuck in the 30sep17 Union.  The man does a good job reflecting the political sentiments of many of us in this community, and, I suspect, more multitudes across our country.

Progressivism and the Certainty of Ignorance

George Rebane

One of the unambiguous tenets of a conservetarian is that collectivism, in any of its forms, is a gateway to human suffering and eventual tyranny.  Collectivists, under whichever banner they assemble – progressive, liberal, national socialist, international socialist (communist), … - will first seek to silence their foes by whatever means they are able to muster, from public proscription, government censorship, and finally by marching them to the wall.

On the path to such draconian ends, much demonstrated during the 20th century, they will attempt to justify their attacks on ideas not suitable to their agenda, they will fashion their arguments and present them in the guise of scientism – the collection of convenient unscientific assertions disguised as science.  The birth of progressivism in America used scientism – specifically in what was then called eugenics - as a companion to their social justice apologetics.

America’s union schools have carefully obliterated the history of eugenics from the history of progressivism.  Their only mention of it today is to give the lie that it was a politically motivated error of the Right seeking to establish a ruling society of the Űbermenchen.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Amity Schlaes reminds us of the details in her ‘The Progressive History of Eugenics’ wherein she also reviews two recent books on the subject.  In it she writes about how the certitude of ideology driven scientism has been used by our central planners and social engineering elites –

And that’s the trouble with reformers. They are so sure, and so wrong. How often comes clear in two new books. The first, Adam Cohen’s compelling “Imbeciles,” focuses on Buck v. Bell, the 1927 case in which the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s right to sterilize citizens it deemed mentally ill, somehow deficient or, indeed, shiftless. In the second book, “Illiberal Reformers,” Thomas C. Leonard also treats the horrifying rise of compulsory sterilization and, in a deft analysis, goes on to compare the thinking behind eugenics to other forms of supposedly enlightened policy.

Nowadays eugenics is portrayed as an unfortunate detail in the story of an otherwise glowing movement, Progressivism. What these two volumes, especially “Illiberal Reformers,” reveal is that eugenics served as a key tool of the Progressive policy makers of the 1920s. “Darwin’s ambiguity on the question of whether evolution resulted in progress or merely change left enough leeway for progressives to claim society must take charge of its own evolution,” Mr. Leonard notes. The consequences of Progressive Darwinism were policies as imprecise, superstitious and inhumane as any they superseded.

Eugenics was received by our polity as a gift from science the application of which to broad populations would immeasurably improve society.  Famous adherents of scientistic eugenics were thought leaders of the day like President Teddy Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller.  All of them celebrated the consensus of scientists that eugenics was the real deal.

(For completeness we must include Frances Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, in that list with an asterisk.  Crick decried the National Socialists’ (Nazis’) use of eugenics to justify the Holocaust and engineering humans.  Crick really saw how his discovery would lead to the new science of genomics which could use genetics to battle diseases (in- and ex-utero), benefit agriculture, and, yes, even provide designer babies.  We leave the discussion of society and genomics to another time.)

Today the Rosemary’s Baby of eugenics - the new scientism that has been introduced to compel the compliance of those lovable “poorly educated” in the sciences - is preventable global warming or climate change or some other fashionable label that histrionically calls for a controlled and massive global response that will be overseen by the progressive elites.

The Tilt of The Union

George Rebane

Some time ago I reported (here) on the results of an audit on the ideological tilt of The Union performed by the Nevada County Republican Women Federated. This was in response to our local Left claiming that our newspaper had become ‘The Tea Party Gazette’.  As usual, these know-nothings missed the boat.  The audit considered in detail the paper’s op-ed content over several months after which the NCRWF met with publisher Mr Jim Hemig to present the results.  He was surprised to find that numerically the paper had published considerably more Left than Right leaning pieces, since he stated the paper considered itself politically neutral.

Nevertheless, the meeting and presented data did make an impact, and Mr Hemig reports on that in today’s (11dec15) Union – ‘The editorial page challenge?’. Therein he announces a reader participation audit scheduled for January 2016.  The NCRWF audit is ongoing, and I’ll report updated results as they become available.  RR’s position repeated is that as a private enterprise The Union can choose its own political tilt, and grouse as we may from our own perches there is no need to demand that the newspaper succumb to someone's standard of ‘balance’ as constantly called for by our locally loud progressives.  

