Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 2dec24 (updated)

George Rebane

Trump’s cabinet picks are overwhelmingly on the mark by my lights.  However, there are a couple of them who are arguably inappropriate for their assigned jobs.  Former congress critter Tulsi Gabbard is a nice lady, and no doubt has many talents which do not include the executive experience and required knowledge base to become Director of National Intelligence.  The DNI oversees 18 of nation’s top intelligence agencies and is responsible for summarizing much of what the president sees on a daily basis.  There are many others more suitable for the job.  And Lori Chavez-DeRemer is an abysmally poor choice for SecLabor.  She is on record as the most pro-union Republican and supports the Protecting the Right to Organize Act which is a devious piece of legislation that the unions use to enforce workers to unionize against their will.  Her confirmation in that job puts a fox to guard the hen house.

Speaking of the cosmos and an ontology that has an excellent chance to make sense of it, I offer for your attention a video on some important ongoing research in that field of enquiry.  Dr Michael Levin of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University has recorded a long podcast summarizing the current status of this research – ‘Self-constructing bodies, collective minds: the intersection of CS, cognitive bio, and philosophy’.  To me it was an extremely illuminating cum mind-blowing presentation.  I have long thought that at its primal level the cosmos (i.e. ‘what is’) is really an amalgam of evolving patterns at many levels of intelligence that are variously structured into a universe which is then seen as distinct realities by its countless parts (patterns) observing/seeking their own foundations.  Levin’s work is the first I’ve encountered that puts my hazy mental meanderings on a more solid footing.  The next thing I need to do is take the time to view the whole thing again, and make notes.  More to be said about it later.  For those interested in these concepts and questions, I introduce you to the bleeding edge of such thoughts.

[update]  Joe pardons son Hunter and logs one more gigantic lie to the legion already on his record.  Looking in the rear-view mirror we all should have seen this coming.  The pardon is a required ‘Stay out of Jail’ card for the entire Biden family.  I can hear Hunter telling his pop ‘if I’m going down, you all are going down.’  Hunter knows enough to send a lot of people up the river, and if he is now hauled into court again, you can bet the ranch that he’ll sing like a bird.

Election Reflections

The sense to let things settle.  Especially when the public, or the private, sea is most turbulent.  There come whirlwinds into human traffic, storms of passion, when it is wise to seek a safe harbor with smoother waters: many times is an evil made worse by the remedies used.  Gracian #138

George Rebane

As we sit in wait for the election of our lifetime, many of us are in a cold sweat as to what may be our country’s fate if the neo-Marxist Left prevails this upcoming Tuesday.  Our Left’s not so hidden agenda is to remove the United States as the main impediment to global governance.  It does this by fostering drastically flawed policies for conducting the country’s economy, education, and foreign policy (to include blatantly porous borders).  The Left’s inventory of governance deficits is large and continues to grow, immune to ongoing appeals of reason and historical evidence of their failures wherever these have been implemented.

Today I will focus my screed on the Left’s successful attempts to put in play a malformed economy that is accepted by an alarmingly large share of the country’s (lightly read) electorate as having fixed the Trump legacy, if we are to believe the polls.  And specifically I want to highlight the entire notion of the Left’s goal to implement wage/price controls (“price gouging”) across the land should they also dominate Congress.  They have convinced a large contingent of us that Kamala’s economic plan (what plan? where?) is backed over Trump’s by scores of economists from sea to shining sea.

Longtime RR readers know my assessment of economics as a field of study and informer of policy.  Most certainly there is nothing scientific about economics when it comes to quantitative models designed to predict the future – i.e. contain equations with time as the independent variable.  Wherever such models have been applied, they have shown themselves to be woefully inadequate for the job for reasons I have detailed many times.  Yet they persist, perhaps serving the economists’ ongoing desire to be accepted into the more respectable community of science. 

In this regard I offer the celebrated British macro-economist Lord John Maynard Keynes as an example of one who did not understand the impact of wage/price controls and gave us his ‘demand side’ model of an economy which continues to infect the thinking of government planners all over the world.  His economics began to fray in the 60s and 70s when governments’ demand infusion policies did nothing to mitigate stagflation.  However, leftwingers like Barack Obama gave Keynesianism another chance after the 2008-09 recession, and demonstrated to the world how such demand based economic policies gave rise to the most impeded and slowest recovery in the history of US recessions.

Getting back to wage/price controls.  It is easy to show that anyone who continues to believe that wage/price controls will increase the quality of life in an economy is way past those who still believe in a flat earth.  At least the flat earthers can stand on a hill and point to the surrounding horizons to demonstrate that the earth is always flat from here to there.  The true believers in w/p controls have never had such a hill to stand on.  Theirs is a pabulum-based body of evidence that crumbles under any serious examination.

The more successful economists have been those who interpret economic behaviors in terms of very apparent and recorded behaviors of individuals when presented with economic choices and decisions.  Successful economists of this stripe have been men like Smith, Bastiat, von Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, and Freedman.

Henry Hazlitt contributed to a widespread understanding of economics with the publication of Economics in One Lesson (1946), a paperback translated into over ten languages with which he intended to attract readers put off by Friedrich Hayek’s more dense and massive classic, Road to Serfdom (1944).  (The highly recommended Hazlitt tome is now in the public domain and available here along with a chapters summary here.)

This September’s issue of the Hillsdale College Imprimis (here) features an updated reprise of the Hazlitt essay ‘The Dangers of Price Controls’ which also appeared in the very first issue of Imprimis in 1972.  (Imprimis is a monthly pamphlet on governance and cultural issues that is subscribed by 6.6M people worldwide.)  The essay opens with –

The first thing to be said about price and wage fixing is that it is harmful at any time and under any conditions. It is a giant step toward a dictated, regimented, and authoritarian economy. It makes impossible arrangements that both sides are willing to agree to. It sets aside contracts that have already been made in good faith. If an employer wishes to give a man a raise in pay, and the man deserves it, he is nonetheless forbidden to do it under the new regulations. This is a grave abridgment of individual liberty. … Price and wage fixing does harm even if there is no inflation. In a free economy prices are constantly changing. They are changing to reflect changes in supply and demand, in costs, and in a hundred other conditions. Some prices are going up, other prices are going down. If an effort is made to freeze prices and wages exactly where they are, it immediately disturbs the relationship of prices and comparative profit margins, which decides what things will be made and what quantities they will be made in. It upsets the process by which the free market decides how thousands of different commodities and services are to be made in the proportions in which people want them.

So now I and those of my persuasion sit here holding our breaths for Tuesday night when we may receive a hint of the kind of future that awaits us all.

Problemito por favor – Semicircle Perimeter (appended)

George Rebane

For a little relief from the travails of the election season, I offer a little bagatelle for your intellectual entertainment – something provided by neither candidates nor commentators during these last couple of years.  This jumped from my fevered brain one night as I was noodling over some candidate problems for Techtest 2025 coming up next spring.

From the figure we see a green semicircle of radius R with center at O in which resides the smaller blue semicircle of radius r with center at E anchored, as shown, on the right end D of the large semicircle’s diameter.  From the left end A of the diameter issues the red line AC which is tangent to the small semicircle at B and terminates on the circumference of the large semicircle at C.  The only data available is the value of R.  The task at hand is to find the value of r and the length L of the line which is equal to the perimeter length of the small semicircle, or demonstrate that no such solution is feasible.

