Rebane's Ruminations

11 November 1918 - Ed and Jack’s War

George Rebane

My up close and personal introduction to WW1 came at the knee of my two early mentors Jack Maschmeyer and Ed Egold. Both were WW1 veterans who were sent ‘over there’ and didn’t come home ‘until it was over over there’. Both saw trench warfare at its most horrific and survived going ‘over the top’ several times. In 1953 we moved into an old house (built in 1830s) in rural Marion County, Indiana next to Ed and Mary who were in their early sixties. Today they would be mistaken for being in their eighties; they had lived a long life of hard work and it showed on most folks of that age in those days.

Victims of Communism remembered – 8 November 2018 (updated 9nov18)

[I post today’s ‘Presidential Message on the National Day for the Victims of Communism’ in memory of the 100-200 million people, including members of my family, killed by communists and communism over the past century.  This is the system to which today’s Left is repaving the road of return.  gjr]

On the National Day for the Victims of Communism, we honor the memory of the more than 100 million people who have been killed and persecuted by communist totalitarian regimes.  We also reaffirm our steadfast support for those who strive for peace, prosperity, and freedom around the world.

Since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, we have witnessed the effects of the tyrannical communist ideology—anguish, repression, and death.  Communism subordinates inherent human rights to the purported well-being of all, resulting in the extermination of religious freedom, private property, free speech, and, far too often, life.  These horrors have included Ukrainians deliberately starved in the Holodomor, Russians purged in the Great Terror, Cambodians murdered in the killing fields, and Berliners shot as they tried to escape to freedom.  The victims of these and many other atrocities bear silent testimony to the undeniable fact that communism, and the pursuit of it, will forever be destructive to the human spirit and to the prosperity of mankind.

Today, we remember all who have been denied the great blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under oppressive communist regimes.  Together, we mourn the unbearable losses so many have endured under communism, and we renew our pledge to continue advancing the cause of freedom and opportunity for all.

[9nov18 update]  From one of our more prominent leftwing commenters - “almost 30 years ago one wall came down in Berlin and today another one is going up here.” (see comment stream below)

That is the reason our two polarized sides can no longer profitably talk to each other.  From what I and others of the conservetarian bent see, there is nothing that we can say to the now radicalized Left which today 1) has an enormous intellectual deficit regarding shared history, and 2) little or no ability to incorporate elemental reasoning into their conversations.

These pages are witness to repeated assertions by the progressives that securing our border with a wall is exactly the same as how the communist dictators secured their borders with walls.  No matter how many times here, and in other publications and broadcasts, people have patiently sought to explain to the terminally deficient that the two kinds of walls serve diametrically opposite functions – communism’s walls are built to keep their citizens IN, i.e. from escaping tyranny so as to prevent emigration; the border walls of liberal democracies are meant to keep illegal aliens OUT, and are built to minimize illegal entry so as to control immigration.  This enormous distinction has always been too difficult for a liberal mind to comprehend – for them a wall is a wall, and even more so if they can glibly ignore that significant nuance to promote their anti-capitalistic message to those equally dense.

From such simple distinctions, things go down when the conversation turns to more complex subjects such as the forms of governance, their dynamics and provenance.  For example, when now and again such leftwing worthies dip into their rich trove of historical knowledge and attempt to, say, deny the socialist underpinnings of the Nazis.  Here they go one up on the walls question, and claim that the American right, which wants to maximize individual liberties and reduce the size of government, is equivalent to Germany’s Nationalist Socialists who did everything to minimize individual liberties and maximized the size of their government.  Simply mind boggling.  And they want us to think like they do!!

The Migration Mess (updated 28oct18)

George Rebane

[This is the updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 October 2018.]

A recently updated dictionary defines ‘migration’ as the “movement of people to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions.”  And not by accident, this sounds like something all good-hearted people should encourage and support.  Today we are suddenly presented with the prospect of over 5,000 Central Americans having mysteriously been massed and marshalled to march north illegally through three countries with the objective of overtly overwhelming our southern border controls, and illegally forcing their way into the United States to become wards of the American taxpayer.