Ruminations – 4aug15 (updated 6aug15)

George Rebane

Progressives are the real opponents of change.  Contrary to their desperate message over the years, their very mindset is sclerotic when it comes to the change that matters in areas like entrepreneurship, invention, technology, economics, individual empowerment, and, of course, personal liberties.  Progressives' latest attempts to keep yesteryear in gear for everyone is their opposition to what has become known as the ‘sharing economy’.  This is where individuals can fill demand by joining innovative jitney services, renting out unused rooms, or offering their talents for some-time housecleaning.  Liberals from candidates, big labor, plaintiffs bar, … have mounted attacks on all these and similar initiatives by a free people offering part-time services with what they have or can do.  Anything that changes their conception of a regulated and regimented workforce is verboten.  (more here)

Most teachers are not corrigible.  A big three-year study involving thousands of teachers who attended various teacher development courses and programs concluded that school districts don’t get much of anything for the dollars they spend in sending teachers to better themselves.  70% of teachers came back unimproved or worse in their teaching performance.   “The report found that no particular approach to professional development consistently helped teachers get better. When individual teachers improved, their success didn’t appear to be linked to systemic efforts by the districts.”  That result can easily be explained by the overall percentage of teachers that fall into the academic low grade ore category. (more here)

The Conservatarian Manifesto

George Rebane

Years ago as my socio-political outlook took shape, I had a hard time fitting myself into the well-defined boxes labeled Conservative and Libertarian.  When I started writing RR and sought to spell things out as unambiguously as possible – my penchant for ‘operational definitions’ – I ran into the problem of what to call myself in the lively debates that have become the hallmark of this blog.  Since my belief system was an amalgam drawn from both camps, some years back I came up with ‘conservetarianism’ (note the spelling) as a label for it.

Well, it turns out that I’m not the only one who has had to cobble together tenets from those two political camps.  Just out is the new book The Consrvatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and fight for the Right’s future by Charles C.W. Cooke of the National Review.  (You can see an interview with him on Reason magazine here.)  From what I’ve heard about Cooke’s elucidation of this newly labeled ideology, I seem to be in accord with everything except my spelling, which I will now gladly cede to the new convention.

The hardcopy is on order, and after reading it I will cite any exceptions I take with Cooke’s work.  But in sum, I am a social animal who has been willing to remain the lone fox in the field if necessary, but nevertheless happy now that others have also come to share similar thoughts on a new and, I believe, important dimension of socio-political ideology which has finally been nationally christened.  We shall see where all this goes in the scheme of ‘right-leaning’ politics – maybe it can accrete around it a new political party to give the Republicans a run, but only if there will arise a new left-leaning party to give the Democrats equal apprehension.  That will really turn our elections into something exciting wherein voters have a greater choice.

Public Pension Punishments in a Progressive Posterchild

George Rebane

Illinois is a one of many states (e.g. California) that highlights the evils of progressivism applied wholesale.  It is worth holding up as an example of the latest problems with the trillions of dollars of unfunded public pension liabilities (much covered on RR) that are plastered over the nation’s fiscal landscape.  Today the state, a leader in corruption and crime, remains in a deep hole of public pension debt from which it hasn’t been able to dig itself out with past tax increases.  So now it’s time to raise them again.  (Here are some Illinois rankings published by their own Chicago Tribune.)

At issue is the replacement of the state’s flat income tax with a progressive version like we have in California – the more you make, the higher tax rate you pay.  And as in California, this has already caused an outmigration from the ranks of the state’s high earning residents.  But that makes no never mind to the public service employee unions like SEIU who are now being joined by some of the most misguided Christian clergy on God’s green earth.

A confused op-ed by The Union publisher

George Rebane

The Union’s new publisher, Jim Hemig, gave us his understanding of today’s media landscape.  In his 18apr14 op-ed he compared “the difference between a journalist and a blogger.”  His point was that a journalist, especially if he works for The Union, has available all kinds of sources for reporting news and uses them to present a “balanced” view in the published product.  Hemig then let us know that “bloggers often don’t have such integrity.  They only share one opinion: their own.”

He later goes on to also paint the entire online community (here we’re talking about a global resource with practically infinite content) as somehow speaking with voices that are intrinsically and ubiquitously biased, claiming that “if you really read The Union … you will find it is a balanced and a much fairer place than anywhere on the Internet (and definitely in print).”

Now I am not familiar with Mr Hemig’s background and may well be underestimating the gentleman, but this op-ed piece does give me pause as to what kind of publishing and journalistic talent our newspaper is currently brandishing.  First of all, he grossly errs in posing the initial question, putting in doubt his understanding of the structure of today’s information media.  To wit, a blogger is a person who publishes a weblog or blog, and can be a journalist, commentator (like me), affinity group (e.g. gardening) editor, or simply a family member maintaining a family information and communication repository (e.g. on Facebook).  And a journalist is just one type of wordsmith from the many who can publish his work on one or more kinds of media outlets – print newspapers and magazines, TV, radio, cable, documentary videos, online news outlets (Reuters, AP), blogs, … .  Comparing the difference between journalists and bloggers is at best failing to distinguish between the content provider and the outlet medium.

The Rebanes are long time subscribers to both the print and online editions of The Union.  The newspaper itself is a run-of-the-mill small town publication that often displays its best efforts in sometimes humorous, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes even infuriating ways.  We cannot characterize it as a career fulfillment workplace for anyone who works in the news industry.  Nevertheless, it is the most read news outlet in our community, and it is the best print medium we have and the best that our dollars can support.