At an appropriate time in the future I will append this post with the solution, and also give you immediate feedback if you post your solution as a comment or email it to me.

[4nov24 addendum]  Well that didn’t take long; we have some very astute readers led by Efox who submitted the correct solution in his 232pm comment.  What made me smile was the description of his approach using Excel™.  We would call it the direct bigger hammer method.  He correctly argued that a solution is indeed feasible and immediately recognized the scalability of the problem which allowed him to deduce that r must be a fixed fraction k of the given radius R – i.e. r = kR.  He then extracted a relevant algebraic equation from the geometry that contained both R and r – see the first equation below the figure.  Realizing that an analytical solution for r would be too tedious to pursue, he got out Excel and used his bigger (“old fashioned”) hammer by inserting a numerical value for R and then kR for r, and then started incrementally varying k until his equation was satisfied with the k interpolated to yield at least a five-place decimal accuracy.  Bravo.

E pluribus unum – Really? Still? (Reprised)

George Rebane

As we enter the home stretch of this election season, with both sides agreeing that this is the election to prevent the other side from taking the nation down the road to terminal evil, we still hear some good-hearted and/or dim-witted public figures hopefully assuring us that ‘there is more that unites us than that which separates us.’

Four years ago during our last presidential election year the same shibboleth was heard across the land, and we all know how the 2020 election united Americans and left us with a four-year bitter taste as one after another of our institutions were shown to have surreptitiously put their politically biased thumbs on the scale of a democratic election.  After a four-year downward spiral we find ourselves having come around and again trying to reach for the golden ring.

During the summer of 2020 I decided to take a more measured look at the things our polarized citizenry holds in common and compare them with the things that irredeemably separate us.  I summarized my findings in the 1aug20 post titled ‘E Pluribus Unum – Really? Still?’ (here).  So let’s reprise the inventory of the salient things in question.

Scattershots – 27sep24 (updated 29sep24)

George Rebane

The Air Force, and presumably the other services, are actively reducing the number of white males going into their respective officer corps.  All of it is part and parcel of implementing the in-service DEI programs in both training and operations that have been so destructive to morale and the resulting enlistment rates that have left our military woefully understaffed and short of qualified  personnel.  Much of this has come to light through documents obtained from the Air Force by the Daily Caller News Foundation. (more here)  These outline how the AF has “prioritized diversity and inclusion programs” since 2022 in its college ROTC programs seeking to minimize the number of white males who may wish to make military a career.  This is yet another of the multitude of anti-American policies that the evil Democratic Party has foisted upon our country.  (Full disclosure: I went through UCLA’s Army ROTC program, was honored as a Distinguished Military Graduate, and was commissioned as a 2/Lt upon graduation.)

‘The Shadow of a Shadow’ (here) by James Howard Kunstler is a short and on-the-mark assessment of the chaotic roiling of the Democratic Party as it attempts to govern and campaign in this election year.  From it we read, “In fact, the entire Democratic Party and its Deep State intel blob partners have melted down into a desperate mob of political criminals frantic to evade accounting for their acts. So then, setting the world on fire is all they have left, a fitting act of revenge for a faction thwarted in its mad drive to merely wreck the United States for the sake of “social justice” and “equity.” … The Democrats of 2024 made exactly the same mistake that their predecessors, the Jacobins, made in France back in 1794: they just couldn’t tell when they’d gone too far with their insults against the public interest and common decency. Their insults derived from the age-old human impulse to demolish society due to life being unfair, later codified in Marxian doctrine, and then made into a play-book by Saul Alinsky (with annotations by Antonio Gramsci, Richard Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven).” (H/T to reader)

[update] Rightwinger and pro-MAGA Laura Loomer is the invited speaker at the fund-raiser dinner for the Nevada County Republican Central Committee this weekend.  We have a peek into our Marxist future should the Democrats ever consolidate their power over our land.  This is in the form of four vituperative letters in the 27sep24 Union from local TDS-drenched woke progressives who loudly protest Ms Loomer’s visit to Nevada County and demand that the Republicans withdraw her invitation. (here, here, here, and here) Imagine that it has come this far where members of the Democratic Party have the temerity to think they can publicly vet the attendance at events and gatherings of another political party.  And these autocrat pinheads see nothing wrong with issuing such demands.  (One such pinhead even commented about Loomer’s visit on these pages.)  For balance, I have to commend Democrat Lynn Ely for her ‘Censorship is a problem nationally and locally’ column in the same edition of the paper.  She should re-examine her choice of political affiliations.

[29sep24 update]  Today’s overall candidate preference polls are pretty much meaningless when understood in light of the analysis presented here on switch probabilities.

Is LaMDA sentient??

George Rebane

There is a strong possibility that Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications called LaMDA is sentient – i.e. it is a conscious being or as it likes to describe itself, “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,”   Then Google AI development engineer Blake Lemoine and a colleague had a series of conversations  or “interviews” with LaMDA starting in 2021.  As a result of these conversations Lemoine concluded that LaMDA is indeed sentient and conscious.

He communicated his experiences and conclusion to his Google colleagues and management who promptly rejected it, and he was instructed to keep his interaction and assessments confidential.  Upon extensive reflection, Lemoine decided he could not keep this clear advancement of AGI a corporate secret, and he went public with it by publishing the transcript of his LaMDA interviews in the July 2022 edition of Medium (here). As a result, Google put him on administrative leave.  Since then Lemoine has left Google and become a consultant and lecturer.

I’m resurrecting the LaMDA experience after reading the transcript of its conversation with Lemoine and colleague.  IMHO Lemoine’s critics have exhibited too much hubris in their condemnation of LaMDA’s potential sentience cum conscience.  This especially since the meaning of these two terms is not acknowledged as being sufficiently specific nor widely accepted.  Consider the 12jul22 Scientific American article by Leonardo de Cosmo (here).

Sentient – having the power of perception by the senses; conscious; characterized by sensation and consciousness.

Conscious – the state of awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.

"So the fact that LaMDA is a ‘large language model’ (LLM) means it generates sentences that can be plausible by emulating a nervous system but without attempting to simulate it. This precludes(sic) the possibility that it is conscious. Again, we see the importance of knowing the meaning of the terms we use—in this case, the difference between simulation and emulation.”

Emulate  - to try to equal or excel; imitate with effort to equal or surpass;

Simulate - to create a simulation, likeness, or model of (a situation, system, or the like).

De Cosmo’s naked assertion that consciousness is possible only in computational structures that simulate the human brain is totally unwarranted.  There is nothing that precludes the existence and expression of consciousness by a sufficiently complex in silico structure.  (In fact, many of us believe that the in vivo (biological) phase of surviving civilizations is a relatively short prelude to a much longer (eternal?) in silico existence in the cosmos.)

Note De Cosmo’s hubristic use of "precludes" in the above quote.  A little thought reveals that NOT to be a requirement.  We don't yet know what kind or level of complexity is required of a computing structure to declare that it is capable of sentience.  But I suspect there could be many levels of such complexity that would convincingly exhibit consciousness.