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?

American Retreat

George Rebane

Robert Kagan is a historian and political scientist with an endowed fellowship at the Brookings Institute.  He perches a bit left of center from where he has been a foreign policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.  Dinesh D’Souza is a conservative political commentator, author, and filmmaker formerly associated with the Heritage Foundation, who continues as a lightning rod for critiques of rightwing ideology.  Not so surprisingly, these two intellectuals share many insights into America’s post-war role in the world and the state of the world were America to “retreat” from this role.

Of D’Souza’s many books, his America: Imagine a World Without Her (2014) contains assessments that tie closely with Kagan’s sentiments as expanded in a major essay ‘The Cost of American Retreat’ in the 8sep18 WSJ.  (Essay based on Kagan’s latest book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World, that comes out later this month.)  My commentary on this highlights that the Rebane Doctrine on foreign policy espoused here over the years also ties closely with what these essayists have gleaned from their studies and experience.  I believe that, in these times, the tenets from both bear repeating emphatically and often.  (Graphic by Brian Stauffer)

Kagan points out how the period of liberalism under the hegemonic umbrella of the United States has given rise to a most unusual epoch of human history.  During this epoch “liberal ideals triumphed because, for the first time, they had power behind them.”  And all this, because “a new player arose on the international scene: the United States. It possessed a unique and advantageous geography, a large, productive population, unprecedented economic and military power, a national ideology based on liberal principles, and a willingness, after the war, to use its power to establish and sustain a global order roughly consistent with those principles. … That order - with its mutually reinforcing security, economic and political components - has created a geographical and geopolitical space in which liberalism has taken root, spread and evolved. But it was always artificial and tenuous, challenged from within and without by natural forces - the always potent antiliberal aspects of human nature and the competitive and anarchic tendencies of geopolitics.”

Ruminations – 25aug18 (updated 31aug18)

George Rebane

That Lady Justice today only wears a patch over one eye is apparent to at least half the country.  Mueller’s ongoing investigation, along with the FBI et al investigations that preceded it, gives clear and compelling evidence to the bloom of corruption that has compromised our justice system over the last decade.  Kim Strassel’s ‘When Justice is Partial’ in the 24aug18 WSJ compiles a short and bitter summary of what has gone down.  And here is the strong letter to follow by Canadian Conrad Black.

Cato on Immigration and Open Borders (updated 3aug18)

If Democrats don't want foreigners involved in our elections, why do they think it's OK for illegals to vote?

George Rebane

The Cato Institute is the nation’s foremost libertarian thinktank.  It has a long record of publishing well thought out and researched policy analyses which it freely makes available on its website.  I have now and again cited their research, and even a few of their opinion commentaries, although I don’t always agree with all their libertarian viewpoints – that is why I call myself a conservetarian.

Yesterday (31jul18) Dr Jeffrey Miron, Cato’s Director of Economic Studies and director of undergraduate economics studies at Harvard, published a commentary in USA Today titled ‘Forget the Wall Already, It’s Time for the U.S. to Have Open Borders’.  In it he argues that the US should open its borders to allow free ingress and egress to one and all with no interference or mediating actions by our government.  When I read Miron’s piece I was shocked at what appears to be an insane policy proposal by an organization which the Rebanes have supported for years.  I still don’t know whether this is Miron opining on his own, or announcing Cato’s considered policy on borders and immigration.

The main takeaway from my now several readings are that his proposed policy will end America as we know it in literally all dimensions. Open borders will do away with the sovereign nation-state, the first attribute of which is that it controls transit across its borders, and what goes on within those borders.  This is the fundamental tenet of the Westphalian order under which the international order has been conducted since 1648.

