Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 27dec18 (updated 30dec18)

George Rebane

LIBERAL BILLIONAIRE APOLOGIZES FOR FUNDING RUSSIAN BOT ‘FALSE FLAG’  Those fun-loving Democrats just can’t leave well enough alone when the go to work getting out the vote.  In the 2016 national election Crooked Hillary and her DNC had to do some numbers ginning up dirt on the opposition, and even putting down the hammer on one of their own kind who didn’t get the hint that it wasn’t his turn (ever).  But most recently it was “billionaire Reid Hoffman (who) apologized Wednesday for funding an effort to dupe Alabama voters into believing Russian bots were fueling Republican Roy Moore’s failed senatorial bid.”  Yep, you really don’t want to get yourself into the cross-hairs of that bunch.

Truthout.org, the ultra-left (well, actually communist) opinion shaper and progressives’ moral voice, is now calling for acts of sabotage to bring down the Trump administration.  This week the summons went out to Democrat constituencies across the country (‘We Can’t Wait on a Savior to Remove Trump. We Must Resist En Masse’), followed by a specific call directed at government employees for “federal disobedience” and “noncooperation” (‘Federal Disobedience: Why We Must Support Federal Worker Noncooperation’).  It is literally impossible to make this up.  Today’s Left is no different from the Bosheviks of old; when the established (constitutional) order cannot be brought down by their ideas in the public forum, then it must be attacked by all other trans-rational means available.

Most longtime RR readers know that people of the Left get a very one-sided view of the world that is dispensed by their favorite ideological wordsmiths and talking heads.  They stick to their own kind when it comes to forming their picture of the world.  And because of this, our local leftwing contingent continually creates comic relief in these comment streams when they unknowingly show up with their blinders on and claim that RR has a solo hold on ideas that counter their carefully cultivated credos.  When other readers provide links and point out contrary references in my commentaries, that information is simply ignored by our lefties as if it didn’t exist – they just continue their critiques cased in the comfort that not only do these ideas have local provenance, but that they also have limited purview.  Hence, if they can be stamped out here in their cradle, the outside world will not be infected.  BTW, here’s a laundry list of fake news that our progressives swallowed hook, line, and sinker during the past year from their faithful fountains of facts.

That old-time religion in America is on the skids.  We have been pointing out for years how the media and our educational systems have been composing recessionals to Christianity as part of their assault on western culture and civilization.  Every time new stats are collected and composed, the story becomes bleaker for our Judeo-Christian heritage.  The evidence for that is most visible during the year-end holiday season when secular humanity makes its strongest assault on the faith of our fathers.  I was directed to a current compendium on this cultural transformation by Joel Kotkin (‘As the Old Faiths Collapse, the Greens, Social Justice Warriors, and Techno-Futurists Aim to Fill the Void’) by a reader and correspondent.  After giving us the dreary numbers of how our traditional religions are being forsaken by the young moderns, despite heroic efforts by churches and temples to inject socio-political ideology into their liturgies, Kotkin documents the parallel social phenomenon of the Left desperately cobbling together new faiths to serve new gods, so that they will not miss out on that ineffable something that they see gracing the lives of the remaining Christian and Jewish holdouts.  (Here is Truthout's report this.) The real interesting news here is about the outliers of secular humanists’ fabricated faiths.  These involve the new trans-humanist faith(s?), and those churches of god without god.  Kotkin concludes his essay with –

The loss here would not only be for the faithful but the entire society. Religious institutions rooted in the past also serve as ideal transmitters of traditional culture and identity; the new ones see themselves largely as warriors of the future, based on perceived social and scientific truths. Trans-humanists, for their part, seek to reduce reality to data, rejecting much of what makes us different not only from other animals, but machines. … Ultimately, the new religions, seeking to fill the void left behind by traditional faiths, offer little to families in search of moral instruction or guidance for how different kinds of people can get along. They have no answers for addressing the reality that almost all of us alive today, despite the scheming of the trans-humanists, eventually will die. A world without the old faiths may still be spiritually engaged, even hysterically so, but we may lose the lessons of community, sacrifice, discipline and faith that the old religions taught to bind our societies together.

[28dec18 update]  “Climate change has always been the cover story, not the real issue which (is) Agenda 21 Sustainability.” writes a reader and correspondent in this morning’s email.  This year’s IPCC special report SR-15 details the real agenda that was pursued at this year’s international climate change conference in Katowice, Poland. (more here)  The global warming bamboozle continues in full force, but the real objectives for arguably the greatest wholesale fraud ever attempted on the entire world’s population are now leaking out, and there to see for everyone who cares to pay attention.  Unfortunately, humans in the aggregate are not that bright.

‘China Reins In Its Tech Giants’ reports the 28dec18 WSJ.  “The closer scrutiny of tech companies comes as Mr. Xi seeks to restore the Communist Party's pre-eminence as a force in people’s lives and to establish that the Party—and not the private sector—is charting the course for China’s future.”  Communism, like our progressive sector, has always claimed to be society’s most reliable moral compass.  Therefore, kowtowing to the Party, China’s industries like ride-sharing Didi are now hiring thousands of “Communist Party members as role models for customer service.”  For our global competitive position, this is the best news coming out of the Middle Kingdom in years.  (Here our Dems will do their best to emulate China starting 3 January 2019.)

Nokidhungry.org maintains that childhood hunger is prevalent in over ten million American households.  And this goes on under governments that have uncountable programs for helping and feeding even mildly or totally unneedy families and individuals.  Congress just passed an $867B (dreadfully misnamed) ‘farm bill’, of which 85% or $737B goes for food stamps for the poor.  For the hungry households, this computes to over $73K for each household’s annual food budget.  Cut that in half and half again, and you’d still come up with over $18K per year for groceries.  What do each of these messages convey about the extent of children going hungry – ‘In America 1 in 6 kids is starving’, ‘- does not have enough to eat’, ‘- faces hunger’.?  (nokidhungry uses the last one in its ads).  But the real question is, what’s wrong with this picture?  (Extra credit:  What’s the political persuasion of the overwhelming share of bureaucrats who have been running the food stamps program for years?)

[30dec18 update]  I was graced by Union columnist George Boardman to appear in his tomorrow's (31dec18) offering.  He quoted from the addendum to my 3jan18 KVMR commentary - "I believe the present state of affairs in the world order are the result of the spontaneously coordinated efforts of fundamental Islam and western socialism’s striving to meet Agenda21 objectives."  I invite readers to reread the complete addendum.

A Bayesian Gem - Least Squares

George Rebane

Some readers may have become aware of my involvement with and amazement of Bayesian probability.  Sadly, most RR readers couldn’t care less, and therefore have no idea of the impact that Bayesian inference plays in their daily lives.  I admit that as a techie, my Bayesian bias started early in my career when I learned to design Kalman filters for Uncle Sam’s military systems.  From there I became more immersed in probabilistic models, especially as applied in AI, all powered by Bayes.  Today Bayesian inference is supremely (yes, SUPREMELY!) important in all kinds of systems, devices, social enterprises, and legal proceedings.  Why?  Simply because it is the basis for ALL the correct ways to update current knowledge with new information and data.  If you don’t change your mind based on what the Rev Bayes taught, then you’re not doing it right.

The newest technology buzz to evoke smidgens of lay interest revolves around algorithms developed through the application of machine learning that are based on deep neural nets, which, you guessed it, are based on Bayesian probabilistics.  The net that the good reverend casts today even collects the humble and long-known least squares estimation techniques, many of which can be derived by simple application of the calculus.  But even least squares derives its ubiquitous power from its Bayesian tap root.