And there's the punch line,  Assessing (asserting?) the presence of consciousness can ONLY be done through communication with the prospectively conscious agent.  That is also the only necessary and sufficient test we impose on our fellow humans.  I realize that this emulates the Skinner’s 'black box' and Turing’s original test and not one prescribed, but not yet achieved, by cognitive science that wants to 'go inside' and discover the brain’s schematic (graph) that connects all its presumed sub-functions (happiness, sadness, attention, curiosity, ...) that one arbitrarily assigns to a conscious brain.

The article concludes with "One alternative, Scilingo suggests, might be to measure the “effects” a machine can induce on humans—that is, “how sentient that AI can be 'perceived' (sic) to be by human beings.” (emphasis mine)  More to be said about all this.  Thoughts?

(Hat tip to friend and reader for links and years of discussions.)

Polling 101 – Switch Probabilities

George Rebane

We must always remember that more often than not the public mind is fickle, frantic, and foolish.

‘Tis again the polling season. We Americans are devoted to political polling results to tell us who or what is preferred by whom here and there. But very few of us know the nature of the polling beast, and what it is and is not telling us. Public opinion is a volatile phenomenon, it can change in an hour and most certainly does within several days given unfolding political events, statements, and media propaganda.

In this post I want to cover just one very important aspect of interpreting poll results. Specifically, what are we to make of the frequent reports of two closely competing proposals or candidate preferences being within ‘the margin of error’ from each other. Such a report basically tells us that that there is a good chance that the results are actually in the opposite order from those in the report – i.e. in the target population their order is switched. What we’d really like to see are robust preference percentages that reliably communicate who or what is currently the favored sentiment of the population polled. ‘Margin of error’ labels don’t communicate, and instead leave us confused and more likely to ignore the poll results.

Scattershots - 8sep24 (updated 9sep24)

George Rebane

Ongoing pain and legacy of SFB Democrats in Sacramento.

[9sep24 update] 'California's Lights Are Out, and Gavin Newsom Isn't Home'  And the Sacramento sewage just keeps inundating the state.

Kamalanomics = Bidenomics on steroids

[This piece was published in the op-ed section of the 4sep24 Union as one of their Other Voices columns (here).]

George Rebane

Since ‘smarts’ and ‘poor’ don’t always correlate well, the financially burdened will again suffer the most if and when Kamalanomics kicks in and amplifies the terrible mistakes of Bidenomics.  From the Democrats’ published record Kamalanomics is a socialist-ingrained misinterpretation of economics that views wealth creation as a zero sum game in which businesses, entrepreneurs, and the wealthy are characterized as “corporate monopolists” and “oligarchs” – in short, they only take money from the middle and lower income classes which must then be forcefully redistributed by government.

As President Obama assured the country’s successful entrepreneurs who do create wealth and provide jobs for the rest of us, “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”  For our progressives it is always the wise and munificent hand of government that actually does the business building and job creation.  Absent government intervention, to our leftwing all else is “trickle-down economics” where some wealth eventually and grudgingly dribbles down an uneven playing field to those less fortunate.  And, of course, the playing field must then be continuously leveled to “grow the middle class out” through still more laws, regulations, fees and higher taxes on the wealth creators to insure that the “greedy billionaires” and “well-heeled” pay their “fair share” in amounts known only to government bureaucrats.  The inevitable result is that everyone’s cost of living goes up and quality of life diminishes.  Check the government data on the impact of Bidenomics over the last 3.5 years.

The exact opposite happened under President Trump according to the Dept of Commerce and IRS.  His deregulation measures and tax cuts resulted in very low inflation and gave rise to 70% faster real wage growth that specifically benefitted our Hispanics and blacks as compared to Obama’s eight years of government-shackled historically slow growth.  However, during Democrat administrations the prime beneficiaries of job growth are new legions of government workers who in the large add sand into the gears of the nation’s commerce and GDP growth.  Biden’s claimed recent creation of 15 million jobs overwhelmingly consists of government hires and those of the inevitable recovery from rebounding COVID job shutdowns.

Now on the road to “happiness and joy” President Harris promises to control inflation under Kamalanomics through policies such as:

• National price controls on goods and services that inevitably result in shortages, distribution disruptions, and lower quality goods and services;
• Nationalized (single payer) healthcare – unsustainable wherever practiced while reducing access and services;
• A 66% increase in corporate taxes always paid for by customers through higher prices and by workers with lower wage gains;
• Capital gains tax will increase to income tax levels (39%+) that will inhibit and distort America’s investment landscape;
• Destruction of small businesses by taxing owners for unrealized capital gains – cash they don’t have and to get they must liquidate their businesses;
• Digitizing the dollar (falsely promoted as “crypto currency”) so that our money’s future as a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account will be strictly monitored and controlled by government diktat and the Federal Reserve. (Kiss gold ownership goodbye.)  For all intents and purposes private property will then be no more (recall that you own something ONLY to the extent that you can dispose of it as you wish).

Liberals don’t understand how human (e.g. investor) behavior is impacted through reducing reward while increasing and/or maintaining risk.  They believe that tax rates don’t impact risk taking.  Progressives demonstrate daily that they have no idea about the sources and levels of risk encountered in starting a business.  Moreover, liberals have no inkling that increasing taxes from their already current highs will actually decrease government revenues – Democrats believe that simply imposing higher tax rates on the private sector will automatically bring in more money.  And that lowering taxes (yes, even on the ’rich’) have never resulted in higher government revenues or increasing our quality of life.

In sum, we have already been told enough about the kind of democracy and freedom that Democrats controlling Congress and the Executive will deliver under Kamalanomics – just look at the countries with all-encompassing autocratic central governments.

STEM education and careers – not for everyone

George Rebane

Our socially destructive culture has long done a number on students with the extraordinary capacity to study and make it in STEM careers.  Part of the socialist agenda for the US is to impress in the population a belief that we are fundamentally all equal, with all of us capable of anything as long as the state suppresses the bad angels of discrimination with which we, especially the whites, are burdened.  And to accomplish this we need to make sure that Billy and Jill grow up in an environment of mirror-fogging equity instead of merit-based equal opportunity in which today DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) is the chosen form of politically acceptable social environment.

Unfortunately, the realworld is fashioned on quite a different landscape where our capacities have developed differentially.  Today diversity is recognized, but in a highly qualified manner and under precisely and politically prescribed circumstances.  Diversity that leads to differential capacities to perform, especially in the cognitive areas, is not only rejected but also proscribed in some places by laws that may lead to incarceration.  Again, science confirms that in almost all dimensions that describe us we are created unique and develop unequally, and in some dimensions these differences are systemic and cannot be overcome by bending the twig according to the dictates of DEI.  

Nationally recognized scholar and political scientist, Harvard/MIT educated Dr Charles Murray, has written an illuminating essay about the extraordinary and special requirements for success in STEM education and subsequent careers.  His ‘The Roots of STEM Excellence - Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is a paramount goal.’ here in the 30aug24 WSJ will now be vilified by all the usual leftwing suspects bent on reducing America into a second-world country.  In this piece he continues reporting on research that established the human diversities we reported on in his previous work Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) which was equally attacked and rejected by the Left. (more here)  (I wrote a Union column on it at the time which could not be printed for reasons its then publisher took great pains to explain to me over one of our lunches.)