The United States, and any country for that matter, with such open borders will quickly experience the full brunt of the tragedy of the commons (cf Garrett Hardin) as people across the globe make their way into America in the attempt to enjoy our economy, freedoms, and social welfare programs.  The duration of such happy times will end very quickly as Americans of all political hues realize what a tragic mistake we have made as the country’s institutions begin to collapse.  (more here and here)

And such migrations will be doubly disastrous if the borderless world envisioned by Miron comes to pass.  Miron promotes global government with central planning and control taken to the limit.  And he naively asks us to believe that massive cross cultural human movements will not immediately require draconian control measures put in force to stop lawlessness and riots on a scale never before witnessed on this planet.  Miron is unaware that for good reason nature abhors monolithic structures of control and repositories of data/knowledge.  What the man advocates across the world is nothing less than the end of civilizations with a Mad Max world contending with Big Brother trying to maintain control.

I annotated Professor Miron’s commentary.  You can download the annotated pdf file and read it in your Acrobat reader if you wish.  Download Forget the Wall Already - GJR

[3aug18 update]  Here It’s again worth pointing out that the Right believes America to be exceptional because of the system of governance and commerce our Founders bequeathed us.  The Left continues to tell us that America is not exceptional, it is evil, and that our system must be changed.  Now the rest of the world, especially those who vote with their feet, fervently believe that America is indeed most exceptional since they are willing to leave everything and risk everything to enter our land by hook or crook.  So here’s the ongoing contradiction that the Left and the so-called centrists ignore – since by the world’s vote America is exceptional, and yet by the Left’s argument it was not our social systems that made us so, then the only explanation that remains is the racist one that it was the white Europeans and their melded cultures rewarding work and risk that have made America the most desired destination on this planet.

This explains the Left’s insane (and racist) assault on western culture and America as the exceptional sovereign nation-state.  Our continued existence as a capitalistic country populated by a free and entrepreneurial people flies in the face of everything that the Left preaches in our schools, throughout our public forums, and in concert with our enemies around the world.

Trump’s Trade Wars Triumphant?

George Rebane

In my 10jul18 ‘Trump’s Trade War’ I opened with the puzzlement that most of his supporters have had lately about the tariffs that he has initiated – “Unless President Trump has something up his sleeve on the outcome of the current tariff tussle and ensuing trade war, I think our fearless leader is making a big mistake in imposing tariffs – and doubly so for “national security” purposes.”  Well, things have taken a turn for the better, and it looks like there really was method to the President’s apparent madness.

Today’s meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the White House resulted in a surprising and fortuitous announcement in the Rose Garden.  It appears that the president has opened the door to an expanded free trade with the EU, and taken some serious steps toward his hopeful ‘zero tariffs’ goal among trading nations.  People not suffering from TDS immediately realize that no matter if we ever achieve the zero level – I’m betting we won’t – it doesn’t matter.  We will wind up in a much better place than we were before Trump started throwing around his tariffs.  (BTW, here is a piece that gives a little history on zero tariffs recommended way back in 1988.)

The extra benefits from these announcements of new trade agreements will now impact our NAFTA partners, renegotiating with the TPP members, and, of course, a new and better trade agreement with China in which they don’t steal us blind in the intellectual property department.  You can bet the ranch that everyone is watching how today’s agreements will set the stage for follow-on success.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross explained the genesis of today’s unfair and asymmetrical tariff situation that has led us to this important juncture.  He pointed out that these asymmetries were put in place right after WW2 when America was working as the world’s good guy in rebuilding destroyed and then emerging economies to create the post-war prosperity that we have all witnessed (well, most of us at least.  Team Obama/Schumer/Pelosi/Sanders/Warren/Waters/Castro/… and our local leftwing lackies will admit to none of it).  We were willing to help other countries by allowing them to charge much higher tariffs on our products than we charged for importing their products, which benefited their agriculture and industries.