I just came across a gem of a very short paper – ‘Where did the least square come from?’ - that gets two birds with one stone.  In there, author Tirthajoty Sarkar (another goddam immigrant 😉) gives a lucid explanation of how Bayes founds least-squares, a well-known estimation technique that forms a key optimizing computation in the guts of deep neural nets, an approach to machine learning which today is used to derive new and awesome capabilities from large datasets that are completely beyond the ken of man (and woman).  If you are numerate, you should really give this little paper a read.

Fearful Writing

“We write at root to make sense of life. And what do we seek to understand more than anything? Our deepest fears.”  Josh Weil

George Rebane

Union publisher Don Rogers’ Friday essay – ‘Write where you fear the most’ – was an unexpected helping of food for thought this morning.  Mr Rogers takes us through a bit of personal history about his education and membership in the guild of wordsmiths, as he promotes our attendance at the Sierra Writers Conference in January at which “top fiction author” Josh Weil of Nevada City will be the keynote speaker.  Weil’s dictum to the rest of us is “Write what scares you.  If what you are writing doesn’t scare you, you probably shouldn’t write it.”

Now Don Rogers reads a lot of books that don’t make it onto my reading list, simply because time is limited and we come at life from different angles.  But his dissertation, with references to multiple authors (mostly unknown to me) and famous personages, on the meta-motivations for good writing struck a chord which I’ll let vibrate a bit in what follows.  I recommend you read Rogers to see what, if anything, starts vibrating in you.

Weil’s observations and advice struck my motivation, for these years of scribbling on RR, right between the eyes – ‘Observations and Interpretations of Events from the Last Great Century of Man’.  My technical training and work in machine intelligence, combined with the experiences in man’s greatest war and its aftermath, has focused my attention on the Singularity and humanity’s race, during these pre-Singularity years of accelerating technology, between proponents of a global tyranny and a stable Westphalian order in which most people will enjoy liberty and their own pursuits of happiness.  Once the Singularity is ensconced, all bets are off – that’s why it’s called a singularity.  And therein lie the things that scare me.

CA Exodus Denied

George Rebane

The exodus of the producers and the productive from California has been a recurring theme on RR ever since the Democrats assumed total control, turned the state into the nation’s home for welfare recipients, started raising taxes and fees as if there were no tomorrow, and opened its gates to illegal aliens.  Essentially, the Democratic super-majority has turned the state into a sanctuary from sanity.  Among the reams of data presented to buttress the exodus argument, a reader sent me the graphic below that highlights just one aspect of nationwide migrations – and these are NET migrations – from/to our country’s prominent metropolitan areas (more here).

This shows that from LA alone we have a net outflow of 46,720 people per year.  And do you think these are the gimmes who think they’ll get more sanctuary protections and better government bennies from some other state?

Globalists and Nationalists, oh my!

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 December 2018.]

Have you considered where you stand on the many issues that not only divide us Americans, but also people everywhere, that is everywhere they can freely speak their minds?  Have you really thought it through well enough to sit down and make a list of the issues that concern you, and also your reasoned or even unreasoned, attitude about each such issue?  Most people will have to answer a truthful NO, and admit that they primarily respond to such questions, as they come up, with an unexamined yet readily available emotion.

Today we are becoming more polarized as each day goes by without anyone being able to identify a meaningful patch of common ground on which we can meet and talk.  The old adage of ‘don’t talk politics or religion’, when hoping to remain civil in polite company, has now become a social mandate in the carefully groomed public round.  When at church or at some other club or association meeting, everyone carefully minds their mouths, and holds on patiently until they can leave and get back to more reliably like-minded folks.

While there are many things we all can disagree on – today immigration, climate change, abortion, culture, assimilation, terrorism, … remain high on the list – how we come down on each of them can usually be traced to our overall picture of the kind of world we want our kids and grandkids to inherit.  And for those fortunate enough to be well-read, that almost inevitably brings us to one of two kinds of worlds, which ultimately identify each of us as being in the nationalist or globalist camps.  Moreover, the roads to such diametrically opposite worlds contain all the just-mentioned hurdles about which we, again, are of opposite minds.

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

[Russ Steele is a regular contributor and commenter in these pages.  He hosts Sierra Foothills Commentary, a blog that focuses on the ongoing debate about the science behind the highly politicized ‘climate change’ issue.  RR invites submitted bylines from various viewpoints on a wide spectrum of issues.  gjr]

By Russ Steele

Let’s be clear, climate change is not a hoax, the climate on this planet has demonstrated a wide range of variability over millions of years and continues to vary year to year, as the oceans warm and cool, orbits around the sun change, and the sun’s output varies.  No hoax, it is real.

So why would President Trump call global warming a hoax?  Perhaps, because there was a hoax played on the American people by a group of climate scientists as to the cause of current climate variations, claiming it was human generated CO2.

Red Pill America has the hoax story, in Episode 7, a podcast by Patrick Courrielche who has done an excellent job of telling the story in a way that all can understand. Even global warmers can follow and understand the story, and the basis for the hoax label. That is if they listen.

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

As a friend of Anthony Watts and close follower of Steve McIntyre, I was an observer to the events described in this podcast. It was Steve McIntyre who got me started learning the R programming language, as I studied his Hockey Stick analysis software. I later used some of his R code in my temperature plotting programs. I am now using Python.

Listen to the biggest science heist in history and you will understand the hoax.

Coming Apart and the Beltway Bubble (updated 4dec18)

George Rebane

SecDef Mattis was interviewed yesterday by FN’s Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum.  This is an annual get together of the country’s important people to talk about, well, national defense.  I’m a fan of Gen Mattis (even though he is a gyrene) and think he’s done a good job at the DoD.  But when the interview turned to how poorly Americans get along with each other today, and the Right/Left polarization, Mattis’ response left me slack-jawed.  I had to rewind the DVR and listen to his quote a couple more times to be sure I heard it right.

The general’s response was a version of Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we just all get along?’  He didn’t think that there lay any real barriers for the country reuniting into a functional form again because, after all, we are still all Americans, and as a country “we probably don’t have big differences about where we want to go ultimately.”  What??!!

Scattershots – 27nov18 (updated 28nov18)

George Rebane

Climate Hysteria Continues.  Along with many other analysts, Steve Koonin in the 26nov18 WSJ reports (here) that “Headlines warned of economic doom after the U.S. government released its fourth National Climate Assessment last week. Yet a close reading of the report shows that the overall economic impact of human-caused climate change is expected to be quite small.”  The report has more holes in it than swiss cheese, but it is the latest blast to continue political pressure on the ignorant and poorly read to start ‘doing something’ to materially hobble the US economy in order to ‘prevent a climate catastrophe’.  None of it holds water, and as Koonin points out, a closer reading debunks its main alarums.  Here assemble government agencies that in their best days cannot reliably predict next week’s weather or next quarter’s GDP, all pretending to tell us what the world will be like 75 years from now.  The report’s survival in the public forum does not reflect well on our collective intelligence.

Presumption of innocence is one of the seminal starting points of any adjudication of guilt in enlightened western societies, and has been so for a couple of centuries now.  Not so according to a Mr Pete Williams as he pits his logic against the recent Kavanaugh hearings.  His letter in the 26nov18 Union (here) argues “the presumption of innocence applies in criminal cases, not civil law suits or administrative matters such as applications for security clearances, job interviews, or hearings to gather information on prospective appointees, like Kavanaugh. The theory behind the presumption of innocence applying only to criminal cases is that it is better that a guilty person escape conviction than for an innocent prison(sic) to be sent to prison. The Supreme Court hearings are not a criminal proceeding — and thus the presumption of innocence was not applicable to the Kavanaugh hearings.”  This terminally progressive gentleman reveals what will be the demeanor of their star chamber courts when the socialists cum communists finally achieve their primacy in the halls of our government (e.g. Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s).  What the gentleman totally misses is the significant nuance that the receipt of a security clearance or similar benefice (e.g. corporate job) is not a constitutional right, it is a privilege to be properly granted by the government charged with the nation’s security.  Its refusal does not destroy the applicant.  However, in cases – administrative, civil, congressional, etc – where a nominee’s reputation, ability to continue his career, and to care for his family is put on the line, all western civilized cultures have tacitly accepted the premise that the burden to prove condemning accusations rests on the accuser, and not their defense on the gratuitously accused.  This distinction is totally lost on our Left, hence RR and other voices consider these lopsided sentiments to be a danger to the very foundations of our way of life – but apparently not of theirs.