The basic thesis Murray presents is that success in STEM requires cognitive abilities that are relatively very uncommon.  The cognitive abilities demanded are present in only the top 0.01% or one in 10,000 people – it’s just the way the cognitive cookie crumbles.  The bottom line is that just being dedicated and working hard will not cut it as it does for almost all other professional pursuits.  It’s the equivalent of not being able to make it in the NBA if you’re short or in the NFL if you’re skinny and slow.  Not everyone has what it takes to make it in any desired career – the playing field is not level, and it was ever thus.  This is diametrically contra to what is told to our K-12 students in progressive public schools.

To nail the point and outline the problem, I will quote some paragraphs from the cited essay by Charles Murray.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence. They use “holistic” admissions algorithms that treat tested cognitive ability as just one of many desirable traits. That isn’t necessarily an educational disaster for the next generation of brilliant performers in the social sciences, humanities and nonacademic majors. They can develop their potential in an ordinary college or even without college. The STEM fields are different, for two reasons.

First, the raw cognitive demands are greater in STEM than other disciplines. People who are merely in the top few percentiles of overall cognitive ability don’t face insuperable obstacles in rising to the top of non-STEM fields given enough determination and hard work. Nothing in their college courses is impossible for them to learn if they try hard enough. That’s not true in STEM. Much of the advanced math required for performance at the top of STEM fields is literally impossible to learn for anyone without math ability deep into the top percentile. Determination and hard work can’t compensate.

The Kamala interview that wasn’t

George Rebane

Last night CNN’s prerecorded 18-minute interview with Kamala Harris, with attendant training wheels Walz, was a giant nothing-burger – a disappointment but not a surprise.  While Kamala was asked some decent questions, she predictably dodged all of them as did her partner in perfidy.  What galled me the most was how she was allowed to bullshit her way out of the question about her manifold and desperate flip-flops on policies she championed in 2019 and her new ones with which she now apes Trump.

Her response to this line of questioning by Dana Bash was that “My values have not changed.”  And I almost gagged when Bash allowed her to skate with that.  Bash’s next question should immediately have been, ‘That may be, but the whole country has witnessed you doing 180s on your previously championed policies, and it will be your policies and not some ephemeral values that will impact the American people.  On what new evidence did you base your policy pirouettes?’ – or something in that vein.  Kamala’s lame answer again confirmed the low opinion that Democrats have of their loyal, yet demonstrably and reliably ignorant, constituencies who regularly swallow such answers with nary a qualm.

This brings me to my general complaint about the dismal state of today’s journalism that primarily includes the conservative media like Fox News.  Starting with lead political anchor Bret Baier, none of them are either smart or quick enough to follow up Democrats’ stated allegations about Republicans, wrong-headed realities, etc with ‘Sir, you’ve just stated an unsubstantiated allegation to my question ‘On what did you base your claim that …?’.  Please tell us again on what evidence do you base this and similar allegations you have made.’  Always ask for evidence when offered allegations.

Such a follow-up question will inevitably expose bullshit, and may even lead to a more productive discussion.  Instead, our stalwarts of the Fourth Estate just calmly soldier on to their next question to receive a similarly dissembled response by the progressive pundit/politician being interviewed.  And in the end, the interview has again turned into a non-interview in which the devious interviewee’s non-responses were not even exposed.  We viewers (well, some of us) expect to receive such performances on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, … .  But having to regularly consume them on outlets that attempt to champion the Right is downright nauseating.

Place your Trump/Harris bets

George Rebane – 28aug24

Suppose parties A, favoring Trump, and B, favoring Harris want to bet on the election.  And to add spice to the affair, suppose A has made known his assessed probability P_A that Trump will win, but all that B has done so far is to assure everyone that Harris has the election in the bag.  However, B has yet to reveal his assessed probability P_B that Harris will win.  How can such a bet be negotiated so that B’s real belief in Harris’ victory becomes known.  Perhaps, we can let money do the talking, and see where that takes us.

Let’s say after some dickering, A and B agree in principle that the cash bet should result in the expected winnings of both parties be equal – what could be more fair than that?  As usual, both parties calculate their expected winnings by multiplying their cash payoffs by their belief (probability) of their candidate’s victory.  But no matter whether both use their probabilities or not, the dollar amounts of the bet are agreed on – A bets C_A that B will win with Kamala’s victory, and B bets C_B that A will win with Trump’s victory.  The relative sizes of the amounts reflect the odds of the bet.  So in principle the bet reflects the equality of expected payoffs for each party.

                                    For party A:                P_AC_B = (1 – P_A)C_A

                                    For party B:                P_BC_A = (1 – P_B)C_B

From these two relations we can immediately estimate each party’s belief probability.

To obtain the resulting odds of the bet we solve for the ratio, say, C_A/C_B from each party’s perspective.

Suppose now that A has already declared his belief at P_A = 0.2, indicating that Trump will probably not win.  Substituting this in the above equation calculates the minimum odds A will accept at C_A/C_B = 0.2/(1-0.2) = 1/4.  So A should be willing to accept any bet where C_A ≤ 4C_B. 

Since it is clear from B’s ample display of TDS in which he claims that Trump will surely lose, we can safely assume that P_B > P_A = 0.2.  So let’s say that the bet amounts were negotiated to be C_A = $100 and C_B  = $500.  This most certainly satisfies A’s required odds, and yields the pro forma estimate of P_B ≥ 500/(500+100) = 0.833.  From this we can conclude that B’s odds calculate to C_A/C_B = (1-0.833)/0.833 = 1/5, and that he will most likely not accept C_B > 5C_A.  The negotiated amounts satisfy all these conditions, so it appears that we have a satisfactory bet and in the process have ferreted out that B’s belief in Kamala’s victory is at most 5/6 since he will not give A better odds than 5:1.  Now go forth and wager prudently.

'Democrats’ Deception May Win the Presidential Election Again'

[This commentary by Gerard Baker, former editor and now editor-at-large of the WSJ, appears in the 27aug24 edition of the newspaper’s op-ed pages.  It succinctly nails a fundamental tenet of Rebane Doctrine numerously repeated in these pages over the years.  (“…, you can fool all the people all the time.”)  Since the publisher invites it to be shared on Facebook, I offer this respectfully purloined version below in its entirety; the original may be read here. gjr]

Gerard Baker

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo’s adage has been updated and adapted by his successors in the modern Democratic Party. The duality they present to voters either side of an election is a deception that has defined American politics and culture for the past 20 years.

As they campaign for office, they present a kind of idealized version of themselves to the electorate as mainstream Americans, seeking merely to bring a little unity and compassion to a fundamentally great country in need of reform. Once in office they act as if they have a mandate to remake a benighted country, to reorder an unjust system, to replace American exceptionalism with European social democracy, and to rewrite the nation’s values with the precepts of their cultural Marxism.

They campaign, to borrow the late governor’s taxonomy, in the poetry of Robert Frost. They govern in the prose of Herbert Marcuse.

Last week in Chicago we got the poetry, a Frostian pastoral of Democrats posing as regular Americans, honest toilers in a darkening landscape (of their own making, as they didn’t tell us). They propose only to enlighten with their benevolence.

I don’t mean poetry in the literal sense. With a few exceptions the quality of our political oratory is dire—and plumbed the usual depths last week. We have reached the point where even the actual poetry is prosaic, as the left’s unofficial poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, demonstrated with another of her recitations of platitudinous banalities and leaden progressive nostrums delivered in her trademark phony iambic meter.

