Rebane's Ruminations

Fair, Just, and Legal, Oh My! (updated 3mar20)

George Rebane

From the dictionary:

• Fairness: “the state, condition, or quality of being fair, or free from bias or injustice: evenhandedness.” “the quality of making judgments that are free from discrimination.”
• Justice: “the quality of being fair and reasonable”
• Legal: “appointed, established, or authorized by law; deriving authority from law; permitted by law; lawful.

We all a hear a lot about things like ‘fair share’ and ‘social justice’ today.  How many people using or listening to these notions really have any, and I do mean any, understanding of what they mean in the greater scheme of our society.  From my experience and the daily round, the answer is a firm NO.  Since in these pages I and most of our readers have a penchant for more semantical precision in their lexicon, I want to expand on what I believe are the utilitarian ways to think about and use such words.

First of all, each of these notions – fair, just, legal - must have meanings that justify their being composed of distinguishable literal strings.  Else why have them if they mean the same thing?  Here we’re interested in meanings that maximally distinguish, and thereby support a richer capacity to think, analyze, and express.

Before unpacking some more precise semantics, we again recall nobelist Kenneth Arrow who showed a long time ago that when there are more than two alternatives from which to choose that satisfy certain criteria, then there is no ideal or fair way to select among such alternative solutions (or candidates) that are guaranteed to satisfy, say, three people, let alone a group.  Arrow identified the criteria in his Impossibility Theorem (more here).  Subsequently, economist Amartya Sen identified the ‘liberal paradox’ which holds that in the distribution of goods and services within a society/economy there is always conflict between any such distribution policy and individual freedom.  This paradox was explained by Frederic Bastiat in his Triangle of Rights to security, liberty, and property, the weakening of any one immediately weakens the other two.

Racism and Racists revisited (updated 24jul19)

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

George Rebane

In a more learned time ‘racism’ was defined by first class dictionaries like the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged) 2 ed as “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.”  Today, Dictionary.com still posts that same definition verbatim.  Unfortunately, that’s where it ends.

In days of yore, and perhaps still among the more precise speakers and writers, a ‘racist’ was a person who embraced such a belief or doctrine.  No longer.  Today in the public forum ignorance and political cynicism rule the day, and are reinforced by the hour in print, online, in schools, and by politicians of both parties.  Racist can be an indictment of someone's comments that have absolutely nothing to do with racism, simply on the invocation of 'We know what he really meant'. It is of a piece of our declining culture that does not bode well for America.  One of my early commentaries on racism was ‘Who is a Racist?’; there I particularly call your attention to the intense and self-assured responses from our liberal commenters.

Today, racist is a label publicly, cynically, and even gratuitously hung around the neck of –

1. Anyone who disagrees with your speech or opinion;
2. Any white person who disagrees with the speech or opinion of a non-white person;
3. Any white person who describes a non-white person in any but the most salutary terms;
4. Anyone who tells a non-white to ‘go back where you came from’;
5. Anyone who describes radical Islam in their own terms;
6. Anyone who opposes illegal entry into the US;
7. Anyone who opposes taxpayer funded succor and sanctuary to illegal aliens;
8. Anyone who calls a shithole country a shithole country;
9. Anyone who wants illegal aliens deported according to our laws;
10. Anyone who wants to enforce our immigration laws;
11. Anyone who cites the race-based IQ testing results published by the American Psychological Association;
12. Anyone who points out the cultural deficits of a non-white country;
13. Anyone who identifies a mulatto as a mulatto;
14. Any white person who disagrees with an elected politician, official, teacher, … of color;
15. Any white person who criticizes the government sponsored demise of the black family;
16. Anyone who points out that overwhelmingly and obviously people like to live among cultural likes;
17. Anyone who points out the failure of certain non-white groups to assimilate;
18. … .

The list goes on indefinitely as expressions and behaviors are uncritically labeled ‘racist’.  What they all share in common is that each has absolutely nothing to do with the original precise definition of racism.  In spite of this, for the Left 'racist' has long become the preferred pejorative with which to tar their political opponents.  So today ‘racist’ can mean anything, when it actually means nothing.  The danger to our republic is that the Humpty Dumpty approach to semantics has now been baked into our justice system.

[24jul19 update] The national press is taking up the points of my above commentary.  To wit, that the media offer no proof or basis for charging President Trump’s tweets to have been ‘racist’.  They just continue to pile on empty moralizing, repeating the racist charge with no accompanying reasoning or evidence whatsoever.  In the comment stream below, we see the echoes of this from our local liberal light-thinkers who have never been able to go beyond the lamestream’s talking points.  To their benefit we beseech, ‘Lord, forgive them for they know not what they say.’