The good news is that for most local thinking people The Union is but one of a hundred sources from which they regularly get their news and commentaries that offer competing viewpoints.  The paper should be considered within this perspective, and our criticism of it should not be done in the context of putting it next to the big guys like the NYT, LA Times, or Washington Post.  Most certainly the claims of any news outlet for being fair and balanced – be it Fox News or MSNBC – should be taken with a block of salt, and that includes the breast beating of our little Union.  Not every story is or can be ‘fair’ to all concerned, and most certainly every news item doesn’t come with a hidden ‘balance’ that a journalist or commentator must always dig out and reveal.  The world is not built that way, but it can be painted as such by people pushing this agenda or that – and everyone has an agenda, which reality is easily verifiable from a perusal of the so-called world class media.

In sum, The Union is Nevada County’s cosa nostra (‘our thing’) in news, let’s enjoy it as it is, and just smile when its management tries a little puffery to rebut its often gratuitous critics.

Approaches to Effective Education (updated 7aug13)

George Rebane

Our long lament with America’s education systems continues.  I was reminded of it again by a report on the entrepreneurial approach to teaching students that is rampant in South Korea.  There kids go to school during the day, and at night after coming home they go back to school, alebeit of a different type.  South Korean students are world class top performers (#2 after Shanghai), and are nudged into that status by parents who pay extra for extra tutoring for their little darlings.

South Korea is full of private tutoring academies (hagwons) run by entrepreneurs and master teachers.  Because of that South Korea is a literate and numerate nation – 93% high school graduation rate, ours is 77% - this means their high schoolers can read and cypher, while a good half of ours fall short.

The hagwons are highly competitive, they advertise and publish their students’ test score averages and college admission rates.  Private teachers are continually rated by their students whom they correctly treat as their customers.  But even with higher ratings, most private teachers still strain to make as much as public school teachers, however many of them do make goodly fortunes.  The outstanding teachers are treated as we would treat rock stars, using online technologies they know how to leverage their talents.

The country’s leading private teacher is Mr Kim Ki-Hoon who runs a 30 person teaching and publishing company.  Most of Mr Kim’s lectures are delivered online, and he supplements these lectures with his own texts that he self-publishes.  His personal income is about $4M annually.  Neither Mr Kim nor his thousands of colleagues/competitors are certified by the state.  The hagwons are run as a pure meritocracy in a free market with the non-performers being ruthlessly weeded out.  (more here)

“Come, let us reason together …”

"The time has come," the Walrus said./ To talk of many things:/ Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—/ Of cabbages—and kings—/ And why the sea is boiling hot—/ And whether pigs have wings."  Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

George Rebane

Older readers will recall President Lyndon Johnson’s famous use of that phrase as he invited opposing politicians to join him in deal making.  Although history shows that after ‘reasoning’ with ol’ Lyndon you almost always walked out scratching your head, counting your fingers, and wondering after the health of your wallet.  But it’s hard to say no to your counterparty when he issues a civil invitation to come and reason together about a disagreement you may have.  It’s the penultimate invitation during a dispute that quickly achieves ultimate status, the more publicly it is issued.

In these pages we now have a significant history of debating literally every issue under the sun (well, almost); I have yet to find a single subject that has been out of bounds.  Now that doesn’t mean that we always conduct ourselves in ways that generate light instead of contributing to global warming.  But most of us do try to put our best foot forward instead of in our mouths.

In spite of that, we more often than not wind up talking way past each other, realizing that we are really trying to convince the anonymous middle road reader – I’m assured that they do exist – who pores over our deft arguments that firmly nail our stand.  Quite often these arguments wind up sounding daft instead.  So I’m going to list some steps that in my field have almost always led to a working compromise or even a meeting of the minds.  And applying this discipline to the business side of things, I have seen amazement in people new to the approach.  They are astounded by how easy it is to come to a closure – whether that means a working agreement, or a detailed understanding why none is possible, and where the ‘give’ must occur to make progress.

My consternation has always been that so few people understand or use this straightforward method to sort out their differences.  And, as you may have guessed, I have found the people of various hues of collectivism to be most resistant to this process.  So here are the steps –

1.    What’s your objective or purpose in resolving the problem/dispute.  This can be stated in words.  All parties don’t necessarily have to agree on the objective, but they should know what each is trying to achieve.
2.    How will you measure progress/achievement?  What is the metric that will satisfy or confirm for you that you are either making progress or achieving your objective?  The metric can be a proxy – e.g. number of marriage licenses issued for, say, the number of new households formed, or for the survival of the institution of marriage.
3.    It would be useful if the parties agreed on the metric, even though their stated objective or purpose would be at variance.
4.    Are some kinds of re/solutions unacceptable?  Are there any constraints on the alternative solutions to be considered? What are they?
5.    Generating alternative solutions is the hard part, and anyone can now participate, whether they agree on the objective or the evaluating metric.
6.    Are there any data sources for input to the metric that will not be accepted – i.e. how will the input data be vetted.  Here one can posit that some data set is correct, and return to its acceptance at a later time.  Hypothetical data can also be used to determine the sensitivity of the metric to variations in or accuracy of the data – i.e. does it make a significant difference?
7.    Put the ‘solutions’ through the metric.  Calculate the value(s) of the metric(s) and see what kind of changes in the solution alternatives will help maximize (or minimize) the metric.  At this point all parties should be closing in on agreement, or knowing why their effort is turning out fruitless.  Learning will have taken place.
8.    If there is a will, go back a few steps, change things and try again.  But stick to the paradigm.