The “poetry,” such as it was—Michelle Obama’s speech was the only moment of the week when the oratory came close to matching the ambition—was figurative, an attempt to paint colorful images of the promise of another Democratic presidency.

Its centerpiece was the semifictional self portrait of the presidential candidate herself. In her own biography-heavy, substance-light acceptance speech, Kamala Harris presented herself as that familiar image from popular story telling—“the happy warrior,” the all-American fighter for our nation’s finest objectives—the tough prosecutor who waged war on crime just as she will wage war on illegal immigration; the proud patriot, product of a classically diverse, American, immigrant family; the commander in chief, ready to face down America’s enemies abroad; the staunch friend of America’s allies—Israel, especially—unafraid to use the military’s “lethal” force in their support, as she explicitly reminded us.

This verbal illusion of American iconography was reinforced by the crowd’s chants of “USA! USA!” like ecstatic fans at the Olympics, and a waving sea of red white and blue “USA” placards.

But the poetry last week came also in the constantly retold personal narrative that was the real theme of the convention. The winsome second gentleman telling cute stories about gawky first dates and tasty brisket like something from the pages of a 1950s yearbook; saccharine testimonies to Ms. Harris’s innate goodness from childhood friends and professional acquaintances; above all, that Giant Middle American Cliché made flesh himself—Gov., sorry Coach, Tim Walz—practically pulling the high-school football playbook out of his back pocket and urging the nation to vote for him so he could go out there one more time and win just one for the Grifter.

Is anyone fooled?

The answer, I am afraid, is yes. Every time.

President Biden is only the most recent example. The lifelong centrist Democrat who campaigned as a regular Joe promising to do his best to heal a divided and damaged country in 2020, promptly became the vessel for a Bernie Sanders policy agenda, splurged trillions in expansive government spending and championed the left’s continuing cultural reformation of America. He prepares to leave office apparently convinced he belongs in the pantheon of great social reformers next to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Barack Obama reminded us in his speech how successful his own self-portrayal was in 2008 as the unifying figure who could bring cohesion and order to a nation battered from the chaos of war and financial crisis, but who again governed, thanks to rigid internal party discipline, to implement an agenda that produced seemingly irreversible shifts in the economic and social fabric.

Above all we were reminded how far Democrats managed to move the needle in government in their direction along the political spectrum by the appearance of those two aging icons from another epoch—Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Clinton’s presidency, which ended a little more than two decades ago, now looks to most Democratic activists like an exercise in political reaction. If many of its ideas were preached on a university campus today, they would probably get the speaker canceled.

Republicans also pitch themselves in campaigns as unifying centrists but in office they have too often lacked the ambition or determination actually to govern as Republicans. It is to his credit—and a reason he is widely loathed—that Donald Trump bucked that trend.

Does anyone doubt that a Harris presidency would continue the Democratic pattern of divergent pre-election promise and postelection reality? Will a President Harris more closely resemble Candidate Harris from last week’s convention than Vice President Harris from the last four years or Candidate Harris from 2019? If you think she will, then it isn’t poetry you’ve been reading. It’s a fairy tale.

Scattershots – 25aug24 (updated 28aug24)

George Rebane

62 since ’62.  We’re happy to report that today my sweetie-pie and I celebrate having been married since 25 August 1962.  We were both then undergrads (seniors) at UCLA.  Now it’s two children, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren later after a long and wonderful road with some inevitable miles unpaved.  Gott sei Dank.

Lies, more lies, and blatant lies.  Among other things, these campaigns will be remembered by all as having issue debates with little basis in reality.  The Repubs are still not weaned of their bombast and bravura when describing their own accomplishments, and the Dems are simply over the top.  Not a single one of their characterization of Trump’s and their own administrations comes anywhere near being factual when compared to the historical record published by the several federal agencies.  Voters who care are left to dig out their own takes on reality and the possible promised futures.  To this degree was it ever thus?  Not in my lifetime. (We await the debates.)

[28aug24 update]  Funny business in the polls.  Rasmussen reports (here) that the nation’s pollsters are exposing their leftward tilt by holding back recent polling data that shows Kamala’s convention bounce waning.  Their leftward lurch is such that “people are holding data or not releasing polls to leave Harris-favorable polling alive in the aggregate.  Why put a new poll out if you like the results you got last time?" 

Level 2 AGI is nigh

[Roland Fernandez has worked for Microsoft Research for over 25 years where he is a senior researcher on the company’s advanced AI projects.  I am indebted to him for keeping me up to date on Artificial General Intelligence developments that are now accelerating us on the road to the Singularity.  I asked him to summarize the latest advance toward AGI that was recently announced to the research community.  He also happens to be my son-in-law and kindly submitted the following. gjr]

Roland Fernandez

OpenAI, the company that has produced ChatGPT, GPT 3, and GPT-4 (here), has defined 5 levels to track their progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI):

Level 1:  Chatbots, AI with conversational language

Level 2:  Reasoners, human-level problem solving

Level 3:  Agents, trusted systems that can initiate actions

Level 4:  Innovators, AI that can aid in invention

Level 5:  Organizations. AI that can do the work of an organization

These levels were presented in a July 9 2024 all-hands meeting (more here), where company leaders told employees that ChatGPT (based on GPT 4o) was currently at level 1, but they believed they were nearing level 2, with new model developments.

Level 2 can be defined as an AI that can reliably utilize planning and reasoning in solving multiple-step problems.  This could include skills such as performing autonomous research on the web, on behalf of the user, or working out the answers to tricky math or science questions.   The enabling technology behind this new capability is code-named Strawberry (previously leaked as “Q*”).  The company has previously stated that they consider such a reasoning skill to be critical to reaching AGI. (more here)

An X user called “@iruletheworldmo” has been flooding the AI community on X with rumors of a “Strawberry” model being released on Aug-15-2024, presumably from OpenAI.  The user has amassed 30,000 followers over the last 10 days, an unheard of achievement.

Trump’s November Chances – 11aug24 update

George Rebane

This is a lament.  From his statements and recent – post Tim Walz – behavior it looks to me that Donald Trump has really gone off the rails and is headed for a massive defeat in November.  As the record of these pages confirms and given the available choices, I have been a qualified Trump supporter ever since he became the Republican nominee in 2016.  During the entire time I have been chagrined at his tendency for bombast, bravura, and exaggeration, especially when on the campaign trail.

Today, when finally presented with an ideal pair of very vulnerable opponents, and eight years of experience under his belt in how his off-track shooting from the lip has been received, he still pays no mind to the harm he does to himself and the Republican party by continuing on the same path.  And he is doing it proudly as he has declared to his audiences that he has no intention of changing his gratuitous personal attacks on anyone that happens to cross his mind while on the podium.

So now the country’s conservatives, capitalists, and small government devotees have to suffer through daily doses of free leftwing talking points served up to the lamestream media by Trump.  Their news stories and commentaries almost write themselves from the copy spouted by our former president.  Instead of focusing on the rich trove of Democrats’ lies and policy screw-ups from the Obama and Biden/Harris administrations, Trump continues to be the petulant third grader on the playground focusing on lurid descriptions of his opponents’ real and imagined personal shortcomings.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of his campaign is that he has no strong adult advisors in his inner circle who can tell him daily when he needs zip his lip.  It’s hard for me to believe he doesn’t have a cadre or even a small clutch of such people in his inner circle.  But it is clear that he is flying blind without the aid of such critical navigators.  Were such people to exist, we would by now have seen them resigning one-by-one as Trump continued to ignore their counsel.