[28nov18 update] As the last echoes of the election die down, we should always be reminded of the words of Josif Vissarionovich Stalin - "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

Fake News Defined (Addended)

George Rebane

Fake News – Assertions in the media (including blogosphere) disguised as news items which are purposely meant to mislead.  This includes assertions of data (facts and beliefs about the real world), information (various formatting of data to promote certain types of decisions/conclusions), and outright lies of the various types (more here).  Most, but not all, propaganda (“information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.”) is delivered as fake news.

In the spirit of promoting operational definitions on RR, ‘fake news’ has been used in this sense in my commentaries, and will continue to be so used.  Commenters who do not subscribe to this definition are welcome to offer their own in order to clarify their remarks, else the reader is invited to interpret such uses in these postings according to above definition (now added to Download RR Glossary&Semantics_v181124).

Ruminations – 23nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

Don Rogers, ex-hotshot firefighter and now publisher of The Union, writes a good piece (here) in today’s newspaper in which he instructs readers about believing hasty predictions about 'new normals' of cold, hot, wet, and dry in California’s weather patterns.  He confirms what we have been preaching for years on these pages about wildfires (recently here).  Mr Rogers’ piece concludes with, “In any case, the path forward includes no small amount of smoke. The fires will burn, but we do have some choice about when. Our best firefighting, perhaps paradoxically, includes setting the forest alight. Basically burn now, when the weather's right, before we burn up later.” (also see 24nov18 update below)

For us history buffs, preeminent living war historian Max Hastings has produced another masterpiece – Vietnam, an epic tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018) - which may become the definitive history of that decades-long conflict.  I strongly recommend his entire oeuvre, and highlight two must reads – Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 (2005) and Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945 (2007) – that document the last years of WW2 in Europe and in the Pacific.  (Longtime readers know that I claim intimate knowledge of the contents of the former.)

‘A $15 Minimum Wage Goes National’ - Nancy Pelosi wants to boost the wage floor far higher than the historical average.  So writes Michael Saltsman in the 23nov18 WSJ.  What progressives and their communist brethren never seem to understand is that such wage controls – especially large ones like this $15/hr would be – always harm the workers and consumers, i.e. the economy.  If the central planners really want to shove more money into workers’ shorts, then why not raise the minimum wage to $100/hr or even $500/hr – then everyone would be happy dancing in the street (for about five minutes).  None of these leftists learn from history of how such merit-removing policies mangle markets – the prices of everything would increase accordingly – without providing any longer term benefits to anyone save the politicians who count on the votes of the ignorant.

[24nov18 update]  This RL Crabb graphic was filched from today’s copy of The Union where Bob is their duty political cartoonist.  I particularly enjoyed this edition of Bob’s work where he sticks his creative big toe into more artistic waters.  My hope is that perhaps he can ease off a bit from his (not so) ‘middle of the road’ observations of our politics, and offer us a richer sampling of his more philosophical and contemplative renditions.

The tragic Camp and Woolsey Canyon wildfires have made news and also a lot of fake news in the last couple of weeks.  A more measured view (here) of these disasters is available from Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, which in part reads -

An enormous debate has developed over the cause of both fires.  Outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown has loudly proclaimed that climate change deniers are “definitely contributing” to the onslaught of new fires. But the best evidence says otherwise. Global temperature increase has been nil over the last 20 or so years, notwithstanding the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Similarly, the repeated claims that we have had more unstable global climate patterns within that period is likewise false. According to Professor David B. South of Auburn University, “data suggest that extremely large megafires were four-times more common before 1940” than today, even though CO2 levels were lower.

[26nov18 update]  Migrants now rushing our southern border.  Remember just a week or so ago these thousands of people were walking toward us over a thousand miles away.  It was supposed to take them weeks to walk to the border.  Then suddenly all kinds of transportation and logistical support appeared for the marchers.  Hard to keep arguing that all this was a spontaneous exodus from their home countries.  Now who provided the money for all this, and who is providing the political welcome into America?  This question is actually a freebie, since Ocasio-Cortez, the Dems' new ignoramus in Congress, is today publicly comparing this mass attempt to illegally enter the US to the Jewish Holocaust survivors' illegal entry into Palestine after WW2.

GM exits sedans, and plans to lay off about 18K workers in the US.  Decades ago the Rebanes could not figure out why any family would want to buy a sedan as opposed to a van or SUV or the station wagon of yore.  Sedans were such inefficiently designed vehicles, especially for a growing family.  Finally the entire country is getting the message as sedan sales are "sliding" industry wide in favor of pickups and SUVs.  For years now our stable has housed a van, SUV, and a pickup.  Hopefully, government mandated electric vehicle production will not prevent the return of those jobs as the car companies start producing more of the vehicles which the market actually demands.

Scattershots – 22nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

Forcible female mutilation is again legal in America.  “A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the U.S. law banning female genital mutilation was unconstitutional and dismissed charges against several doctors in Michigan who carried out the procedure on underage girls as part Muslim sect’s religious practice. … U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that Congress had no authority to enact a law that criminalizes female genital mutilation (FGM). “As despicable as [FGM] may be… [Congress] overstepped its bounds” by banning the procedure, the judge said.” (more here)

Two things – imagine, if let stand, the precedence this ruling sets for all kinds of primitive practices if they are claimed in the name of this or that religious practice (and focus on the ‘forcible’ part); also, did anyone notice that it was FN that broke this news, while it was totally eschewed by the likes of lamestream’s MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, … .  Begrudgingly, 24 hrs late, leftwing outlets such the NYT started reporting on it.  But the news doesn’t fit the Left’s pro-Muslim narrative even though they should all be enraged at the anti-woman implications of this barbarous practice.  It’s tough making such choices when you have a dysfunctional ideology that you must then promote with an incoherent narrative.

Women in world class chess are not very prominent.  Today the unequal and asymmetric roles of women are much in the news and an entire politically correct protocol has emerged about how we should think about women viz men, and how we should speak about such things.  The ongoing world chess championship match between reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana (here) is renewing interest in the questions of ‘where are the women, and why aren’t they represented in such matches?’  Well, there are all kinds of answers.  An interesting one is presented by Alisha Mathewson-Grand who argues (here) that women’s chess needs more coverage than current interest warrants, and that they are not as good as men because an insufficient number of them play the game to create enough right-tail outliers in the game’s skill distribution (admittedly tech talk).  My view is that instead of creating some artificial demand for women chess players, women should just play the men in normal tournaments and beat them to generate broader female interest in the game.  Overall, I think this gender stuff in chess is a non-issue, a nothing-burger if you will.  (I wonder how a transgender woman champion will be viewed by the politically correct population.)

Man vs Machine.  My real interest in human championship chess actually resides in a new class of interests for me.  How should we humans think of continuing to compete in activities in which our abilities are clearly outclassed by machines.  Ever since Kasparov was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, the best chess players on this planet are no longer humans.  Continuing matches like the current Carlsen/Carauna contest are strictly Junior Varsity.  No human chess master today would take the time and make the effort to be publicly humiliated by a better chess-playing machine.  The same dethronement happened recently in the even more complex game of Go.  It all reminds us again of the lore of John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man (here and here), that introduced America to the notion early in the industrial age that bit by piece man would be bettered by machines as time went on.  Is our (waning?) interest in human world chess championships a harbinger of how pre-Singularity humans will continue to compliment themselves in various endeavors in which they have been bettered?  And will they persist in these self-adulatory activities as the daily advance of technology outdoes them in skill after skill that require advanced cognition, sensing, dexterity, speed, and strength?  Can we also start augmenting our own bodies in these pre-Singularity years (jumping the gun in becoming trans-humans) with advanced embedded processing, memory, connectivity, prosthetics for sensing, mobility, and manipulanda, …?