An example of this appears in ‘Prove the Tweets Were Racist’ by WSJ editorial board member Holman Jenkins.  Excerpts from his piece follow –

• Numerous outlets this week deceived themselves when they referred to Mr. Trump’s “racist tweets” as if their racist nature was an established fact that good reporting had nailed down. They think they are being brave when they are being the opposite. Brave was a dissenter: Keith Woods, National Public Radio’s diversity chief, who argued on NPR’s website that reporters should report facts and do interviews and leave the moralizing to people they quote.

• (The media sought) to incriminate Mr. Trump with words and actions of people who are not Mr. Trump. Media outlet after media outlet confidently asserted that Mr. Trump was speaking in racist code. But if it’s code, its meaning cannot be detected in the plain words, so we must rely on the media’s anointed code breakers to tell us what Mr. Trump really meant. (emphasis mine)

• Trump makes a great deal of trouble for himself because he insists on free-associating in public. He won’t, like other politicians, stick to scripts carefully scrubbed of ambiguity. But the press does not make truth out of ambiguity by putting words in his mouth. (emphasis mine)

• If they acquired a bit of political realism (from Trump’s election), reporters might even notice something about Mr. Trump’s “make America great again” slogan. It gives a large and ineradicable part of the electorate a way to frame their interests and discontents without reciprocating the identity-based claims of those they see (not altogether inaccurately) as assailing them.

• Frankly, some humility is also in order from a press that has displayed a more than usual amount of gullibility, conformism and poor judgment on just about every matter that has come before them in the past few years. If the media’s not-so-secret agenda is to defeat Mr. Trump, they might consider the possibility that they are (again) going about it in exactly the wrong way.

Globalization, Globalism, Globalists, and Governance

George Rebane

RR commentaries have defined and used globalism and globalization interchangeably to mean the political and commercial progress toward a one-world government as long proposed by the United Nations and its proponents, and especially by those espousing the UN’s Agenda21 program (q.v.) promulgated by its worldwide network of ICLEIs (more here and here, and see also RR’s ‘Agenda 21’ category of commentaries).

In recent RR comment stream exchanges, a couple of our leftwing readers reminded me, correctly, that most of the public understands ‘globalization’ to refer to the trade and commerce aspect of companies rapidly expanding to do business across national borders.  Moreover, that this same cohort, which includes our commenters, doesn't connect ‘globalization’ with today’s concurrent efforts by the international collectivists to abrogate the Westphalian order of nation-states and unite humanity under a one-world government.  Merriam-Webster defines globalization as “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.”  Clearly the focus and intent here is in the fields of commerce and not unified governance.

Yet M-W and others define ‘globalism’ as “a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence”, and “the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations”. Here we definitely overlap into the area of politics and governance.  And people who are ‘globalists’ are those who share such an “attitude”, now on the track to one-world governance.  This has been the sense in which RR commentaries have interchangeably used ‘globalization’ and ‘globalism’, along with ‘globalist’.

So, in the interest of continuing our tradition of precise definitions (which so vexes the Left), I will henceforth use the following definitions in my commentaries and comments –

Globalization - the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by businesses and commercial institutions in sovereign nation-states expanding their products and services across national boundaries in conducting free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.

Globalism – the ideology that treats the whole world as a unified sphere of political influence, and promotes institutions which place the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations, with the ultimate goal of achieving a one-world government.  A globalist is a person embracing such an ideology.

These definitions will be included in the next edition of RR’s Glossary & Semantics.

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.

‘Truth Decay’ (updated 23jan18)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 January 2018.  A slightly edited version of the broadcast commentary appears here in the 20jan18 Union.]

We are now such a tragically polarized nation that almost all of us believe we are being misled through the various media.  We believe that disinformation and ‘fake news’ make up the major fare we are exposed to, and its source is, of course, from the other side.  Observing this growing socio-political crisis over the recent years, the well-respected and non-partisan Rand Corporation has launched a research program to discover the nature, extent, causes, and possible solutions to what it calls ‘Truth Decay’.  They recently published a report, actually a 326-page book, that describes the problem along with an outline for future research.

The Rand authors, Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich, start by giving a working definition of Truth Decay.  Its four dominant trends are –

1. increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data;

2. a blurring of the line between opinion and fact;

3. the increasing relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact;

4. declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.