But those days are over, and those rules are no longer needed because the Europeans and Asians and Latin Americans are no longer destitute.  The only ones that still screw over their populations are the socialists and communists who have spread wholesale misery within their borders of the kind that the sought-after policies of Team Schumer/Pelosi/Sanders/Warren/Waters/Castro/… will provide Americans if ever we become stupid enough to let this crowd get their hands on our economy and common weal.

And now we understand why President Trump had to use that ridiculous ‘national defense’ ploy to announce his tariffs – that was the only legal lever that he had to get things moving quickly without getting into a congressional quagmire of hearings, etc before the midterm election.  He played poker with a poker face, and our allies correctly painted him serious and came to the table.  They too realized that continuing this ridiculous trade game three generations after the end of the war was a hell of way to run a railroad.  Much more to be done.  More accomplishments to take to the bank.  But from my perch, things are looking up.

How many people do we really need?

George Rebane

[Apologies for the ragged composition of this commentary.  I thought it important enough to get it into the RR record, and invite comments/debate by those who care to consider something beyond current events.]

How many people are necessary for humans as a species to improve its aggregate quality of life and continue reaching for the stars as AI provides more and more of our fulfillment and wealth creating needs?

We know that the answer lies somewhere between ‘way too many’ to make us all poor and miserable living in a degraded environment, and ‘way too few’ to give the remainder a sense of being members of a vibrant, enriching, and achieving global community of multiple cultures.  What the actual bookend numbers are, no one knows beyond the ‘way too many’ and the ‘way too few’, quantities that are of little use in a reasoned discussion.

Some very smart people are again beginning to ask, ‘Why does America need more people?’  Before you blow that question off with hip-level answers like ‘we need more people to work and grow the economy’ or ‘we need more people to do the work that Americans are unwilling to do’, consider some cold hard facts.

Ruminations – 12jul18

Intellectual ostracism – the refusal to engage with a person or people who cannot rise to minimum standards of rationality. (Stefan Molyneux in The Art of the Argument – Western Civilization’s Last Stand, 2017)

George Rebane

Dems’ final solution for ‘immigration’.  Given our inundation of illegal aliens from the south, the Dems may yet have the best final solution for stopping it.  Just proceed with the unbridled adoption of their welfare, regulatory, and tax policies into the US economy.  The resulting impact on America’s common weal – Venezuela del Norte - oughta make them Latinos think twice before coming north.

Our lamestream-reported US income inequality at 11-15% is entirely bull pucky.  When over $1T in annual transfer payments and tax policy numbers are figured in, “only 2% of today’s population lives in poverty”.  This is lower than many western developed countries.  But the reported high numbers are a necessary part of the Left’s victimhood narrative to maintain the plantation.  (more here)

The EU’s socialist market mangling bureaucrats are at it again.  “It has only been about a month since European regulators dropped a bomb on the internet with the rollout of its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which imposed major costs on web platforms of all sizes and strengthened the market position of tech titans. … Now, the EU is turning its eye to copyright infringements online, and its proposed rules would be similarly damaging to the internet. The motivations for these new rules are hard to discern, and the extent of the collateral damage is hard to predict.”  This is part of America’s guaranteed future under Democrats. (more here)

Media Bias

George Rebane

First, H/T to Bob Crabb where I first saw this graphic of 'media bias' before going to another site to filch a good copy of it.  Now I have several problems with where some outlets are placed on this chart, but I'll keep them to myself until readers have had a chance to make their own voices heard.  (As always, click on the image to make it larger.)

Ruminations – 22jun18 (updated 24jun18)

George Rebane

Dr Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018).  This man was an intellectual staple in our house for at least twenty years, and his most recent stint on Fox News brought him to our dinner table on an almost daily basis.  His towering intellect, expansive knowledge base, exquisite reasoning, and gentle, often self-effacing humor made him a welcome extension of the media family in our home, and also millions of other homes fortunate enough to have discovered him.  The way he sat (wheelchair bound) in a dignified upright as he delivered his on-air soliloquies, always with a twinkle in his eye and with a dry bon mot, slyly intertwined for the attentive listener, that confirmed his well-earned sobriquet as ‘The Bonze’ to all of us grasshoppers.  He lived a blessed life of courage and wisdom, and the hole he now leaves in many lives across the land will eventually fill, but very slowly.  RIP.