Border security and judicial bias political?  That's what the media claims that President Trump brought up politics in his Thanksgiving calls to our troops.  First, I don't think so.  Border security is a non-partisan issue that the anti-American Left has made political in its opposition.  Judicial bias in the US is blatant and unabashed, and it has been so deemed by all sides in their turn.  Chief Justice Roberts spoke out of the wrong end when he created the latest batch of fake news by bloviating that America's judges, once empaneled, are hardworking, unbiased jurists.  Nothing could be further from the truth, else neither side would so readily sacrifice honesty and honor in opposing the other side's picks.  The president was on the mark and correct in pointing these out during his calls; and BTW, he's their CIC and gets to do that all day long if he wants to.  The last thing he should be guided by is the hate-Trump sentiments of his political enemies.

[26nov18 update]  Why Nevada County indeed?  Russ Steele, NC native and RR contributor, writes a letter to The Union in today’s edition that nails the particulars behind that question.  Here it is in its entirety –

Erika Kosina wrote in Digital disruption: Tech, entrepreneurial ecosystem paves way for growth, "All we need to do is connect the dots."

Yes, let's connect the dots, all the dots.

Dot #1: Lack of affordable housing for young families fleeing urban blight. According to Joel Kotkin, millennials with family are looking for single family homes with a safe yard for their children.

Dot #2: Young families with children are looking for communities with quality schools. Nevada County has the Ghidotti Early College High School with a small number of students, but the recent Common Core testing indicates many Nevada County Schools would not make the competitive cut.

Dot #3: The work-at-home population needs to have high-speed internet access, and broadband in Nevada County has some severe limitations.

Dot #4: The target populations are prolific smartphone users and expect robust cell phone coverage, which can be a challenge in Nevada County.

Given the lack of affordable single-family homes with a yard, a high-speed broadband connection, with robust cell phone service, all near top-rated schools, why would a young family choose to move to Nevada County, when there are more competitive options in other states?

Khashoggi affair resolved

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 November 2018.]

President Trump announced yesterday that the US would not pursue the Khashoggi murder by Saudi government agents.  The president’s reasoning was clear and eminently rational.  As anticipated, our leftwing received it with howls of disapproval that accused the president of all manner of sins violating international norms founded on morals and ethics and law and human rights and God knows what else they could pile on, when the decision actually violated nothing of the sort.  BTW, full disclosure, even some Republican politicians got their noses out of joint.

Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was a dissident Saudi journalist whose commentary and news coverage were critical of the kingdom’s ruling Saud family.  In mid-east countries like Saudi Arabia you don’t get to mess with the rulers without some consequences coming your way.  Let’s face it, that is their culture, these are not nations of laws with guaranteed rights and constitutional strictures which prescribe what their governments can and cannot do.  Most nations in the second and third worlds are ruled by ruthless men who are corrupt autocrats at best, and cruel tyrants at worst.

Monday with The Union

George Rebane

Jo Ann and I very much enjoy reading The Union – our town’s newspaper.  (This pleasure preceded her joining the paper’s editorial board.)  I am particularly entertained by George Boardman’s columns, and the regularly occasioned other voices from locals with academic credentials like Dr Milan Vodicka.  Dr Vodicka is a longtime Nevada County resident and a naturalized citizen immigrant like me.  We have met him before in these pages - e.g. here, where I noted that “the good Dr Vodicka is an ‘Independent Education Management Professional’ with an academic pedigree from the California Institute of Integral Studies that prides itself with academic departments such as ‘Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion’, ‘Integral and Transpersonal Psychology’, and ‘Drama Therapy’.”

In today’s (19nov18) Union, Dr Vodicka illustrates his academic prowess to readers by misunderstanding the difference between the communist controlled economy of his native Czechoslovakia and the US economy we are now enjoying.  There he likens the centrally planned economy of his youth, that based all progress on the tons of steel produced while totally ignoring the people’s needs for consumer goods, with that of America’s which is based on defining our economic boom in terms of providing the wherewithal for record consumer consumption.  He considers both to be short-sighted ‘single attribute’ measures that fall equally short of other attributes that should be the proper measure of an economy.

His measure of an economy (seatbelts please) must center on how well it concerns itself with ecological and environmental affairs, instead of crass indicators like consumer satisfaction, financial growth, and a nation’s quality of life.  In Vodicka’s perspective – “Measuring the ‘boomness’ of the economic performance just by money is like wandering in the world being blind.”

The focus of this liberal academic’s (may I use that label?) environmental interest is, of course, scientifically indisputable ‘climate change’, aka preventable manmade global warming.  There he lectures us on the characteristics of “scientific fact” – “1. measurability, 2. verifiability, and 3. repeatability” - without noticing that the propositions which support ‘climate change’ can lay claim to none of these. (more here)

A correspondent sent me one of the countless debunkings of public policies put in place to limit human emissions of that dreaded CO2.  This was recently put out by Prof Rutherford Plimer, much published geologist and professor emeritus of earth sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and Adelaide.  Plimer points out again what the lamestream bends over backwards to hide facts about the natural emissions of CO2 by the ongoing eruptions of earth’s over 200 active volcanoes.  For example, just four days of the recent Icelandic eruptions “negated every single effort” all humans have made over the past five years to reduce CO2 emissions on our planet.  More convincing to discerning minds is the fact that Mt Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption, that lasted for about a year, “spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.”

Dr Vodicka apparently knows nothing of such ongoing natural processes that overwhelm human intents and activities, and he most certainly does not have the academic credentials to understand or dispute such obvious realities, which should at least invite some open-minded skepticism about our current politically faith-based writhings to combat global warming.

Turning now to our favorite local liberal commentator and RR commenter George Boardman, we learn from his column (here) that he has missed the news of the Central American migrants’ arrival at the border in Tijuana.  And it also seems that he’s unaware of the bus and truck transportation that is now available to the thousands whom he characterizes as being “weeks from the border”.  Again, it’s best not to know stuff that will upset the Left’s carefully crafted and continuously fed narrative.

Scattershots – 15nov18 (updated 17nov18)

George Rebane

A leftwing Union columnist most recently summarized the huge ideological chasm between the two polarized camps of Americans (see 15nov18 letters).  Writing in response to the Kavanaugh confirmation, the writer unabashedly blurted out a core progressive tenet that was in full display at the congressional hearings – “It is just as bad to assume innocence as it is to assume guilt.”  This violates the very basis of western jurisprudence, and has long been the norm for dictators as they attempt a forged judicial system under their rule.  Nowhere in recent memory have I seen such a stark reminder of how different we are, and how different will be our society were the Left to gain absolute control.

Defense spending and a strong American military has never been in the Left’s desiderata for all the obvious reasons.  Our military has suffered mightily under leftwing administrations, most recently under President Obama.  Today the Democrats continue their anti-military chorus, while they continue to entice their gimme constituencies with promises of more and mightier entitlements, most recently led by their efforts to implant a comprehensive socialized healthcare (“single payer”) program that has yet to demonstrate its sustainability in any land it has been implemented.  Their intended source of insufficient funds for such welfare projects is from our defense budget.  However, our military today has been so weakened that the non-partisan United States Institute for Peace has issued a landmark report ‘Providing for the Common Defense’ (download it here), which goes chapter and verse into the details of what we have let lapse along with the effects it has and will have on world order.  This state of affairs is an ongoing legacy of the Left, a gift that keeps taking.