On Immigration and ‘S#!thole Countries’ (updated 13jan18)

George Rebane

No matter what he actually said in that White House meeting on immigration policy, President Trump has again focused a policy discussion on a crux of the matter instead of continuing the same ol’ same ol’ circling of the barn.  I don’t want to debate whether he actually said “shithole country” as the press is attributing, but I hope he did if it gets us off the dime in deciding who should be let in to serve America’s interests as a sovereign and sustainable nation-state.

Because this is a family-oriented blog (hah!), and in the ensuing discussion we will want to continue using that colorful descriptor without gratuitously sprinkling dirty words all over these pages, I will use the three-letter acronym SHC in the sequel for both expedience and, perhaps, collateral decorum.  Nevertheless, the meaning of that appellation will be made and should remain clear.

Instead of working on a more polished commentary, I decided to quickly anchor my contribution to the topic in a structured list of propositions that I believe are also embraced more or less by other conservetarians.  If they are also Bayesians like me, then their beliefs of the following will range from near zero (impossible) to near unity (certain), and in the process never saying never for either extreme.

Definitions Derby

Hold to nothing too violently.  Every fool stands convinced: and everyone convinced is a fool; and the faultier a man's judgment, the firmer his conviction; even with the proof on your side, it is well to make concession; for your reasons are known and your gentlemanliness is recognized; ... .  Gracian #183

George Rebane

In these pages we have sought, so far with limited success, to make our discussions and debates semantically crisper by using well-defined terms, and editing these definitions as necessary to capture the more nuanced meanings intended.  For example, many keyboards have been pounded over the years debating the definitions and the subsequent uses of socio-political labels such as socialist, communist, capitalist, liberal, progressive, conservative, conservetarian, etc.  The resulting definition derbies seem always to revolve around how attribute comprehensive should the labeled thing be before its assigned label is accepted.

Most people will accept a label such as ‘socialist’ or ‘conservative’ if the person, program, or policy can claim some sufficient number of attributes to unambiguously indicate its membership in the labeled class.  As an example, a policy can safely be called socialist if it expands state’s control of the means of production or mandates market-blind distribution of goods, wealth, etc.  Such common usage doesn’t call for implementing all (i.e. the comprehensive set) of the attributes of socialism.  In short, a useful discourse can be had if the parties either understand each other’s use of a label, or accept a working principle that doesn’t make ‘comprehensive’ the enemy of ‘sufficient’.

Debating definitions can also serve agendas, especially if you determine that your ideology must be sold carefully to broader audiences (e.g. your lightly-read constituencies).  In such cases you don’t want to reveal the complete picture too soon because your audience will then balk.  In these times such has been the case when collectivists of various shades want to hide behind easy-to-embrace social give-aways without going into the details of what it will take to sustain such transfer payments, or if sustainability is even possible.

So, when you believe in a future in which the state controls more than less of our property and behaviors, a future where markets are greatly curtailed or completely eliminated by state mandated distribution policies, then you don’t want to advertise that too early, even if you believe that such a system will ultimately provide the greatest good to the greatest number.  In that case you will decry the socialist label being prematurely attached to policies that are at best camouflaged in half-way houses on the road to socialism.  You then will argue in favor of the comprehensive definition, and dismiss any sufficient characterization of socialism that doesn’t check off all the dictionary items listed under socialism – ‘my policy doesn’t call for the elimination of all markets, therefore it is not socialism.’

With comprehensive definitions suppressing the merely sufficient, the debate’s progress will be successfully stifled until the destination is achieved at which time it will be revealed when all of its features or attributes are in place.  In such a forum, one is not allowed to identify himself, say, as a conservative unless he can check off somebody’s complete list of requirements for a conservative.  The same for a ‘free market’ which is then defined as one that is not allowed to have even a smidgen of regulations under which it must operate.  Or the obverse, mandating the ‘free market’ label when a massively regulated market still has a bit of wiggle room left.  It all depends on your agenda.

Quite often definitions are given in terms of an overarching concept that can stand on its own, but can be expanded to have one or more appended categorical components.  We recently ran into one such term – ‘collusion’ – that is much in the news these days, and forms the crux of an enlarged debate that is attended by participants all wearing ideologically colored glasses.  To illustrate, for the Right ‘collusion’ is seen simply as two or more parties proceeding in confidence to accomplish some end, be it innocent or evil.  The latter being the addended categorical component.  To pursue its current agenda, the Left can only view ‘collusion’ in terms of its categorical component of ‘evil’ firmly clamped to the overarching definition, with the attendant logic that colluding secretly or in confidence must always and necessarily be evil – no further proof is needed. (more here)

Unfortunately, such definition derbies often lap over to embrace countless faulty logics so prevalent in the comment streams of most blogs including RR’s.  The preceding semantical gymnastics are usually part of a drill that starts by characterizing everything in black/white or binary terms.  If you don’t explicitly condemn/embrace something, then the clear conclusion is that you must love/hate that same thing.  This is the most common and ham-brained way of rejecting the cautionary wisdom that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Related to this is the so-called ‘argument from ignorance’, so popular today, wherein one ‘asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false’.  Both appeal to the same logical fallacy.