‘City of London Will Be Powered By 100% Renewable Energy Starting in October 2018’ – this little bowl of bullpoop was put out by the Good News Network (H/T to reader).  Actually, the whole city will not be blessed by this technological miracle as reported by the City of London Corporation (here).  But the part that will is going to draw its electricity from some solar panels on buildings, and (seat belts please) buying only “renewable energy already on the market” drawn from the grid that is, of course, polluted with all that dirty power from fossil fuels.  But not to worry, their green accountants will know how to sort out the good from the bad electricity, and buy only the good stuff.  There was no report of what the marginal cost would be for all this clean energy.

Speaking of global warming, it was 1988 when James Hansen, NASA scientist, told Congress that earth was going to hell in a handcart according to his general circulation models.  Looking back, we ask, ‘Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?’.  The answer, explained all over the web (and here), to those who would listen and could understand, is ‘not very well at all’.  Bottom line, it is nowhere near as warm as predicted by Hansen and the IPCC, and Earth will not be the hyped hothouse by mid- or end-of-century, and we still don’t know exactly all the gazintas and how they interact so as to produce a reliable camzata temperature number on which to base reasonable public policy. (more here) But that, of course, makes no never mind to the True Believers who worship consensus science.

 [23jun18 update]  My position here has grown to ascribe the lamestream media as definitely anti-American (see definition here) in the way that they purposely fabricate lies into their ‘normal’ coverage of the news (e.g. here), and the way they self-censor reporting salient news items that contradict their anti-Trump and long-playing anti-American narrative (e.g. here).

[24jun18 update]  Just watched former HS Secretary Jeh Johnson on FN admit that there is no immediate or short-term solution beyond Trump’s zero-tolerance to stop the illegal alien border violations and taking the illegals into custody, a policy that was initially enabled by a Democrat legislation way back when.  Of the 12K separated kids now in question, only 2K are separated from their illegal entrant parent(s) and placed with relatives in America.  The other 10K arrived with non-family coyotes and need to be housed somewhere before their disposition is determined.  Sec Johnson had no better solution than what is going on now.  This clears the demagoguery that the sleazebag Dems and their local lackeys are blowing for political gain, lying to Americans that Trump created the problem which he could now solve with a stroke of the pen.  Today Feinstein is floating a bill that in preventing separation, would encourage human trafficking, invite unlimited migration from the south, and promote the continuation of open borders and amnesty to the illegal aliens who successfully crawled under the fence.

Our Declining IQ Numbers

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 20 June 2018.]

Listeners to these commentaries over the years have heard me report on the advance of America’s national dumbth – a term coined by the late Steve Allen to describe the overall state of our understanding, interests, and intellectual acumen.  The reasons for this have been many, but mainly due to the de-emphasis of rigorous academics in our public schools over the last fifty years or so.  In any event, I was surprised to receive from a correspondent news of recent studies on the decline of IQs reported by our National Academy of Sciences, and other similar organizations in the developed world.

Ongoing longterm studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland, and Estonia all corroborate the “downward trend” observed here in America.  First, let’s be clear that what we are talking about is not how much people know – people’s so-called knowledge base, which, of course, has also been declining over the same period.  But IQ is a prime measure of a person’s ability to process data, acquire knowledge, and make decisions.  This human attribute is critical to a society, especially technologically advanced societies, in that it directly impacts people’s ability to participate in our rapidly changing job markets.

During most of the last century our IQ scores were found to be increasing, something that came to be called the Flynn Effect by psychologists and people who keep track of such things.  IQ scores for men kept increasing until about 1975, and then something unexpected happened.  Continued testing showed that IQ scores started steadily decreasing among men born after 1975.