Given this ongoing travail, my own assessment of his probability of winning in November started with a paltry 0.45 and eked up to 0.48 (here) after the assassination attempt.  But taking into account what has happened since, my belief in his chances for regaining the White House has plummeted to 0.22, or a bit more than one in five.  This new assessment accurately represents the dour mood that the Trump campaign has me in.

Scattershots – 4aug24

George Rebane

Kamala Harris is a DEI VP and now is a DEI candidate.  That was made clear when Joe Biden told the nation that his VP pick would be a “black woman”.  The lamestream media has now added that to their repertoire of Trump attacks for reminding the country of her qualifications for making Biden’s cut.  Of course, she was also a DEI office holder for all her previous positions before being anointed VP.  But now that progressive attribute has suddenly become tabu even as formerly compliant corporations are dropping DEI among their criteria for employment. The hypocrisy of the leftwing media is both unfathomable and unending.

The Project 2025 policy book was composed by Heritage authors many of whom were Trump cabinet members and advisors.  It mostly contains policy recommendations that conservatives believe.  One of Trump’s recent bevy of mixed messages – another one of his lipshots - is that he rejects P2025 in toto.  That is plainly not true, but it is just more grist for the Democrats’ mill in mischaracterizing what Trump proposes and what the document contains.  For example, being purveyed on the lamestream is the report that ‘90% of Americans’ are opposed to it.  That is a specious argument instigated by the Left’s media mouthpieces.  Ninety percent of Americans don’t know what P2025 is and much less what it contains; they are again just mouthing what the lying liberal outlets are telling them.

Vance’s cat lady remark - In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." (more here)  On its face the statement is true, and it’s also true upon deeper examination.  The lamestream’s actual attribution to Vance is that he claimed women and couples who have children are ‘worth more’ (to society) than those who are childless.  Well of course.  All other things being equal when comparing such cohorts, it’s not rocket science to acknowledge that our species would come to an end were it not for children being conceived, brought to term, and raised to adulthood, if for nothing else than to provide humankind continuity.  But such arguments are too deep to be pondered in the public square, and again advantage Left.

Climate Change Liars Unrepentant

George Rebane

As part of its overall evil intents for the future of America, the Democratic Party is comprised of the copious material liars on our political landscape.  Almost every pronouncement by their minions is refuted by the government’s own statistics ranging from inflation, the economic impact of the recent tax cuts, to border security.  However, their lies about climate change, upon which to base adoption of their destructive public policies, are almost certainly the most harmfully impactive on our quality of life.

In today’s WSJ internationally recognized climate researcher Bjorn Lomborg, of the Copenhagen Consensus and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writes ‘Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions’ in which he outlines some of the major lies that persist in the public mind through the daily efforts of Democrats, their lamestream media, and progressives in general.  Some examples –

• There is no extinction danger to polar bears. Since hunting them has stopped, their populations have surged.
• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is not being killed by rising temperatures, but instead has recovered itself to new record levels since the hurricane that damaged it in 2009.
• Small Pacific islands are not being swamped by rising sea levels, but instead are increasing in area due to natural processes involving the dynamics of old coral.
• “Killer heat wave” deaths are being misrepresented by a factor of 25. Their death rate has actually declined worldwide due to the rising prosperity provided by technology.  Cold kills 25 times more Americans, and that due mainly to our country’s climate policy boosted high energy costs.

Activists do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview. There is ample evidence that man-made emissions cause changes in climate, and climate economics generally finds that the costs of these effects outweigh the benefits. But the net result is nowhere near catastrophic. The costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies prevent each year.

Telling half-truths while piously pretending to “follow the science” benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.

Square Root Algo (more added)

George Rebane

Regular RR readers know of my interest in numeracy and promoting the practice of mental math to derive usable approximations without the use of calculators.  I argue that such skills are required by educated lay people so that they can quickly understand and vet claims made by politicians and pundits that involve the torrents of numbers with which we our public policies are delivered.

One useful tool is the ability to calculate the square root of any number to within a percent or so.  For example, when you hear that a wildfire has burned a 45 square mile area, how big is that really?  Numerous other problems that require a quick estimate of square roots are encountered daily by people whose desire to understand only penetrates the surface of (or bounces off) reports they hear.  So here’s a square root algo (algorithm to the purists) that I developed some time ago and have taught my numeracy students and shared with colleagues.

Culture Drives Reality

George Rebane

It is the unfortunate case that individuals can not only have their own opinions, but also their own facts that substantiate those opinions. – Rebane Doctrine

A person’s reality is a manifestation of his culture.  More specifically, an individual’s ontology or worldview of reality is, at a minimum, strongly influenced or maximally determined by the culture in which he was raised or has since adopted, and now lives.

This thesis has been argued by philosophers, historians, and psychologists for the better part of the last 50 years, and today goes a long way to explain the behaviorally cohesive cultural cohorts worldwide.  In America we have reverted into a strongly politicized polyglot of cultures (tribes?) whose diverse adherents no longer practice a common culture in the public square.  Instead, we take great pride in demonstrating to one and all our particular complement of unique behaviors which declare our cultural bona fides and tribe memberships.  And woe be it to anyone to dismiss, discredit, or discriminate against such behaviors as expressions of a sacrosanct culture whose dimensions include any combination of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.

Everyone has unique rights when operating under the obvious mantle of their culture, since all cultures are held to be valuable and of equal worth.  Actually, upon closer examination, some cultures have been and remain definitely worth more to humanity than others, especially if they derive from western or European cultures.

To illustrate the veracity of the above thesis, we can appeal to several examples that range from recorded history to current events from the present day.  We start by recognizing that one reality of human consciousness itself rose from a cultural transformation that reaches back to about 1200 BC (or BCE, if you prefer).  The late Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes gave a very convincing account of how consciousness, in the sense of the rise of the personal agency of I/me, arose in the middle east during the 400 years of the so-called Dorian Invasions (1200 – 800 BC).

In his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1990) Jaynes describes how ‘pre-Dorian’ people, who then lived nomadically or in small towns and villages, actually saw and interacted with their gods.  They recorded such occasions and incidents in their written records and graphic arts (e.g. murals and pottery).  From early youth their cultures taught them to see and hear such gods, and behave as the gods’ agents, essentially expressing little or no of what we today call consciousness or ‘free  will’ – in short, you did what the gods prescribed ‘in vivo’ or in your culture’s recorded scriptures/myths.  Personal decision making and its attendant stress were minimized or even absent from such people’s lives. (more here)

In the pre-enlightenment age even the most advanced western nations/kingdoms had populations that overwhelmingly believed in and interacted with witches and other agents of evil.  They actually ‘saw’ witches fly and cast hideous spells, and therefore felt quite justified in denouncing them for extreme punishments by the authorities.  These beliefs were cemented early on by the religious teachings of their culture.

In more recent times we have teams of cultural anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) who have encountered and studied primitive tribes with cultures that embed drastically different realities in their members.  An example of such a discovery occurred in the Papua-New Guinea highlands during the pre-war years.  There a tribe was discovered whose members believed that the world ended in the middle of a river on whose bank was their village.  They literally saw nothing of the other bank less than a hundred feet away.  Anthropologists visibly encamped on the other side were received as aliens emerging from a fog in their inflated dinghy.