In my experience, also confirmed in these pages, it is overwhelmingly the folks on the Left who don’t want to be explicit about what they actually believe (i.e. the tenets of their credo), and consequently in a debate they sail under false colors as long as possible, and then simply quit the field when such colors no longer serve.  I have yet to meet a person of the Right who, when asked, hesitates to declare the underlying tenet of his credo that gives basis for his argument on an issue.  Perhaps others have had the same experience.

(Readers may always examine my credo and glossary of terms so as to correct or confirm that my own apologetics conform to my previously stated beliefs.)

 

Fake News Defined

George Rebane

Since I took some considerable issue with the LWV’s attempt to illuminate the nation’s travails with fake news (here), the definition of which never quite emerged from that conclave, I thought it proper to make my own contribution to the same.  I believe that most people graced with critical thinking skills will more or less agree with the sequel.  In any event, when I subsequently refer to ‘fake news’, it is in this light.

First, fake news falls into two broad categories – Insignificant and Misleading.  News stories about topics that are totally irrelevant to a medium’s consumers, and placed there out of lack of editorial attention or to please some other desire to fill ‘space’ or fulfill an innocent obligation, even if completely true in fact and form (e.g. fluff pieces), falls into fake news simply because it is not the kind of news which the outlet purports to deliver and fulfill the expectations of its consumers.

Second, news stories which mislead, either intentionally or through poor journalism/editing (endemic these days), are also fake news.  Purposive misleading by a seemingly legitimate news item can be accomplished in the several ways that satisfy the definition lying, how lies can be told, and therefore fully conform to that semantic taxonomy.  I covered these variations some years back in ‘Lies and Lying’, and these are worth a revisit by anyone attempting to understand the present dissertation.

It is important to peel off certain types of communication which many people thoughtlessly group with fake news.  Propaganda per se is not fake news if it hews to a truthful attempt to promote some agenda or conclusion.  We recall that propaganda is “information, ideas, OR rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.”  I have emphasized the ‘or’ to point out that this kind of purposive communication can also be totally legitimate, containing no false information or ideas, or even rumors that later turn out to be true.  Propaganda only becomes fake news when it subsumes the nature and purpose of lying - to deceive and/or mislead.

We can equally eliminate the factual and opinionated denigration or celebration of individuals, organizations, or causes from the fake news category.  Editorials and commentaries that are factually correct and unabashedly make their purpose clear to their consumer, are by any means neither fake nor news.  (Satire is in its own category, and its absorption as fake news depends on the acumen of it consumer, and the known type of its source.)

In summary, when a previously consumed media piece, ostensibly presented as news, is known or subsequently discovered as having been ‘designed to deceive in the sense of being counterfeit or not real’, then we can reliably ascribe it to be fake news and communicate that conclusion to others.  Else the more detailed considerations given above should come into play.

News sources legitimate, credible, impartial, and biased (updated 7jul17)

George Rebane

‘Legitimate’, ‘credible’, ‘impartial’, ‘biased’ are labels hung on news sources.  These days with fake news flooding the web and other channels, different people append such labels to news sources with which they agree or not.  And often they do it with little thought given to what those labels really mean, thereby increasing the heat and confusion in any subsequent dialogue.  So let’s get these monikers for news sources straight in our minds –

• Legitimate – true to an established AND known set of standards/rules/protocols that constrain what and how they can report something.
• Credible – having established and continuing to maintain the reputation of being factually correct.
• Impartial – evincing no clear partisan flavor or favoritism in their published syntax.
• Biased – evincing an obvious partisan leaning or position regarding what they choose to publish, and what syntax to use in their reporting.

The amount of semantic orthogonality of these labels should become clear with a little thought.  For example, credible sources may also be biased or impartial.  Legitimate sources may or not be credible and/or biased, and so on.  More specifically, the same credible and factually correct event may be reported by various non/partisan sources as –

• Leftwing: ‘Hillary Clinton confirmed that she had deleted no work-related files.’
• Impartial: ‘Hillary Clinton stated that she had deleted no work-related files.’
• Rightwing: ‘Hillary Clinton claimed that she had deleted no work-related files.’