Detailed analysis showed that the decline was not due to a “long-believed theory known as the dysgenic fertility theory, which states that unintelligent people have more children, leading to a ‘dumbing down’ of society.”  No, research shows that the dumbing down was identified as caused by “environmental factors (which) could range from nutrition, changes in the educational system, less reading and more time spent online, (and) to changes in the media environment.” (more here, here, and here)

Others have acknowledged that we may also need to adapt IQ testing and “other traditional methods of measuring intelligence”, since times have changed and today “people are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media” which indicate that “educational methods need to adapt to such changes.”  But the bottom line is still that, in the aggregate and compared to their older generations, today younger people cannot do and/or readily learn to do the things that need to be done to operate a civil society.

These observations across a broad swath of developed western countries should sound an alarm that something has gone wrong with the way we as parents raise kids, and then how we as a society educate them to become the next generation of a productive, competitive, and advancing civilization.  However, there is also a danger that these warnings will be ignored or actually denigrated by political factions for reasons ideological that dictate a more homogenous world.

One political vulnerability of such research is that it continues to corroborate the longstanding differences in IQ based on race, showing that the mean IQ scores of Asians rank highest, followed by Caucasians, with the Negroid scores being significantly lower.  The American Psychological Association acknowledges these rankings despite “the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic.”  (more here)

Finally, a strong corollary of all this is the increase of mental illness among young people in developed countries.  Alarming fractions of our youth are now regularly diagnosed and medicated for clinical depression and behavioral problems. (more here and here)  Statistics on the need for remedial education and teen suicide rates all tell different parts of the same story.  Among things like our public education system, we may also want to reexamine and change the way that well-to-do parents are today required to monitor and restrict our children’s activities, and how among the poorer strata, where broken families abound, kids are turned loose to find their own way on the meanest streets in town.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Ruminations – 15jun2018 (updated 20jun18)

George Rebane

Headline, ‘Growth in US Leaves World Behind’ while the ECB continues to keep the ‘fragile economies’ of the EU on crutches with low interest rates.  Wonder why our lamestream considers this too insignificant to report?  One might almost think that they're afraid people will credit President Trump with some of this good news.

Judge’s ruling - Illegal aliens now know how to be turned loose in the US after crawling under the fence - just bring your kid along.  Wonder if this will invite or deter more illegals.

Macron wants to restore the ancien régime after Brexit, and make French again the official language of the EU.  Meanwhile English, and specifically American English, has become the world’s lingua franca in both commerce and diplomacy.  Maybe Monsieur le Président knows that French is the most rapidly shrinking developed country language worldwide.

California’s new enforced water restriction law is designed to make real in people's lives the global warming hysteria that the progressives’ politicized consensus science could not do.   It looks like you will be criminalized if ‘in this land of surf and sun, you still flush for Number One’.  Meanwhile we continue to oppose building new reservoirs and dump most of our fresh water into the Pacific. (more here)

Government cheating government – it turns out that “America’s great progressive political hope, NYC Mayor Bill deBlasio is essentially the nation’s pre-eminent slumlord.”  NYC’s affordable housing projects have been allowed to deteriorate while deBlasio has been “taking active steps to deceive inspectors and cover up its ineptitude and wrongdoing.”  We recall our mantra – in creating social problems, government is always guilty until proven innocent.

[16jun18 update]  Gary Litke in the 16jun18 Union (here) is among the county’s NIMBY legions who oppose building 28 new houses west of Grass Valley because “the agricultural, open space history of this property should be maintained in ways that would benefit someone other than residential real-estate developers.”  It continues to be lost on the local Litkes that Nevada County needs people who need places to come and raise their families here, do business with our merchants, send their kids to our schools, support our cultural offerings, and do all the things which have made Nevada County the desirable place to live that it has been.  Do all of these people not also benefit from such developments?  Today, we seem to be a draw primarily for people with, let’s say, a spectrum of alternative life styles based on cesspool SF values.  What are we offering to middle-class working families with traditional American values?