[16nov18 update]  And then these little tidbits caught my eye this morning.

Khasshoggi’s killers to get the death penalty – well, not all of them, just the poor snuffies tasked to do the dirty work.  Imagine being a highly trained field agent for your country ordered to do a delicate little assassination of some ‘enemy of the state’ in a foreign land.  You go do the job that’s then discovered through no fault of yours, and you get tried and executed while the big kahuna(s) are untouched.  How will that affect your fellow agents as they contemplate their next mission to do the state’s dirty work?  (Work that into the definition of ‘patriotism’.)  But as ever, rank hath its privileges – some people just rank too high to fail, especially those whose enemy is our enemy, and who buy billions of dollars’ worth of guns and grenades from us.

“Hire sight unseen” is the MO of employers seeking to fill critical jobs in sales and STEM.  In this hot economy, the competition for even tentatively qualified labor is so high that all you need is to submit your creatively wordsmithed resume and pass a 25-minute phone interview (some with a robo-interviewer), and your offer letter appears in your inbox. (more here)  Of course, I assume that if you really bomb on your first day on the job, you’ll be let go equally fast.  I began my career as an aerospace draftsman in exactly the same way.  My phone interview with a job shop lasted less than five minutes during which I was told the address and contact person of my new employer.  Those draftsmen who didn’t make it were out on the street after the morning coffee break.

Woke progressives continue to mangle the language.  The latest casualty to politically correct newspeak is the use of ‘body’.  Humans, people, and persons are now reduced to bodies – e.g. “Bodies that migrate across borders undergo tremendous change.” in the NYT.  The use of ‘body’ joins many other words whose meaning has been folded in with a lot of other meanings, making for ever more murkier communications.  Matthew Hennessey’s piece ‘How to Read ‘Body’ Language’ goes into more detail.  (And in the below comment stream you can see my exchange with a commenter over some silly semantics.)

Migrant caravans made up of almost all military-aged males.  Has anyone else noticed the pictures and videos of the various proto-illegal alien caravans approaching our border through Mexico?  Count the women and children.  And who is paying for all the food, shelter, transportation, and organization to get these thousands of Latinos to their designated destinations?

[17nov18 update]  Ramirez again summarizes it in a manner that is clear, concise, and complete.  (H/T to reader)

Nationalism cum Patriotism

'Nationalism unites; tribalism divides.'

George Rebane

The concept and notion of nationalism is now thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued across western countries.  The gist of the conversation or debate over nationalism is that it has been incorporated into the Left’s trans-national narrative as something that today portends giving rise to the more sinister angels of our collective nature.  To be more precise, leftwing politicians here and in Europe have unleashed the message that nationalism implies ‘white nationalism’ which implies ‘ethnic exclusion’ which represents the strong form of ‘racism’.  The lamestream media's daily outpouring makes all this very explicit, and it is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the leftwing grassroots.  An example of this reveals itself in recent comment streams found in these pages.

French president Macron did no one a favor by lecturing Trump that “nationalism is counter to patriotism” while defining his understanding of neither term (more here).  Such simple and unexamined semantic conquests continue to be the modus operandi of how language is co-opted into politically correct newspeak.  In more measured moments each of us can look up the pre-progressive definition of nationalism to find it means –

"Nationalism is a political, social, and economic system characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty (self-governance) over the homeland." (Wikipedia)

Nationalism is “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.” (Merriam-Webster)

Nationalism, “the strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.” (dictionary.com)

From these, and other such definitions, we see a common thread in an operational sense.  Nationalism is simply the ideological tenet that describes a nationalist as one who puts the interests of his own nation first when contending, comparing, or competing with other nations.  As such, there is nothing pejorative about any of these semantic variants.  And anyone of any color, religion, ethnicity, etc can join with others similarly distinguishable as a fellow nationalist to promote the sovereignty of a given nation-state.  (Sen Marco Rubio also expands on this here.)

Patriotism is nothing more or less that the expression of national pride within “the ideology of love and devotion to a homeland, and a sense of alliance with other citizens who share the same values.” (Wikipedia)  In other words patriotism is the display, exercise, and/or implementation of nationalism - i.e. patriotism is the practice and maintenance of nationalism.

Things get dicier when we start adding modifiers to create ‘white nationalism’ and ‘black nationalism’.  A white nationalist is not simply a nationalist of the Caucasian variety.  No, no, no.  The progressive definition of white nationalist has overt racial overtones such as white supremacy AND white separatism (two semantically orthogonal notions).  Today being called a white nationalist clearly assigns you to the deplorably racist neo-Nazi camp without any chance of redemption or opportunity to explain yourself using more precise language.

A black nationalist is not so encumbered, and enjoys a very asymmetrical definition.  “Black nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism in the United States which seeks to promote, develop and maintain a black national identity for people of black ancestry.” (Wikipedia)  Nation of Islam and Black Power are functional expressions of such black nationalism.  Any such reciprocal notions of promoting, developing, or maintaining a white national identity for people of white ancestry is strictly forbidden.  Moreover, evincing any efforts in those directions will get you placed on several lists of suspect and bad people that are maintained by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  And should such leanings be known in your workplace, you likely will soon be unemployed.

For the record, there is no evidence that nationalist Republicans, Libertarians, conservetarians, conservatives, or Tea Party members embrace additional attributes of nationalism than those included in the above definitions.  However, this conclusion does not fit the narrative of the Left, ranging from so-called moderate Democrats to their most fringe socialist cum communist cadres.  The America of the non-Left is, has always been, and will remain an evil nation-state.  And of this, our children must continue to be carefully taught in union dominated public schools and academe.

Do California Wildfires Serve a Greater Purpose?

George Rebane

Over 40 dead and counting, plus thousands of buildings and homes burned, plus hundreds of thousands of acres of trees and wild critters of all kinds killed, plus untold amounts of public monies pissed away that could have been used for many better things for the common good.  And all of this as the result of an annually recurring insanity put in place by well-meaning econuts through programs that started long ago with Smokey the Bear.  Today the epidemic of this seeming ignorance has become endemic.

Once upon a time the U.S. Forest Service’s mission was to actively manage the federal government’s resources. Yet numerous laws over the last 50 years, including the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act, have hampered tree-clearing, controlled burns and timber sales on federal land. (13nov18 WSJ)

Today the Agenda21 driven political divide has been augmented by the use of ‘climate change’ to double down on dumb forest management policies.  Moonbeam Brown has led a chorus of progressive pundits and their legions of true believers, claiming that preventable man-made global warming is the cause of all the recent catastrophic conflagrations (more here).  Again, the data does not support such emotionally charged political arguments; there is no scientific basis for a causal link, only a political one. (more here, H/T to reader)

President Trump’s message about governments mismanaging our forests is spot on, no matter how crudely it might have been delivered.  We have to reduce the tremendous fuel loads in our forests through active programs of undergrowth clearance, harvesting timber, and prescribed burns.  One only need to look at the circa 1850 photos of California forests to understand what humans have done over the last 150+ years.  Back then trees in the mountainous west grew in copses separated by open spaces – lightning started forest fires burned only a few copses that had grown too close together, but that was it, the fire didn’t spread and go on burning miles of trees.  It took human foolishness to encourage cheek-by-jowl growth through aggressive firefighting.  Forest thinning wildfires were outlawed, but never stopped.

Now our ecological betters, using the government gun, have created critically flammable environments wherever they could identify an endangered critter or flower or fungus or … .  Put that together with population growth that has built homes and towns in the former wildlands, and anyone with an ounce of critical thought knows that the annual chance of disastrous wildfires quickly approaches certainty.  The reality is that the forests and chaparral will burn, no matter what.  The only choice we have is whether it will burn economically when and where we want it to burn, or whether it will burn when and where we can least afford to have it burn and at enormous cost.