Or regarding the 6jul17 NPR report - “Trump pointedly omitted mentioning NATO’s Article 5 during his last trip through Europe.”  Compared to an impartial ‘Trump’s remarks did not include NATO’s Article 5 in his last trip to Europe.’

[7jul17 update]  To overwhelm you with examples of ideologically biased reporting, take a look at any article from this list of Politico pieces on leak investigations in light of the above discussion.  There you will learn that what the Trump administration is really doing is stifling “in-depth reporting” by launching numerous leak investigations by the FBI and other national security units of the federal government (in addition to Congress).

According to Politico’s progressive reporters, in-depth reporting requires criminal leaks of national security compromising allegations from anonymous and surreptitious sources labeled simply as “high level official in (fill in name of bureau)”, “former (fill in name of bureau) official”, … .  So now Politico accuses President Trump of “creating fear” of what it calls “witch hunts” when national security organizations are conducting their own leak probes and revising need-to-know policies to limit and identify staffers who are privy to certain areas of classified information.  Bottom line – national security compromising criminality is a fundamental component, if not an outright First Amendment right, of progressive journalism.

How Deictic is Your Ontology?

George Rebane

While our Left, especially of the academic bent, assiduously works to stunt the English language – e.g. reduce/mangle the information carrying capacity of words – our technologists have been very busy expanding the language and introducing new words into English and other tongues.  This battle is both important and its outcome is not yet determined, although for most people the Left’s determination to limit speech and thought along Orwellian newspeak lines seems to be taking hold with their constituents recently from union schools now being tutored by even more radical mentors in our institutions of higher learning.

In the last century we discovered a strong determinant that limits thought is a person’s language(s).  An individual has a hard time thinking thoughts (e.g. formulating concepts and storing them) that his language does not support.  More formally, the structure and breadth of a speaker’s language determines his perception and categorization of experience. This phenomenon is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which we have reviewed here before.

While words like ‘discriminate’, ‘immigrant’, ‘hero’, ‘prejudice’, ‘stereotype’, ‘racist’, ‘climate change’, ‘misogynist’, … have been mangled beyond meaning, other words like ‘meme’, ‘network’, ‘hashtag’, ‘feedback’, ‘in-the-loop’, ‘online’, ‘email’, ‘variance’, ‘steady state’, ‘causation’, ‘transient’, ‘algorithm’, … have worked their way into everyday usage as our individual ontologies have expanded to keep pace with the times.  (Ontology? Please stand by.)

Crossin’ da ribbah!

George Rebane

True to form, RR readers couldn’t wait for me to get my act together and post on the 6jan17 intelligence community report about Russia meddling in our 2016 election.  The post ‘The Russians did it’ appeared in due time, but not before its dissection commanded quite a bit of real estate in the 6jan17 sandbox.  Therein a longtime reader, self-declared left-libertarian (although we’re still looking for the libertarian part), good friend, and stalwart member of the RR commentariat takes the side of DNI Clapper and tribe to maintain that their report gives definitive proof that 1) the Russians hacked the emails, 2) it was a dastardly deed the fruits of which should have been eschewed by all Republicans as they were by Democrats, and 3) it most likely put a thumb under the electoral scale to benefit The Donald.

My conclusion about Russia’s involvement subsumes Trump’s skepticism and goes a bit beyond to wonder what all the fuss is about, or in the vein of Claude Rains' immortal line in Rick’s saloon, “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” (here)  In direct response to which I hubristically wrote – “… your comments here clearly reveal that you interpret the report as intended by the powers that be.  But you can bet the ranch that, to cover their collective asses, Clapper and team wordsmithed that little production in the manner that I and people like me are trained to parse the language - it is part of their professional kit. In my trade you also learn it as you study algorithmics and become an algorist who can actually identify salient contingencies, and then generate code that automatically dissects and handles such complexities. To the uninitiated it is all a smooth amalgam ;-)”

The potential contours of Russia’s involvement are indeed complex given the number of agents involved – here and overseas – who act through the various possible time lines.  I thought of naming all the agents and delineating their relationships in a grand influence factors diagram (here) to illustrate and substantiate my claim about the beneficial role of algorithmics to understand the purposefully foggy and nuanced report presented to us last Friday.  But that seemed like too much work for what may wind up with my confusing RR readers with people who really cared.  So as Plan B it occurred to me that a fun little problem might illustrate the kind of thinking that Team Clapper put into the report and therefore its equivalent required to properly understand it.