What if your counterpart doesn’t want to play this game?  What if he just wants to shout his (baseless?) opinion past you.  Then you know he’s not serious and has an agenda in the debate not based on any acceptable form of reason, and that he’s probably there to jack you around.

Once more –

1.    State objective/purpose
2.    Select/define progress measure
3.    Constrain solution/outcome alternatives
4.    Generate/present alternatives
5.    Crank data for solution(s) through metric
6.    Evaluate results

The Antifragile Taleb

If you see fraud, and you don’t shout fraud, you are a fraud. – NN Taleb

George Rebane

Among other things Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a flâneur, mathematician, probabilist, systems thinker extraordinaire, philosopher, elitist, and most certainly a curmudgeon.  I ran into him years ago when doing some research in financial engineering.  He had just quit being a successful Wall Street trader, and got a job as a college professor exploring and disseminating (mostly his) ideas about “decision making under opacity.”  The more I read him, the more I wanted to be like him when I grew up – so I became his student.

Readers may have heard about Taleb when they first ran into the now well-worn notion of a ‘black swan’ event (q.v. and here and here).  Besides numerous technical papers on things like low probability events and infrequent happenings, he has written three books for the intelligent reader – the man is also extremely well-read, well-traveled, speaks several languages, and does not readily suffer fools nor write for the thinking impaired.  Fooled by Randomness (2001) was his initial foray in which he introduced Black Swan to a wider audience.  Because the book also introduced realworld risk taking in a new and revealing light, it was immediately picked up by the investment and banking communities, and we began seeing ‘black swan’ in the popular press.

His next book – surprisingly titled Black Swan (2007) - expanded on the topics of risk that now reached into public policy making, and embraced people familiar with behavioral economics.  Somewhere in there he caught the attention of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, who along with Tversky RIP, founded behavioral economics, and documented the foibles and fables of human decision making in his recent Thinking, Fast and Slow (2012), a must read in its own right.

And after letting a few more years pass and his popularity (notoriety?) grow, Taleb decided to gather his own near and far thinking into one volume that he purports as his summa, Antifragile – Things That Gain from Disorder (2012).  The book runs over 570 pages with diagrams and squiggly laden technical appendixes.  In the process of covering the extension of his ideas to what Taleb calls antifrigility, he takes the reader through a wonderful journey of western philosophy going back past the Greeks.  Heavy emphasis is shown to Mediterranean civilizations since Taleb is an immigrant from Christian Lebanon, and all things Levantine (including things Arabic) are firmly embedded in his double helix.  But the reader also learns about fine foods and wine available in various hideaways all over Europe, as he is regaled with the inner workings of complex systems that have been intelligent enough to adapt and even thrive in hostile environments – Man happens to be one of them.

MOOCs and the education revolution (addended 9jan13)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my 4jan13 KVMR commentary.  I last covered MOOCs in my 21aug12 post.  This post has an addendum that explains in more detailed how intelligent MOOCs can be designed to deliver complex instructional sequences that are not available in traditional learning environments. ]

Let’s consider higher education for bit tonight, especially its cost, relevance, and the impact of learning technologies on traditional ways of delivering education products.   Our post-secondary education and its graduates are the national jewel that affects every American’s quality of life.  As a stake in the ground, consider that our population growth has slowed to under one percent per year, which still translates to adding almost 3M people annually.  With demographic lags, we currently pump out about 4M young people a year into our job markets.

Everyone knows that they will earn more, the more post-high school education they get.  And everyone is told they are college material, and are encouraged to borrow money and apply for scholarships to pay for college.  This encouragement has been so successful that outstanding student loans now amount to over $1T nationwide.  On the whole, it’s hard to see how much of this debt will be paid off given that many or most college students select majors that don’t teach marketable skills.  The Atlantic reports that “53% of recent college grads are under- or unemployed”.

Distinguished professor Richard Vedder of Ohio University tells us, “In 2009, spending by Americans for post-secondary education totaled $461B, an amount 42% greater than in 2000, after accounting for inflation. This $461B is the equivalent of 3.3% of total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and an amount greater than the total GDP of countries such as Sweden, Norway and Portugal.”, adding that  “…more than 17 million college graduates were ‘underemployed’ in 2008.”   For many college graduates ‘Would you like fries with that?’ is a recurring theme across the land.