The right choice should be an easy one.  So why hasn’t it been made?  There may be several reasons, but one of the most plausible explanations for our decades-long insanity in choosing badly is that such wildfires also serve a greater political purpose to aid the ongoing fundamental transformation of America.  If we consider public policies encouraging such annual holocausts in that light, then one can make the plausible case that our devastating wildfires are really the result of totally rational decisions toward an end which eventually will serve a greater common good – these wildfires are just another form of the eggs which must be cracked before our central planners can deliver their promised omelet.  It's worth a discussion.

[16nov18 update]  An environmentalists’ epiphany??? 

After decades of butting heads, some environmentalists and logging supporters have largely come to agreement that forests need to be logged to be saved. … Another dangerous factor, land-management experts say, is that forests have become overgrown with trees and underbrush due to a mix of human influences, including a past federal policy of putting out fires, rather than letting them burn. Washington has also sharply reduced logging under pressure from environmentalists. (more here)

Is liberalism really anything different from mental illness?  Why did it take decades for these people to recognize a solution known to the rest of us for over a century?  How many other such practical approaches to commerce, land use, and recreation do these people continue to deny America?  Does this epiphany represent some light at the end of this insane tunnel?

Election night and I am really pi&&ed (again)!

George Rebane

We’re watching the various channels report the returns.  And the directors and producers of their election night shows insist on putting on talking heads and politicians from all over the country who not only have no clue which way things are trending, but also no firm ideas on which way things will turn out given the up-to-the-minute data feeds.  Why put these know-nothings on the air to tell us their long-winded ‘on this hand, but on the other hand’ information-free interviews.  We don’t need to hear such ignorance (technical use of term) and/or ambivalence from invited talking heads; the program anchors can handle such 50-50 outcome monologues all by themselves, and they can do it more efficiently with backup data than the people on their panels or the senator from some state who will amble on in ambiguity.

So here’s the drill.  Ask the prospective person to be put on the air whether they have any firm convictions about which way this or that race will turn out given the data up to now.  If the sumbich says he hasn’t got a clue, then don’t put him on the air to waste the viewers’ time.  In short, if you have some firm position on an outcome that you can defend, then welcome and speak your piece – else we’ll get back to you when you’ve got something to tell us other than your long-winded ‘I don’t know’.  How come none of those stellar journalistic professionals putting these ‘election headquarters’ on the air know how to do this???

Ruminations – 4nov18 (update 5nov18)

“If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science.” Karl Popper

George Rebane

A regression function does not a theory make.

Climate change: A regular reader and avid follower of climate science Russ Steele sent me a couple of links that I’d like to share with our True Believers (the rest are “deniers”).  The first is a comprehensive yet compact analysis and refutation of the Left’s climate science hysteria (here).  The second is an analysis of ‘CO2 driven warming’ that again puts a lie to the whole thing (here).  Both pieces have solid assertions that can be refuted (i.e. they are falsifiable) with countering science and argument.  I invite our leftwing readers to respond with something more than another performance of their sophomoric Consensus Cantata.  In the meantime, meditate on the above two shibboleths now out of fashion with our progressives.

The definition of ‘nationalism’ is on the slippery slope, being shoved into politically correct meaningless verbiage that is appended with everything the Left dislikes.  I ask readers to give us an English word that means “a political, social, and economic system characterized by devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state. The belief that nations will benefit more from acting independently rather than collectively, and the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty over the homeland”, and nothing more or less.  What should be the label for such a sentiment shared by billions across the globe?

Midterm Election MABs.  Only three of us cared to offer their MAB distributions for the outcome of the House elections.  I have computed the MABs shown in the upper left of the above figure, along with the plots of the discrete MAB probabilities for each outcome for the number of House Democrats who will be seated January 2019.  Recall, of the 435 seats a majority requires at least 218.  The figure shows the definite and confident party biases of Messrs Steele and Frisch, with Moi the Chickens#!t timidly sneaking in there with a 0.5 confidence for my most likely (ML) of 220 seats for the Dems.  It is clear that RussS will win with the best prediction if the Dems get less that 219 seats, and StevenF will win if the Dems get more than 219.  And 219 happens to be the ONLY number of Dems that will make me the winner - very sad.  However, if we consider the 'wisdom of crowds' as the shown group average, then I am the closest to the common mind in this little prediction derby.  Alas, this is a position of which I have never been a proud resident.  Oh well, we'll see next Wednesday morning how it all shakes out.

Hate speech??  Hate speech is used a lot by progressives to describe stuff they don't want to read or hear.  Can anyone give an operational definition of 'hate speech' that can be used to categorize it?  Or is it a gift leftwingers are blessed with - something like 'I really can't define it, but I sure can tell when someone uses it.'?

[5nov18 update] Sen Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has issued a massive report documenting interviews with dozens of witnesses and accusers of Justice Kavanaugh, and his alleged sexual misconduct.  They have found “found that no witnesses could provide evidence to substantiate their claims”.  Instead, many of those who came out of the woodwork have now recanted their accusations – example, “the evidence appears to support the position that Julie Swetnick and Mr. Avenatti criminally conspired to make materially false statements to the Committee and obstruct the Committee’s investigation.”  For some odd reason the Dem sleazebags on the committee – those led by Sen Feinstein who conspired to torpedo Kavanaugh’s nomination through last minute political theatrics, are silent on the matter – no report contending the committee’s findings is forthcoming.  Should the Dems take the House tomorrow, the same troupe of sleazebags will resurface to up the ante on the crap they will manufacture in the attempt to impeach SCOTUS’s newest justice.  In the meanwhile, crickets.  (more here)

Bloomberg drops $5M in last minute appeal to bipartisanship by urging a Democratic vote tomorrow.  The former mayor of New York is confident that his audience is sufficiently dimwitted to believe his claim that he is not being political, but instead calling for us to come together under the magnificent plan forward for the nation as promised by the Left.  Let your search for common ground begin here.

Honduran and Guatemalan flags are in very obvious display in the columns of migrants headed for the US.  You would think that they would be carrying the flags of the country into which they wish entry, into whose society they intend to assimilate.  What are we missing here?

And speaking of everyone coming together to become one happy American family - here's the latest from our Muslim immigrants.  Get any of this from the lamestream?

Scattershots – 18oct18 (updated 20oct18)

George Rebane

All eligible should vote?!  In today’s (18oct18) Union ‘Hits & Misses’ we note the following – “HIT (from Editorial Board member Susan Rogers): To the massive turnout at the Miners Foundry for Indivisible Women of Nevada County's Get Out the Vote event. Even if you personally don't agree with the agenda of the group, any patriotic citizen should not have a problem with the concept of urging all eligible voters to vote.”  (emphasis mine)  Actually, many of us are not sanguine with that concept, so far as it involves voters ignorant of the issues on which they are asked to vote.  To do your country and community a favor, please don’t vote on matters you don’t understand.  As many have argued before, and we reinforce here, JUST being able to fog a mirror does not necessarily recommend your vote.  More on this important (nay, critical) notion is available from Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007), whose arguments are more valid today than ever, and are expanded here, here, and here.

Climate Change Revisited

George Rebane

‘Climate change’ is one of the unfortunate labels that a nation dominated by dumbth uses to simplify and therefore profoundly misunderstand a very complex process that is made even more confusing through the injection and overarch of political ideologies.  The hoi polloi are salved and saved from all this confounding by being taught that science is a singular absolute, and that ‘science is settled’ on climate change.  There is nothing that will change such minds outside the opinions of their chosen political betters who insist all credible scientists warn us that earth is headed for a thermal catastrophe unless we quickly adopt a set of draconian public policies, enforced by a bigger government, that must needs change our fundamental lifestyles.  Assessments and evidence that contradict such consensus science are loudly sourced to flat-earthers, creationists, and others categorized as intellectual troglodytes.