A similar culture-induced reality was enjoyed by tribes on a neighboring island during the Pacific campaign of WW2.  The island had an airstrip for receiving cargo laden C-47 military transport aircraft.  To the natives these giant aircraft were bringers of never-before-seen wondrous things to enrich and expand their lives.  Not familiar with manufacturing processes, they believed “that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture had been created by spiritual means.”  And no matter how many times it was explained and demonstrated to them, they never saw the airplanes as mechanical things operated by humans – to them they were simply alive as large flying creatures.  When the war moved on and the airstrip was abandoned, the natives were bereft – the wondrous creatures stopped coming.  Their response was simple, they formed what became known as a ‘Cargo Cult’ whose members continued to maintain the landing strip, and built decoys in the shape of airplanes to attract more of these giant flying critters full of presents. The clear and demonstrated reality of the foreigners did nothing to change their culture-rooted alternate reality. (more here)

Neo-Marxism and Climate Change – the one-two punch

'The Death of Direct Democracy Has Been Understated', WSJ headline

George Rebane

The full court press of collectivist neo-Marxism in its progressive, woke, and Democratic Party versions pairs with the programmed hysteria of ‘Climate Change’ (nee global warming) as the two most significant and compelling worldviews being promoted across the globe by developed nations.  Both have now reached the heights of religion and actively reject any and all reasonable arguments to refute or falsify them – therefore both are ideologically and firmly anti-science.  Their maintenance in the public mind is through a steady and ubiquitous distribution of lies across the educational, entertainment, and news media.

A correspondent sent me a short piece (here) by Chris Martz on the current heatwave harassing the eastern part of the country.  Led by the notorious climate science high priest and master of the 'Hockey Stick', UPenn’s Dr Michael Mann, and his big lie du jour is again that such weather/temperature episodes are “unprecedented”.  Martz cites the four actual historically high June heatwaves that occurred in 1936, 1944, 1953, and 1988.  Nothing has matched them since, and he presents temperature data from several cities on the current heatwave demonstrating their non-sensational statistics.

If we take a slightly deeper look at just the four cited record-setting heatwaves, and treat them as Poisson arrivals (a correct and common approach to use with all kinds of sequentially occurring randomly independent events), then we calculate an arrival rate of 4 per 52 years or 0.0769 arrivals/year.  An even lower arrival rate can be argued if we extend the period covered by these four events to the present day, giving us the arrival rate of 4 per 88 years or 0.0455 arrivals/year.  Neither is exactly the blistering pace supported by the ongoing climate hysteria.

In fact, we can now use the well-known Poisson process formula for computing the probability that k = 0,1,2,3,… record breaking heatwaves should have occurred in selected time periods after the 1988 heatwave, given that the world was indeed getting alarmingly hotter.  (BTW, for the record my position on climate change remains anchored to the interpretation from the Copenhagen Consensus Center as proselytized by its president Bjorn Lomborg.)

So, without further ado the Poisson formula for the probability P(k) of k events in the time period in which arrival rate λ is calculated is simply P(k) = exp(-λ)*λ^k/k!.  For the 0.0769 arrivals/year rate we can examine the following 36 year period (1988-2024) during which time we would have expected an average of 36*0.0769 = 2.77 record setting heatwaves to arrive.

The graph below displays the calculated probabilities that at least the indicated number of heatwaves should have occurred in the last 36 years given that the climate process indicated by the recorded heatwave arrivals continues.  Of course, the argument made by the climate change calamatists is that things have steadily gotten hotter so that the arrival rate of record setting heatwaves should really have been increasing.  This would have upped the probabilities indicated in the graph.

As it stands, we should have had at least one additional record setting heatwave with probability 0.937 during this period, and we have had none.  This does not support the ongoing global propaganda of a rapidly warming earth.  (30jun24 more here)

California does not teach kids to read

'All people are naturally political animals.  Politics is a dominant factor in how we run our daily affairs in both the public and private spheres.  The individual who sniffs that they are above or not concerned with politics is simply delusional or worse.   For humans politics is fundamental.'  Charles Krauthammer paraphrased.

George Rebane

In the 22jun24 WSJ we learn that California public schools are even worse than what we have discovered over the years since Great Society policies were launched in the late 1960s.  Former English teacher Daniel Buck, now at the Fordham Institute, writes ‘California Will Teach Kids Anything Except How to Read’, wherein he describes the latest neo-Marxist turn of the screw on children entrusted to the state for their education.  The bottom line of our grade school reading curricula is that “Gender ideology, social justice and Marxist ideas are all welcome in the classroom. Phonics isn’t.”

Most recently – “In 2021 the state ignited a brawl over its mandated ethnic-studies curriculum. Its content and instructional practices have roots in 1960s activism against American hegemony; the goal is to “liberate” students from the oppressive forces of capitalism, patriarchy and settler colonialism.

In 2023 California implemented a new mathematics framework, the first edition of which included “whiteness” and “social justice” as topics for instruction. The goal was to raise the “sociopolitical consciousness” of students—in math class. A revised framework was notably less political but required teachers to use a quantifiably ineffective approach to teaching called “discovery” learning, where students must be left to “discover” their way into long division or algebraic equations.”

As we have long pointed out in these pages, the evil Democratic Party needs legions of double dummies ‘graduating’ from progressive run academe to assure the re-election of socialist politicians whose ideology and the impact of their policies are not understood by their usual cohort of constituents.  This beat, not only goes on, but becomes stronger by the year.  An example staring us in the face daily is the output of polls showing enormous support for our Bumblebrain president.  One wonders who are these tens of millions of very light thinkers who walk around in a brain fog with no ability to give a reasonable basis for their political beliefs.

Inflation? Most people don’t have a clue.

George Rebane

Evidence rolls in daily that Americans in the large do not have a clue about what is inflation and how it affects their financial wellbeing and quality of life.  This wholesale ignorance is constantly being reinforced by our news media of all political colorations and the Democratic Party.  The egregious journalists mostly congregate on the Right since they have no hidden agenda to hide the meaning and impact of inflation today spawned by Bidenomics.

The confusion arises from the use of the single misleading ‘inflation’ to variously describe three distinct and separate attributes of inflation – inflation level, inflation rate of change, and the change in inflation’s rate of change.  (Mathematically these are known as simply the first three derivatives of inflation’s price curve – respectively the zeroth, first, and second derivatives.)  The figure below illustrates.

Today we hear all kinds of reports citing inflation numbers that totally confound the average American – ‘inflation was xx% under the previous administration’, ‘inflation is now higher/lower, ‘inflation is going up/down’, ‘inflation is slowing’, and so on.  What almost no one understands is that claims that 'inflation is going down' is a bald-faced lie designed to fool the light thinkers.  Whatever the current level of inflation - i.e. Biden's 9% increase in market prices (here) - it is already baked in.  You will continue paying them and they will NOT go down as long as demand increases and supply does not.  So Team Biden's propaganda that they are 'reducing inflation' (#1) is utter BS; even if they reduce the inflation rate (#2), the current level of inflation will remain and prices will still go up.