Many educators and employers, especially those who can’t find enough qualified workers, tell us that not everyone needs to go into debt getting a mushy major.   Most high school graduates are not ready for a college education, and would do much better for their careers by learning a marketable skill set that is confirmed by various accepted levels of certification.  And to do that, more and more young people and older workers needing to change careers are turning to online education and training courses.  The acronym to remember is MOOC – massively open online course.

Singularity Signposts – IBM’s TrueNorth advances cognitive computing

George Rebane

A few days ago IBM published a very short paper titled simply 10¹⁴.  It summarized the first successful testing of TrueNorth, IBM’s cognitive computing testbed funded under DARPA’s SyNAPSE.  That program “calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales to biological levels, using a cognitive computing architecture with 10¹⁰ neurons (10 billion) and 10¹⁴ synapses (100 trillion, based on estimates of the number of synapses in the human brain) to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.”

It so happens that the human brain contains about 10¹⁰ neurons and 10¹⁴ synapses in a system of relatively few highly organized and repetitive pattern recognition structures arranged into hierarchies.  This is a major advance in the current fanout of intelligent machines that seek to replicate the functioning of the human brain.  Right now TrueNorth runs only about a 1,500 times slower than the human brain.  But that will soon change.

I am currently in the middle of Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind (just published) wherein he goes into great detail on the type of structure and capabilities of a neuromorphic machine like TrueNorth.  Therefore I was happy to see this concurrent announcement of the next step toward Singularity from IBM, the company that also brought us Watson (here) and is now marketing that into several application areas beginning with medicine.

These advances need to be viewed in the context of today’s accelerating technology, and its disturbing impact on the workforces of developed countries (more here).  Their greater effect on humanity is already very difficult to predict beyond giving rise to the obvious redundancies of mediocre human talents.

Lamestream in the Limelight (updated 6jun12)

George Rebane

Ramirez nails the latest.  And did you hear – well, actually it was hard to do that – how the those self-adulating lamestream journalists all went silent the instant that the district attorney released evidence supporting Zimmerman against the hooligan who was pounding his head into the concrete.  Then all the spigots opened again when the judge revoked his bail on misrepresentation of available cash charges.

And now our President, you know the one who’s not a socialist, has awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom to big time American socialist Dolores Huerta.  “The Heritage Foundation’s Lachlan Markay reported this week that President Obama has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dolores Huerta, a labor activist and honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.  As Markay notes, DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”  This is a story the mainstream media declined to cover. But Heritage is getting the story out there regardless.”

Just another verse from the lamestream’s theme song, ‘The Sound of Silence’.  I could go on, but you get the idea …

[6jun12 update] A more significant item 'overlooked' by and in the lamestream is Alabama's passage of the nation's first anti-Agenda21 legislation.  This is especially significant because of the chorus of the nation's useful idiots (especially of the local kind) who claim that Agenda21 is only a figment of fevered rightwing imaginations and has no bearing on America's property rights and individual freedoms.  On The New American we read from 'Alabama Adopts First Official State Ban on UN Agenda 21' -

The Alabama Senate Bill (SB) 477 legislation, known unofficially among some supporters as the “Due Process for Property Rights” Act, was approved unanimously by both the state House and Senate. After hesitating for a few days, late last month Republican Governor Robert Bentley finally signed into law the wildly popular measure — but only after heavy pressure from activists forced his hand.

Virtually no mention of the law was made in the establishment press. But analysts said the measure was likely the strongest protection against the UN scheme passed anywhere in America so far. The law, aimed at protecting private property rights, specifically prevents all state agencies and local governments in Alabama from participating in the global scheme in any way.

"The State of Alabama and all political subdivisions may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to 'Agenda 21,' " the law states, adding a brief background on the UN plan hatched at the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro.

Ruminations - 16mar2012

George Rebane

We watched a DVRd recent ’60 Minutes’ piece on a fifty year program by Texas ranchers to conserve over 150 African game species on their own range lands.  Through their own efforts they have taken contributions from the nation’s zoos and built up the herds/flocks, in the process saving many species that were on the brink of extinction in their native Africa.  The ranchers help pay for this by providing controlled hunting under the aegis of state and federal laws.  The animals are thriving and the enterprise has been a win-win-win all around.

Enter the eco-idiots, a breed that marbles our nation like a disease.  There is a faction that has been working diligently to make hunting of these animals illegal.  Their imminent success promises to shut down the entire conservation program/business.  Their only ‘reason’, besides rank insanity, is that the animals should be taken back to their native Africa and put on nature conserves where dysfunctional governments will allow poachers to kill them off.  In short, the animals should only live in their native habitat that can no longer protect them from extinction – period.