When the semantic onion is peeled back, climate change is really the short label for preventable man-made global warming (PMGW), about which you shouldn’t bother your little head as long as you concur with the new laws, regulations, taxes, and fees required to ‘prevent climate change’.  Climate change is also the perfect and only storm that must not be wasted on our road to a global Agenda21 (q.v.).  However, the rest of us know that –

1) earth’s climate change is perennial and ongoing;

2) the greenhouse effect is real and greenhouse gases (especially CO2) in earth’s atmosphere are constantly varying, and have done so over broad ranges for eons;

3) earth’s carbon cycle is poorly understood at best;

4) humans do contribute an unknown proportion to atmospheric CO2;

5) the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and ‘earth’s temperature’ is an unknown dynamic process;

6) the temperature of the earth is a number produced by any of many algorithms, and then politically selected for public consumption;

7) our understanding of the dynamics of weather and climate are poor and a work in process, definitely not ready to support public policy making;

8) general circulation models (GCMs), cobbled together to generate and support weather and climate predictions, are many in a field of ongoing research, and are intensely politically mediated for use in public policy making;

9) today’s GCMs barely work for predicting near-term weather, and are useless for predicting long-term climate changes;

10) earth’s weather and climate are large-scale, complex chaotic processes, the long-term predictions of which today are not possible to any degree of usable reliability, and for several technical reasons having to do with physics and computability, such usable reliability may never be possible;

11) the presented evidence for PMGW has been demonstrated to be fraught with fraudulent manipulations and interpretations of historical and topical measurements along with ad hoc estimates, and there is no evidence that the claimed climate change is preventable;

12) the overwhelming ‘thousands’ of the UN’s IPCC scientists, who have neither the expertise nor understanding of things outside their own narrow disciplines correctly, make no such claims, especially when it comes to the workings of any of the GCMs du jour that incorporate their particular inputs for making predictions in the large;

13) all of the above has also been communicated by a body of competent scientists and engineers who are both beholden and not beholden to politically correct government grants.

For some time now the climate change debate has been politically polluted beyond any reason-based redemption or resolution.  Instead, it meticulously mangled by the media before being resolved in the public square through the vicissitudes of an ephemeral and mostly fluid public comprehension, one that expresses itself variously in the nation’s ballot boxes.  Democracy at work indeed.

For these reasons I remain a skeptic about PMGW, and treat all new information as a Bayesian.  To characterize people like me as 'not believing' in climate change immediately extinguishes further discussion and debate.  Such accusations are invariably either agenda driven or simply ignorant.

(The portents are more compelling for a near-term episode of global cooling.  Perhaps the politicians will respond when we witness, say, a couple of years of a crop-killing June frost on the Great Plains.)

Fascism – what it is and isn’t (addended)

George Rebane

Since the Democratic Party’s great Leftward Lurch, it is now publicly and unabashedly America’s new socialist party, notwithstanding start-up wannabes like the newly formed Progressive Party USA.  The Left’s problem today is how they must carefully wend their way through a potential political minefield in how they describe their brand of collectivism – i.e. socialism - in a way that doesn’t blow up the narrative they have been carefully nurturing since the days of FDR.

As we witness in these pages and from the years-long national dialogue, the Left has always maintained that while they embrace the socialism of a Marxist-Leninist provenance, the extreme Right, in its turn, embraces the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini.  And therefore, to all good modern leftwingers, fascism is not now and never has been a form of socialism – fascism is instead the form of totalitarianism that comprises the hidden agenda of the Right and is the other bookend of their simplistic political spectrum.  This is both factually and historically false as we’ll cover in a moment.  But given the difficulties our Left has had in selling socialism to Americans, they have always desperately needed an ideological bogeyman or monster that they could erect and portray to the lightly read, and against which they could favorably compare the nostrums and shibboleths celebrating their brave new world.  Enter ‘fascism’, the avowed enemy and monstrous ideology that we fought and vanquished in WW2, and, according to the Left, the rebirth of which once more threatens the world if the Right comes to power and has its way with us.  (And hence the current rationale for the Left’s sanctioned “incivility” in the streets until they regain power.)

So, for at least the last 75 years, the Left’s narrative has drawn its substance and raison d’etre from characterizing itself as the defender of the common man against what they invent for public consumption as the rapacious Right of the greedy capitalists.  These are the people whose only aim is to exploit and then enslave the masses under an autocratic cum totalitarian governance that forcefully exploits them as the labor engines to create wealth, which is then shunted into the coffers of the … (wait for it), the ‘fascist elites’.  Unfortunately for the Left, history has shown all this occurring only after collectivists have come to power.

America’s Right has continued to characterize itself as promoting the ideology of individual enterprise, free markets, private property, liberty, distributed governance through minimalist governments/jurisdictions, and an originalist (‘textualist’) interpretation of the Constitution (see Addendum).  This interpretation embraces inevitable change through constitutional ways and means prescribed and practiced throughout our history.  In short, an ideology that is a total antithesis of the collectivists’ worship of society organized under and administered through the strata of (altruistic) central planners and controllers within an expansive and ever-expanding government.  Today the Left marches toward globalization under banners emblazoned with ‘democracy’, and the full and selectively suppressed knowledge that, practiced in the large, democracy quickly consumes itself as it morphs into one of the particularly egregious forms of totalitarianism.

Poverty, Transfer Payments, and GNI, oh my!

George Rebane

Abetted by progressive propaganda, the UN has found “shocking” evidence that 40M Americans live in “squalor and deprivation”, which comes to about 12.7% of our population.  The trouble with that piece of fiction is that none of the millions seeking entry into the US by hook or crook believe that bullcrap.  As we have pointed out before, our Census Bureau uses a complicated formula for computing the poverty threshold that uses factors such as income based on family size and composition, and totally ignores the $1.5T of government transfer payments along with the additional $500B of private charity benefits that our ‘poor’ receive annually.  Were only the government payments included in the calculation, our poverty rate would already be less than 3% which reflects realworld total household income data, consumer spending patterns, and the country’s immigration pressures.

But none of this would fit the vote buying and plantation maintenance narratives of our Left, now very busy moving the Democratic Party toward full scale socialism.  These elites need to play a hand that contains not only the poverty card, but also separate cards for inequality, racism, sexism, and more ‘phobics’ that emerge every day.  And the maintenance of this Big Lie is all made possible by their bought and paid for propaganda purveyors of the national media.  Were it not for the constant daily din of dunning news about how badly we are all doing because of President Trump and his 'illegitimate administration', people would forget what is drilled into their heads, go about their business and enjoy a real recovery from the last recession that’s finally worth its name.

Hugh Hewitt, Washington Post’s token conservative columnist, recounted the economic and public policy realities that we have enjoyed since Team Trump took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  In ‘Trump may be outside our norms. But he is succeeding for all of us.’ Hewitt recounts the impressive litany of this administration’s accomplishments including getting more people, especially of the minorities, working than anyone today can remember.  One of the tightly kept secrets by the lamestream media is the recent Rasmussen poll that shows a resurgence of blacks supporting the president more than doubling from one out of five to one out of three – that means people are beginning to notice where it counts, in their wallets.

Economists Phil Gramm and John Early in ‘Government Can’t Rescue the Poor’ provide the reader a snootful of pertinent stats about poverty in America, and conclude that with what our poor already receive in transfer payments and from charities, that there is no amount of money which will today motivate them to added efforts “to allow them to develop and use their capacities.” This was Lyndon Johnson selling his 'War on Poverty' in 1964, one of the historically least effective and most destructive programs ever devised by our government.  As supportive data, consider that in the twenty years since WW2, America’s poverty rate had steadily dropped from 32.1% to 14.7%.  And then in 1965 its descent stopped dead in its tracks by the advent of progressive give-aways, the only real measurable achievement of which was the destruction of African-American families.