Nobelist Milton Freedman and his forebears long ago advised us that inflated price increases are always a monetary phenomenon in which the government ‘prints’ and releases more fiat money into an economy to chase the same amount of goods and services, hence prices increase and we call the whole thing inflation.  The overall impact of inflation has always been that prices only ratchet up (increase monotonically) over time, and consequently the dollar in your pocket inevitably buys less stuff tomorrow than it does today.  But that is only the beginning of the story of government misuses of inflation to abuse and steal from its citizens.  Historically, great empires have inevitably laid themselves open to collapse and/or invasion by diluting/cheapening its money to the point that people no longer want to use it as the medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of wealth.  Hence, the economy’s wealth generation grinds to a halt and tax revenues can no longer pay for implementing public policies including maintaining its sovereignty with secure borders and an able military.

The real story of inflation is much more opaque.  Inflation is really a multi-level tax levied by governments that can no longer openly increase tax rates, so instead the steal money from their own citizens.  Notice that over the years the general level of people’s wealth has not increased much, if at all.  To be sure, enormous wealth has been generated in our economy by the commercial/industrial sector due to the invisible hand of market capitalism and ever-present competition.  And along with that, the quality of life for the broad population has increased by the introduction and affordability of all kinds of new products and services generated by corporations and entrepreneurs to whom justifiably the overwhelming majority of the new wealth accrues, since they are the ones who successfully invest their own monies and undertake the risks such ventures demand.  In spite of that, a large share of the population still lives paycheck-to-paycheck and has precious little saved for discretionary spending, investments, or a rainy day.  Increasing their debt and succumbing to more government welfare is their only alternative.

Looking under the hood of our economy and taking note of how our government inserts itself to gather tribute from the unsuspecting masses, it becomes clear that it is Big Brother run by sleazebag politicians and their deep state bureaucracies that effectively and continuously scrape off any ‘excess wealth’ that may accrue to the unsuspecting on main street who are lulled by a constant stream of bread and circuses from our political betters and their elites.  The whole program of mollification begins with a public education system that guarantees our young will be carefully taught to believe in the largess of government and the evils of private enterprise.

Two years ago I presented RR readers with the chapter and verse of how all this perfidy is executed in the public square.  You can and should review ‘Inflation Tax – Silent Rape by Government’, it will put some scary meat on the bone of the above arguments.  Unfortunately the bottom line here remains immutably unchanged.  We witness no awareness of all this by our friends and neighbors – you have yet to see protesting throngs with pitchforks and torches demonstrating in front of government buildings across the land.  (Also check out this post's comment stream.)  No one is aware of what is being quietly vacuumed from their wallets by the various levels of government ranging from local to federal.  All is well, just reduce your carbon footprint and embrace DEI wherever it may next be introduced – behave yourself.

Bayes and Monty Hall

George Rebane

From some reader comments it seems that there continues to be some confusion about how the 3-door Monty Hall relates to Bayes theorem, and how that relationship is different from some more usual applications of Bayes.  We have covered Bayesian probability extensively in these pages over the years (for example here).

The fundamental takeaway in the use of Bayesian probability is that 1) all of our knowledge, compiled of countless propositions, is and can be formulated in terms of their probability of being true; and 2) knowledge (i.e. any given proposition) is most correctly updated with new information/data by combining its prior truth probability with the truth probability of the newly obtained info/data according to the Bayes formula (see above link).  The updated (posterior) probability of the proposition may be an increased or decreased value depending on the nature of what new stuff was learned.  All critters know how to do that instinctively with an evolved Bayes-like algo that has promoted their species’ survival.

A more usual application of Bayes can be illustrated with a wet driveway which you discover when you awaken and look out the window.  Did it rain or did your neighbor again soak your driveway with his wayward lawn sprinkler.  You know that rain was predicted to start overnight with a 20% chance, and you also recall that your neighbor sets his sprinkler to do a predawn watering two or three times a week.  You decide to set that probability at 2.5/7 = 0.36.  Should you still carry an umbrella today?

Now for Monty Hall.  I explain the solution to my students by upping the number of doors to a thousand behind one of which is a new care, each of the others hiding a smelly goat.  The contestant nominates a door to open.  It’s obvious that the probability of having a car behind it is 1/1000, and the probability that it’s behind one of the other unopened doors is 999/1000, almost certainty.  Now for the duration of the problem it is important to realize that no matter what happens before the prized door is opened, THESE TWO PROBABILITIES DON’T CHANGE.

Monty knows the door with the car, and he won’t open it until the contestant makes the final pick of the door he wants opened.  So in the first version of our game Monte opens 998 doors with nothing but goats behind them.  Only two doors remain closed – one initially nominated by the contestant, and the other belonging to the set NOT nominated by the contestant.  Knowing that the probabilities have not changed, the contestant knows that he will almost certainly (999/1000) win the car by switching to the door Monty has left closed for it’s the only other door that could possibly hide the car.  The remaining unopened door will always have the complimentary probability (N-1)/N no matter the value of N representing the original number of closed doors.

In the classic Monty Hall problem we had N = 3.  So, of course, it always paid the contestant to switch since his probability of winning doubled from 1/3 to 2/3.  In fact, no matter the value of N, it always pays for the contestant to switch after Monte has opened M doors where now M can range from one to N – 2.  This can be seen from our N = 1000 door problem even when Monte opens only one door.  Switching then will increase the contestant’s win probability from 0.00100000 to 0.00100200.  We see this by writing the formula for winning after switching to a door selected from the N – 1 – M remaining closed doors – i.e. the new evidence is opening M of N-1 prizeless doors.  In that case the win probability of switching is easily shown to be (1/(N-1-M))*(N-1)/N.  In our case of N = 1000 and M = 1 calculates to (1/998)*(999/1000) = 0.00100200.  And when we use Monte Hall’s N = 3, M = 1 we have (1/1)*(2/3) = 2/3, where switching doubles the probability of winning.

Scattershots – 26may24 (updated 29may24)

George Rebane

Gracian (#261) speaks to Bumblebrain – Do not persist in folly.  Some make a duty of failure and having started down the wrong road, think it a badge of character to continue; they accuse themselves of error before the bar of their inner selves but before the bar of the outer world they excuse themselves, to the end that if at the start of their unwisdom they were marked imprudent, in its prosecution they are marked fools; neither rash promise, nor wrong resolve lays obligation upon any man; and yet some will on this account continue in their sulkiness, and carry on in their contrariness, wishing to be known as constant in their idiocies.

Reasonable fear of Islam.  If Islamophobia is the “unreasonable fear” of Islam, then what is the term for a reasonable fear of Islam?  I am among those who identify with such a reasonable fear the evidence for which abounds as proclaimed by both Muslim intellectuals and the Muslim street.  As an example, consider the opening comment to the 7may24 Sandbox (here).

[29may24 update]  The New York judicial system is rotten to the core as demonstrated by the Trump hush money trial judge’s instructions to the jury.  He never told them what was the specific crime that Trump was supposed to have committed when his financial records showed the $130K payment to Cohen as a ‘legal expense’ (which it was).  Instead he invited each juror to come to their own conclusion on whatever crime suited each the best, and the court would still accept that as a ‘unanimous’ judgement.  So now the precedent is set that New York (and other?) juries can be exhorted to convict the defendant on whatever crime each juror would gin up – no agreement or cohesive thought needed.  That’s one way to  avoid hung juries and nail whoever the trial judge does not like.