The program's nausea factor was increased by the female correspondent continuing to ask each rancher interviewee ‘If you love and want to save these animals, then why do you allow hunters to come and shoot them?’  The obvious economic answers washed off her little brain like water off a duck’s back.  Now consider the millions of like-minded viewers out there for whom such reportage makes sense.  Pass the barf bag please.

Anthony Watts has published another substantial summary of the scientific controversy over the now notorious temperature ‘hockey stick’ cooked up by Michael Mann over twelve years ago.  Locally, Russ Steele has been tracking the political controversy over anthropogenic global warming (AGW) that has become a public policy control tool for Agenda21 politicians, and article of fervent faith to the scientifically dimwitted.  The review of Mann’s latest book on this controversy again illustrates the sleaze in ‘the debate (about AGW) is over’ that is promoted by the politically correct grant hungry ‘scientists’ and their government handlers.

It is remarkable that the AGW question has not been submitted to a small panel of acknowledged experts who are independent of the government gravy train; a panel similar to the one assembled after the space shuttle Challenger disaster.  The amount of draconian public policy that has already been made by nations, and the more that is contemplated has all been done in the face of a constant stream of evidence that shows the error of the original and revised AGW conclusions.  Would such an issue of global importance be swept under the rug if it were not the only game in town that allows the socialist one-worlders to impose their diktats on the rest of us while we destroy thriving economies on the road to their new world order?

We are attending a Mercatus Center conference in Scottsdale.  As supporters of that institute at George Mason University, we have benefitted from their research into public policy issues that seek to buttress the preservation of rights summarized in The Bastiat Triangle (q.v.).  Of late I have become more and more impatient with what conservatives have traded for progress – namely, preaching homilies to the choir when they assemble (see my ongoing hissy fits about ‘Candyass Republicans’).  At these meetings we are regaled with speeches and presentations that document and memorialize noble accomplishments of free enterprise achieved under the umbrella of liberty.  We are again told how the future would be brighter for all, were we to successfully contain the many-headed monster of collectivism.  But everyone attending such conferences already knows this material chapter and verse, and that is why they wind up only being kumbayahs for conservatives.

This time, instead of having our bellies rubbed one more time, I would like to hear of some, or even any smidgeon of progress made in halting socialism and successfully educating our electorate, then students to reject the ‘solution by redistribution’ messages that originate from the Party of the Fixed Pie and wash across the land.  And if there is no such good news to report, then tell us what we can do to advance liberty and change direction.  Absent that, why gather us together to attend what can only be characterized as the moral equivalent of a wake?

Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award

George Rebane

The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that it has named Dr Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for 2011.  The announcement itself begins –

NEW YORK, March 15, 2012—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. His work serves as the standard method for handling uncertainty in computer systems, with applications ranging from medical diagnosis, homeland security and genetic counseling to natural language understanding and mapping gene expression data. His influence extends beyond artificial intelligence and even computer science, to human reasoning and the philosophy of science.

The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. It is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, whose 100th anniversary will be celebrated in June at the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration that includes 34 past Turing Award winners along with Pearl.

"Like Alan Turing himself, Pearl turned his thinking to constructing procedures that might be harnessed to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence," said Vint Cerf, chair of the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration, and a former ACM Turing Award recipient. "His accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning, and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine.'" Cerf pointed to Pearl’s innovation as a quantum leap from Turing’s "test" dating to the 1950s, when Turing set out to discover if machines could think. "Pearl's work on reasoning with uncertainty as well as his game˗changing contributions to machine reasoning about causality have had a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science, and statistics," Cerf said.

The rest of the announcement may be read here.

Judea Pearl and I first became acquainted as colleagues on various defense research projects during the 1970s when he consulted for the small ‘black studies’ company that I headed during that period.  Subsequently our families became friends and over the years we spent many evenings in exciting discussions and song (Judea on guitar and me on the keyboard - Judea is an excellent musician in voice, choral, and several instruments.).  It was Judea who convinced me to complete my doctorate and join his small troupe of students at UCLA working on the various research tasks that served as the halo around the magnificent tour de force that Judea Pearl presented to the world when he showed how Bayesian networks could be constructed and correctly computed.

Once his 1988 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference was published, Bayes nets became and have remained the state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.  Bayesian inference now is the standard in all applications that required correct probabilistic reasoning, decisions under uncertainty, and management of risk - in short in all human endeavors.  Every field that has not embraced what Pearl started with Bayes is now scrambling to catch up.

I have long had the honor of calling Judea Pearl my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.  Those of us who had the good fortune to recognize early his genius and accomplishments were amply rewarded by what he taught us, and how he guided our individual contributions (my own humble efforts were in machine learning and causality).  It is most appropriate that Judea now joins the pantheon of the recognized greats in computer science. 