Six people need to cross the river.  They have a canoe that can carry at most three people.  Having various abilities and handicaps, each of them alone in the canoe can paddle it across the river in 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 units of time.  With two paddling, the crossing time is one unit less than the slowest paddler’s time.  With three paddling the crossing time is that of the middle paddler.  What crossing scheme – sequence of crossings with identified paddlers – yields the minimum time to deliver all six from bank A to bank B?  This problem is simple enough to be solved with pencil and paper.  So I invite readers to post their solutions in the comments – an easy way is write down the sequence of crossings with 4-tuples like (3,5,0,4), (3,0,0,7), (1,8,13,14), … where the first three numbers denote paddlers by their solo times (zero is an empty seat), and the fourth number is the tally of the total time elapsed after that crossing.

Here the interesting aspect that communicates the type of thinking required is when you consider an algorithm that can be programmed to have a computer find the optimum solution.  In fact I am working with a SESF TechMentor student to develop a genetic algorithm (GA) that will solve this problem.  A critical component of the GA software will be another sub-algo that can quickly determine whether a solution is sane or not.  Insane solutions don’t terminate within a reasonable number of crossings, or do things like have an empty canoe (0,0,0,15) crossing, or containing paddler(s) who weren’t on the embarking bank of the river, or … .  These insane contingencies must be identified and code generated to efficiently detect them in order to reject the solution as the GA continues its ‘evolutionary’ effort to find ever better solutions.

IMHO, an exercise like this illustrates the kind of analytical dissections also required to generate the various contingencies AND how they are reported that relate to our email hacking imbroglio, and reports of it coming from people in the government, media, political parties, and NGO individuals.   Most certainly our intelligence analysts have to exercise this kind of disciplined critical thinking to do their work.  Here in our comment streams as we debate issues we often (almost always?) wander off topic, ignore the orthogonality of factors, misattribute meanings, and so on.  I’m sure some of these malaprops are also intentional to inject humor or advance an ideological agenda.  Mea culpa – as an ideologue and commentator I most certainly try to choose words with which to best frame my arguments; but I never intentionally attempt to mislead or derail the debate’s progress for the simple reason that I may be wrong and would not discover my error if I diverted or screwed up the discussion.

Having said all that, now I’m not sure that I’ve really pushed the peanut ahead.  But I have put a stake in the ground for future reference for anyone to cite when/if we really get serious about seeking resolution rather than circling the barn or just bouncing things off the wall ;-)

RR Glossary & Semantics - V9nov15

George Rebane

From time to time RR's Glossary & Semantics is updated to provide readers with the more precise definitions of words that I use in my scribblings.  Since the information carrying capacity of English is decreasing, due primarily to run amok political correctness and the increase in national dumbth, such a glossary becomes necessary when we join to slice, dice, and debate complex issues and current events.  The latest version of this post may always be accessed from the top right panel of this website, and the pdf of the document itself is available here -  Download RR Glossary&Semantics_v190206

More complex than ‘Illegal Immigrants’

George Rebane

An illegal alien by any other name ...

For years I have advised against labeling all illegal inhabitants in America as ‘illegal immigrants’.  In any reasonable discussion of the illegal alien and illegal entrant problems, this catch-all label will cause confusion.  Now this is coming to pass as we attempt to get real about passing what is (again erroneously) called immigration reform.  To clarify the issue, years ago I outlined a more accurate picture (here) of the various flavors and derivations of US inhabitants, both legal and illegal.

Today, as Congress tries to get to the nitty gritty of actually writing something into law, people are running into problems along the road that the simple tag ‘illegal immigrants’ enticed them to travel.  It looks like 40% of the current 11M US illegals entered the country legally, and only 60% crawled over/under a border fence.  My graphic of the situation allows clear delineation of this discovery that you can read more about in the 6apr13 WSJ’s ‘Many Here Illegally Overstayed Their Visas’.  The article outlines the problem of attempting to legislate when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about – a craft, nevertheless, that Congress perfected many moons ago.

In the above figure of US inhabitants, the reported percentages are circled.  Note that the actual ‘illegal immigrants’ are circled in green, and no one yet knows how many of those there are in the country.  So it appears that we will now have to slice and dice the illegals much more carefully, and give each cohort an informative name if anyone is to make sense of the next sausage that will be stuffed in Washington.  Political correctness comes with many costs.