Without the obligation of marriage to hold them back, black men impregnated willing black women who knew that each additional fatherless kid meant a bigger check from the feds.  The Census Bureau data confirms “how the War on Poverty produced an unprecedented decline in work effort among those who received benefits”, and over the years it “has been an abject failure, increasing dependency and largely severing the bottom fifth of earners from the rewards and responsibilities of work.”

Today the marriage, bastard children, educational achievement, and employment stats tell the story of how the Great Society has impacted America’s minorities.  But not to worry, as reported by Gramm and Early, the actual poverty rate of 3% is confirmed by the “Department of Energy Residential Consumption Survey, which finds consistently rising spending among poor families on cars, home electronics, cable, household appliances, smartphones and living space. The 3% poverty rate would fall even further if it accounted for transfers within families, some $500 billion of private charitable giving, and the multibillion-dollar informal economy, where income is unreported.”

This effect on the poor has been known for generations.  Even that great social engineer Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned us during the midst of his depression in 1935 that “The lessons of history show conclusively that continued dependency upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

So now we come to Guaranteed National Income, which is suggested by many, including me (here), as the only prophylactic that will keep blood out of the gutters.  The only concern that nags me is a tenet in my credo that acknowledges 'relevance' as being a fundamental human requirement for maintaining stable civil societies.  Without doing work that obviously contributes to the well-being of his family and community, people will become dissatisfied with the general scheme of things that surrounds them.  And they will respond by either attempting to become relevant in their established environment, or disrupt that environment for a new, perhaps simpler (more primitive?) one in which they again see themselves as relevant.

No matter our politics, these are the certainties that will shape our world as technology advances and governments seek to soothe us, first with gratuities then with guns.

Yellowstone Supervolcano about to blow?

George Rebane

[This little interlude will most likely interest very few RR readers, but it has provided me a respite from the political struggles through my continuing love-affair with pushing squigglies.  Truth be told, I do this kind of stuff quite often, and who knows, there's always the off-chance that some reader may show interest.]

As we sat last Saturday morning waiting for the history making Senate confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh, I meandered across yet another article on the supervolcano that rumbles under Yellowstone National Park.  Geologists tell us that the volcano has erupted every 600K – 800K years or so with a devastating effect that we in recent decades have come to call a ‘nuclear winter’.  The last one occurred about 640K years ago.  When that magma dome blows again it will put so much dust, dirt, and ash into the earth’s atmosphere as to change the earth’s climate for several years starting with a two- or three-year winter that will kill much of the planet’s vegetation and critters, make agriculture near impossible, and therefore cause the wholesale death of most of us who live here – at least that’s what NASA and a covey of paleo-geologists tell us.

It turns out that modern technology today can provide a very beneficial prophylactic to prevent such an event, and in the process generate a considerable amount of clean geothermal electricity.  Scientists at NASA tell us that it would be possible to cool the molten magma bubble by drilling laterally into its sides, pumping down cold water, and harvesting super-heated steam for electricity generating powerplants on the surface.

The cost of drilling such 10km deep holes comes to almost $3.5B, add another few billion dollars to the budget to put up a powerplant or two, and you could see doing the whole thing for about $10B while lowering or completely eliminating the risk of a big blow-up.  The cost of the electricity generated in this manner comes to about $0.10/kWh – cheap at twice the price.  So why aren’t utilities rushing in there to do just that? (more here and here)

Well, the best anyone can tell is the high business risk of such an undertaking in a national park that is surrounded by high walls of environmental regulations manned by legions of super-zealous, lawyer-ladened, eco-nazis with a paucity of critical thinking skills.  Now this is where government should step in and play the crucial role of paving the way to implement such a humanity-saving insurance policy with a clean energy solution to boot.  But so far no one on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has made a peep about this.  It can’t be the cost, because the feds lose more than $10B a day with what they drop off their loading docks.  So, for an answer, let’s look at the risk side of this potential earth-shaking catastrophe.

To quantify the downside risk we techies first appeal to what is called probability rate theory that is a well-known tool in areas like search and detection using radars and sonars.  The best estimate of Yellowstone’s catastrophe rate is once every 700K years.  That’s about the average frequency at which the big magma bubble gets close enough to the surface for its outward pressure to blow its top.

The real question we have to answer today is something like ‘what is the probability that Yellowstone blows again in the next 100 years?’  Clearly, if that probability, let’s label it P100, is sufficiently high, we should get busy tout de suite on the drilling and powerplant project described by NASA.  I have no idea what is ‘sufficiently high’ for the congress critters to get something going.  Most certainly if P100 = 0.5, then things in Washington would start happening.  But if P100 = 0.01, then I think we would continue to sleep on it a bit more.  So what is the real value of P100?

Lucky for you dear reader, mom sent me to school to learn how to answer such questions.  So I’ll save you the trouble of reading my brilliant analysis before calculating the answer, and give it to you right off the bat – P100 = 0.000246.  That’s a pretty low number for the next supervolcano eruption to take place sometime in the coming 100 years, and it pretty much explains why people aren’t getting too excited about it in the government or in the energy industry.

Now that doesn’t mean we won’t have one of those smaller eruptions that occur every few 10K years, these will not be civilization enders, but they might screw up our agriculture on the Great Plains for a few years.  Maybe later, if there’s available data, I’ll do some noodling on the chance that a ‘minor’ eruption will happen in the next century.  So the question remains, why are the NASA people getting excited about Yellowstone’s civilization ending volcano?

What the Kavanaugh Confirmation has Really Confirmed (updated 7oct18)

George Rebane

By the slimmest margin, this morning the Senate voted cloture – to restrict remaining debate on the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh before the vote to confirm scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.  Odds are that by this time tomorrow Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed as the newest Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Here and elsewhere the road to the confirmation vote has led us through some of the smelliest sewers of our federal government while unambiguously revealing the journalistic corruption of our vaunted Fourth Estate.  For all intents and purposes, what in these pages I have labeled the ‘lamestream media’, the overwhelming membership of that estate has today successfully morphed into the Ministry of Information (aka propaganda arm) of the Democratic Party.

It is turning out that the real collusion in this confirmation drama occurred in the Democrats’ management of the hearing’s witnesses.  The most recent FBI investigation revealed that there was a concerted, coordinated, albeit unsuccessful effort to get Dr Ford to perjure herself on her (lack of) recollection of the facts related to her allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.  The larger dimensions of this sordid side of the sewer has yet to play itself out – stay tuned.

Escrow the Witch Hunt (updated 29sep18)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary that was broadcast on 26 September 2018.  It is an augmented version of the previous RR post, ‘Mueller’s “Witch Hunt” Metric’.  An edited version of this commentary was also published in the 29sep18 Union (here).]

Even with the ongoing Kavanaugh confirmation hysteria, the Russia collusion investigation by special counsel Mueller continues to elbow its way into the lead stories of the news cycle, and rightly so.  Should Mueller find some material evidence on impactive collusion or, now the add-on hunt for obstructing justice, then that would have an immediate and material impact on the prospects of President Trump completing his first term.

Today we continue to have the usual Trump enemies like James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey appearing daily on leftwing media endlessly rehashing their charges that President Trump colluded with the Russians to get elected, and then engaged in various nefarious acts to obstruct investigations that would bring him to justice, a road that would lead to immediate impeachment and possible conviction by the Senate to remove him from office.

The lack of any evidence to substantiate such allegations does not have any impact to slow the beat of the media propaganda drums that today continue to convince the nation’s voters that Trump is guilty as alleged.  Trump and his supporters respond by calling these evidence-free allegations and the seemingly interminable Mueller investigation a witch hunt.  Basically, they accuse Mueller and his Democrat supporters of following a policy that the investigation will continue until some culpable evidence is found, and the nation along with the administration will be kept on tenterhooks until that time.