‘Rural Myths’ – don’t worry, be happy (updated 2mar12)

George Rebane

There is no question that governments at all levels have become less efficient from the taxpayers’ viewpoint.  This inefficiency is felt from many quarters and with respect to applied metrics, ranging from ‘bang per buck’, through layers of onerous regulations and mandates, to the ongoing removal of freedoms often through gratuitous criminalizations.

We live in a county that, on the whole, is fiscally well managed.  However, in recent years many of us have started to notice some pretty significant lapses in how our elected officials do business.   As examples, we may consider the string of bad decisions made during the recent AtPac lawsuit (q.v.), the demonstrated and endured lack of competency in the county counsel’s office, and our county’s official discounting/denial of its unfunded pension obligations.  On all of these, the inquiring citizen faces a phalanx of tightly circled wagons, and is ridiculed for bringing up individual issues.

The portent of the county’s unfunded liabilities are undoubtedly the biggest sword hanging over our taxable heads.  The amount that the county will have to pay out in the future (the out-years) is actually a complex calculation, and depends on not only the legal obligation to the public service retireds, but also on how much CalPERS will have in our account.  We have to remember that PERS is just an investment manager for the retirement funds the county remits to it.  PERS has no obligation to do anything except disperse what is in the Nevada County’s account.  (And then we are in a risk pool with a couple of hundred other jurisdictions like the profligate City of Bell, which is a whole other dimension of risk.)

This account may go up or down, depending on the vagaries of the securities markets and how astute the PERS portfolio managers are.  Their obligation as a fiduciary is only to do their best, come what may, and also to tell us their best estimate of what our unfunded part is when payments come due.  And that is where the problems start.  Local jurisdictions all over the country are basically in arrears, and many cities and counties are on the brink of Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

In California, Stockton is our next city that is prepared to file.  The San Francisco Chronicle has a more complete report on the entire situation in the state, and it isn’t pretty.

Added to the above calculations we have at least one “side fund” and yet to be explained amounts of monies due that are not shown on the county’s financial statements.  The situation is murky indeed, and our electeds are not exactly leaning forward to clear up the obligations that are facing us.  What I would like to see is a chart like the one below that shows by year Nevada County’s total known and anticipated obligations with error brackets showing the high-to-low range.

For more a higher level perspective, we recall the 2009 quote by Mr Ron Seeling, Chief Actuary of CalPERS –

"I don't want to sugarcoat anything. We are facing decades without significant turnarounds in assets, decades of …unsustainable pension costs of between 25 percent of pay for a miscellaneous plan and 40 to 50 percent of pay for a safety plan …unsustainable pension costs. We've got to find some other solutions.”

And things have gotten worse since then.

The Value of Stereotyping

George Rebane

Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full of writing instruments more often seen in the shirt pockets of male engineers than in the pockets of other men.

Stereotyping has gotten a bad rap in our society, and its use is roundly criticized in the public forum.  However, stereotyping, so as to assign or exclude someone from membership in a given class, is built in to almost every critter that lives on this planet.  Why?  Simply because it is a low cost survival technique that has evolved in all species to simplify quick decisions about the famous ‘Three F’ functions – feed, fight, or mount - important to everyone.

But if you understand the underpinnings of stereotyping, it can be a valuable tool in making all kinds of decisions, and also serve as a mirror for better understanding yourself.  I was motivated to write this piece when recently reading Daniel Kahneman’s monumental Thinking, Fast and Slow which dances around the subject without getting into the nitty-gritty of it because of the little math involved.  Kahneman, recent Nobelist and co-father of behavioral economics with the late Amos Tversky, is also a giant in the field of psychology.  In that field stereotyping comes up under the forbidding label of representativeness (q.v. – which is short for quod vide or ‘which see’, and I’ve concluded that its modern version is simply ‘google it’.)

Now consider seeing a good looking woman, finely coiffed, beautifully dressed, and dripping with expensive jewelry, getting out of a chauffeured limousine in front of a fancy restaurant.  You wonder if she’s a member of the currently notorious ‘1%’.  More particularly, what are the chances (friendly word for ‘probability’) that she is a member of that exclusive class, given she has some of the stereotypical characteristics of that class that you just observed?  If you had been facing the other way and your friend told you that a woman just got out a car behind you; then without seeing her, what would you answer if he mused whether the woman belonged to the '1%'?

Christmas in 1949

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 16 December 2011.]

‘Tis the season for Christmas stories, so I’m going to tell you about my first Christmas in America.  The year was 1949.  Dad, mom, and I had arrived here in May on a troopship packed with east European refugees.  All of us had gone through WW2 on the wrong side, and then spent the last four years in refugee camps in Germany.  We arrived here with three suitcases and the clothes on our backs – no language, penniless, and literally no idea what was going to happen next when we got off the boat.

By December mom, dad, and I had gone through a hectic summer on a Connecticut chicken farm and were now living in a rented room with a shared bathroom.  It was located across the street from a noisy bar in downtown Willimantic, a poor New England ‘threadmill town’ that in 1949 already looked long of tooth.  Dad and mom had found work in the big threadmill as thread machine loaders – mom started working the day shift and dad was on the night shift.