The Liberal Mind – Topical trumps Synoptic

George Rebane

The ongoing debates on current issues such as budget, deficits, gun control, healthcare, climate change, immigration reform, … highlight one of the most robust aspects of how Left and Right thinking are fundamentally different.  As witnessed by RR’s Liberal Mind category, this is a long abiding subject of interest to me, and apparently becoming so to others inhabiting the polar regions of our ideological globe.  There is something fundamental and basic to how both sides present and argue their positions on the issues.  And since RR readers fervently debate these issues, I want to introduce a couple of new terms from the technical field that, perhaps, best capture the meaning of the different approaches.

A pair of arcane terms in science and technology that have yet to follow ‘feedback’, ‘bandwidth’, ‘in the loop’, ‘cloud’, … into the common lexicon are ‘synoptic’ and ‘topical’.  Dictionaries often define synoptic as “affording or taking a general view of the principal parts of a subject”.  In science and technology synoptic denotes notions that refer to an area in the large, be it the entire history or time window of a process, the overall design of a large-scale system, the complex inter-relationships of this with all of those, or a stream/collection of data in a database.  A synoptical argument captures the large scale of the subject that may even include objectives and measures of utility.  Something synoptic is of encompassing scope.

The other end of the semantic notion of scope is topical which denotes anything of limited scope.  Again, the more common definition of topical is that “pertaining to or dealing with matters of current or local interest.”  But in the broader context I’m discussing here, things topical are limited in time and space, they are arguments, notions, appeals to the here and now, or entail some specific example(s) of a larger scheme, examples that need not be at all representative of the whole.  This last point is very important in the understanding of the proper meaning of topical.  Specific examples/incidents are sometimes also called anecdotal, and therefore a topical description of something subsumes the semantic of anecdotal examples, occasions, happenings, samples, etc.

With this understanding, I now can make a more powerful proposition regarding how the Left and the Right contend on issues in the public arena.  The Left overwhelmingly presents its support and/or promotion of ideals and issues in distinctly topical frameworks.  Whether it is healthcare or gun control, we are regaled with stories of a specific individual who is denied a critical medical procedure, or have eleven bullets pumped into their little body.

Ruminations – 2oct12

George Rebane

We add solyndra and solyndrize to the RR G&S lexicon.  Both in lower case, the first is a noun, the second a verb.  Other forms of modifiers like ‘solyndrizable’ will be readily formed and used as needed.  A solyndra is a government picked and supported enterprise foisted on the taxpayer as a private corporation/institution that has no ability to survive or succeed in the marketplace on its own.  One can also consider it as an entrepreneurial façade using taxpayers’ money in the attempt to bolster a misguided government policy.  To solyndrize a company is to select it for the infusion of government monies and other regulatory protections so as to shield it from the realities of the marketplace.  A natural extension here is ‘solyndricide’, the final failure of a solyndricized organization which is usually brought about by the government’s cutting off the solyndra’s financial transfusions.

Polls and margins of error are much in the news today.  A little calculator work shows that the vaunted Real Clear Politics average of polls is just that, the arithmetic average – add all the poll results together and divide by the number of polls in the average.  This is a severely crude and often misinformative attempt to derive information from the blizzard of pre-election polls that are cited to support all kinds of arguments by commentators and media talking heads.

A more professional approach to the estimation of current sentiment across a population of polls would take into account the attributes of each poll, and include them in the weighting of the poll’s result.  Such attributes include its variance (margin of error), time late, and validity instant that contribute to each poll’s reliability and timeliness.  Sample sizes matter, and public opinion is a volatile commodity that quickly decorrelates.  I’ll have more to say about it in a post that will present the correct way to aggregate and produce information from a set of polls.  And I’d appreciate getting pointed to a site from which I can download such data as sample size, and the interval over which the questionnaire was administered.  Thanks in advance.

Central banks are buying gold by the tons, none of them care about price.  Now that everyone in the world that can print fiat money is printing it – e.g. the Bernank’s QE3 of $40B/month forever – we get updated on what the world’s monetary experts really think about “that ancient relic”.  Central banks used to pooh-pooh the metal and keep their reserves in a trusted ‘reserve currency’ like US dollars.  This is going by the board as the European Central Bank, Russia, China, India, …, and the United States are hauling in tons of the stuff from the world’s mines.  Each has added large percentages to their already quietly accumulated hoards, and the beat goes on.  It’s as if they think that the stuff they’re printing won’t be worth much in the future.