Actually, mom had spent the summer in Essex as a dishwasher in a café, while dad and I worked on the chicken farm near Danielson.  Without going into the gory details, mom had a heart problem, and the extra heavy work in the threadmill did her in.  She spent most of the fall of 1949 in the hospital.

Early after starting fourth grade that fall, I wandered into the Willimantic fire department, drawn by the bright red fire trucks on display every afternoon.  My less than perfect English gave me away, and after the firemen quizzed me, they ‘adopted’ me.  Since my father was asleep during the day, there was little for me to do in our room except wake him up, therefore I was told to report to the firehouse every day after school for a hot meal, do a few light chores around the big fire engines, and play with the duty Dalmatian that was a resident of almost every fire house in those days.  My father approved the arrangement, and the firemen became my extended family to make up for the one I seldom saw during those months.  In spite of everything, that fall was exciting for a nine-year-old, I even got to ride on the fire truck responding to a couple of small fires.

As the weather got colder and the New England snows came, I looked forward to Christmas because, well, I had always looked forward to Christmas.  Even in the refugee camp it had been a festive time of music, hand-made decorations, Christmas tree, special church services, hope for a renewed life, and, of course, the anticipation of my present.  But this Christmas was going to be different because my mom would not be home until after the holidays, and dad would only get off on Christmas Day.  I knew that at dad’s $40 per week, presents were out.  Refugee kids become money savvy at an early age.

But I was also part of the fire department, and there was plenty to do to decorate and prepare the fire house for Christmas.  I was pretty much blown away by all the lights and bright shiny things and wreaths and boughs and the big Christmas tree that were part of an American Christmas.  The local Lutheran church had also taken us under their wing, and going to the Advent services was a real introduction to American Christmas music.  It was amazing how much more went on in an American church, especially during the holidays, than at the Estonian church that we had attended in the camp.

About a week before Christmas we found out that mom would be released from the hospital, and we would all be together in our first real home in America at 38 North Street, Willimantic, Connecticut, second floor.  With mom on the mend and expecting to go back to work soon after the holidays, things were again looking up.  Dad and mom were already talking of better jobs which would let us move into a real apartment with a bathroom.  We all felt that the way to an American future was beginning to take shape.

Then a week before Christmas my teacher told me that I was invited to a special Christmas party with a Santa Claus to be held at school.  I remember walking back to school through the snow in the evening.  The room was full of kids I didn’t know, there was a Santa Claus, and when it was my turn, he handed me a toy filling station with a garage and pump island on it.  It was used, but still in good working order.  I was more than a bit embarrassed by this, and walked home carrying the cumbersome filling station.

What had stunned me was that this was a Christmas party for poor kids, and I had been singled out as a poor kid.  But I knew that they had gotten something terribly wrong.  During and after the war I had seen plenty of kids and families who were really poor.  And I knew, that especially on this Christmas, I was definitely not a poor kid.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Merry Christmas.

The Systemic Train Wreck of the American Middle Class

George Rebane

“The truth is that we don’t know how to fix the US labor market – we are in uncharted territory,” says Peter Orszag, Mr Obama’s former budget director, now a vice-chairman of Citi. “It would help to spend more on retraining and on infrastructure and to have a more rational immigration system. But these wouldn’t fundamentally transform the situation for the middle class ... It is not yet clear what, if anything, could.”

This is how Edward Luce concludes ‘Can America regain most dynamic labour market mantle?’ in the 11dec11 Financial Times.  The article itself presents an excellent analysis of the systemic problems in the American workforce which have long been delineated in these pages (to a blizzard of reproach and denial from our Leftwing readers).

While President Obama and his liberal congressional cadres are out there demagogging the decline of the middle class as the fault of capitalism and the Republicans, the inescapable facts point to much deeper and more serious reasons why our middle class workforce is in irreversible decline.  None of it, of course, will make a dent in the herd of voters who are convinced that it is the system that is working against their right to sell for ‘fair wages’ whatever marginal or worthless skills they have left in their kit.  Such is the sum and stuff of populism.  But in a deeper sense they are right – it is ‘the system’ of 21st century Earth that is definitely against them.

And as Orzag eerily echoes the 1939 lament to Congress of FDR’s SecTreas Morgenthau (“… we simply don’t know what to do.”), no one has a plan to reverse this fundamental trend - it is not certain that such a plan even exists.  And by that I mean that neither the Republicans nor Democrats have put anything on the table, or discussed in their vaunted think-tank journals anything that softens the inevitable impact of advancing technology and a competitive global workforce on the expanded panoply of ‘rights’ on which the American worker has come to believe he has a perpetual draw.

Before the developed western countries do stabilize in some new competitive arrangement within the global economy, then to the extent that each of us got into socialized hock there will be hell to pay.  But then you already knew that, didn't you?