A Pennsylvania judge has blocked the application of the state’s new voter ID law for the upcoming election.  The consistency of the rationale here is simply amazing.  The most important and sacrosanct act by a citizen of a liberal democracy is relegated to the level of kindergartner’s belief in Santa Claus.  Photo ID’s are required for every conceivable transaction in our land – you can’t pass gas on a subway without a photo ID; well maybe – but walk into a polling station and you can register to vote right then and there, and vote.  All you have to do is lie that you’re a citizen, and give them your driver’s license or state ID number (or even SS number). Both of these have your picture, and all can be had without proving US citizenship.  The Nevada County Registrar of Voters Office informed me that under Secs 2111 and 2112 of the Elections Code, the registrant’s statement that s/he is a US citizen is deemed to be a sufficient affidavit and proof of citizenship under penalty of perjury – no further verification by the state is required or performed.

‘Ragheads’ and/or ‘Savages’??  Seems that finding the appropriate pejorative label to tag Islamic terrorists is an undertaking that has a broader scope than that in these pages.  “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.  Support Israel.  Defeat Jihad.” read an ad in the New York subway stations.  Well, that got the leftwing’s undies in a bundle.  Referring to the ragheads (q.v.) as savages was considered “hateful”, “hate speech”, “racist”, … (you know the drill).  Putting together ‘savage’, ‘jihad’, and the implications of Islamic involvement (ya think?) was apparently beyond the pale.  I don’t know; looking at the formal definitions of ‘savage’, you could have a good quibble with each of them as applied to ragheads, which I think is a pejorative much more semantically precise.  Oh well, we continue the search.

Dr Thomas Sowell on Obama.  The renowned academic and good professor has a very revealing interview with a colleague at the Hoover Institution.  (See ‘Tax Cuts and Obama’s Myth of Trickle Down Economics’, worth watching.)  One of the Bush2 myths that he demolishes is by describing the roots of the subprime mortgage explosion that run deep into Clinton’s administration which pushed banks to make these loans by guaranteeing that the government would cover defaults.  We all recall the Democrats following ol’ Barney’s willingness to “roll the dice on Fannie and Freddie.”  Win some, lose some.

What do debates reveal?  Joseph Epstein agrees (here) with my long held belief that candidate debates – especially the presidential kind – are mainly circus and don’t reveal anything much about the qualities of the candidate that make for a good President.  One of the many foibles that debates emphasize is the quickness of response – and better if it is a deep slicing one liner – that “has nothing to do with genuine thought, which requires brooding over a subject, laboriously working through its complications.”  In sum, the silver-tongued devil is a shoo-in for winning the debate, his other presidential qualifications are optional.

The Advent of Obamunism

George Rebane

[This is the submitted form of my column to The Union published in their 15sep12 print and online editions.  The new Union website doesn't appear to have date-specific URLs, and its contents, including my column, have no apparent permalinks.  The column is available in their 'e-edition' which is an image of the print edition.  There I see that some unfortunate edits have taken place that include the substitution of 'hegemony' for 'hegemon', and the capitalization throughout of obamunism.  A reader points to the previous use of obamunism on protest signs, one of which I have added to this post.  Obamunism is also added to the 15sep12 version of the Glossary & Semantics pdf.]

To say that President Obama is a unique piece of work in the Oval Office would be the understatement of this young century.  This man, held in thrall by the country’s liberals, and also in increasing contempt by world leaders – friends and enemies alike - has devised and carried out a set of policies, procedures, and prerogatives in the Executive Branch that is turning out to be truly breathtaking in its sheer audacity.  Because there is a good chance that we may see at least four more years of such a form of governance, we need to give it a name and an informative definition.  Reasoned debate about it in the years to come requires such an extension of language.

I propose we call it obamunism – the ideology and form of administration that President Obama has practiced and promises to continue if he is re-elected as our Chief Executive.  History will show that although certain previous presidents have also displayed aspects and vestiges of obamunism, Barack Obama is the nation’s first full-fledged obamunist President.

Introducing RR Glossary and Semantics – latest V6feb19

George Rebane

This post launches a new and deplorably tardy category in RR, one that will contain ready access to the definitions and extended meanings of terms, notions, and ideas discussed and debated in these pages.  I plan to make the glossary and semantics (G&S) available on two separate documents that can be downloaded as pdfs – initially we’ll start with just the Glossary.  Both will be ‘living documents’ in the sense that they will grow and be edited over time.  The new G&S category is found in the Category section presented in the right margin of RR.

Their content will be derived initially from culling the almost 3,000 posts that currently comprise RR over its 13-year life.  These definitions and semantics will primarily be mine.  However, I invite readers to submit contending definitions which may be included with their distinguishing labels.  The documents will of need be ‘versioned’ by date so that they can be unambiguously referenced in all future discussions and debates.