Mizzou’s comeuppance.  The university is in dire straits with student enrollments down 35%, and more graduating than wanting to attend.  It turns out that all that horsecrap in 2015 - when student activists banned free speech, got top administrators to leave, and made academics a politically correct supplementary offering - has convinced students and parents that the University of Missouri is a place to avoid, especially when other neighboring universities and colleges are doing their best to return to academics and offer an open environment for exchanging ideas. (more here and here)

[17jun18 update]  The naivete of The Economist.  This hoary ‘newspaper’ continues its lurch leftward, donning the trappings that so often today adorn the remarks of progressive naifs.  In its 16jun18 edition’s lead editorial (here) this auto-aggrandized paragon of journalism laments that the Singapore “agreement contains no binding North Korean commitments.”  More sober observers celebrated Trump’s first meeting with NK’s UFK as 1) the decades-awaited breakthrough meeting that defused what the Left itself had been aspirating as imminent nuclear armageddon, and 2) the potential for further talks that could lead to the normalization of that rogue regime and remove it as China’s pawn for irritating the west.

[19jun18 update]  Now here’s a bit of embarrassment for Mueller and his crack team of progressive yet unbiased lawyers finally investigating the Russia conspiracy angle which was their charge.  A Russian company charged in the conspiracy did not exist at the time of the alleged mischief, and the company is now fighting back - whoulda thought of that? - justifiably demanding Mueller’s evidence on which he based his indictment.  Red-faced and with pants down, Mueller is desperately petitioning the court for delays and gag order for submitting his supposedly unclassified evidence.  Oh my.  (more here)  H/T to reader.

[20jun18 update] 'My Lazy Summer as a Public Employee' by Jason Riley is another of a gazillion examples we see every day of government workers' gold bricking, hubris, inefficiencies, and incompetence.  All of it counsels letting government do something should be the choice of last resort when all other private sector means have been exhausted, including to consider not doing it at all if government is the only remaining choice.

‘Climate Change Has Run Its Course’

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 6 June 2018.]

Steven Hayward of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies has put down some observations about climate change (here) that summarize what millions around the world acknowledge daily – namely that “climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.” 

Now neither Dr Hayward nor, for that matter, these commentaries have been telling readers and listeners that climate change, formerly sold as global warming, is not happening.  Of course it is, and humans are no doubt contributing to this change, but we have nowhere near the impact on climate that hysteria mongers in politics and special interests have been getting all purple-faced about over the last few decades.  The supporting consensus or pseudo-science of climate change has failed to live up to the terrible predictions wrested from tortured data and dodgy computer models, neither of which can seem to get their stories straight.

Barraged by all the revelations of data doctoring and missed prognostications, the True Believers have tried all manner of approaches to convince the world’s nations to start economy-crippling decarbonization programs.  On national levels there have been a flood of laws passed to lower carbon emissions in both consumption and energy production.  But on the international level, since 1988 when the climate hysteria was launched with a series of highly publicized congressional hearings, the UN’s big global warming conferences have been an utter bust.  Since then, nations have gathered several times to pay lip service to reducing carbon emissions.  But after leaving the conferences and running the numbers on the impact of their promises, none of them have come close to living up to their carbon reduction commitments.  And many have actually increased their CO2 outputs.

As Hayward points out, “A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ”  Yes, you heard that right – the politically correct world is definitely pivoting away from the unconvincing consensus science about global warming to something more fuzzy and currently in vogue – social justice and identity politics issues of which there are an uncounted number just waiting to be raised into people’s consciousnesses.  Hayward calls this “the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality.”

The downward descent of such politicized attempts at central control was explained years ago in 1972 by political scientist Anthony Downs as “a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly.”  The first cycle has experts and activists raising the alarm about a problem, which in then is picked up by the media as the next big story of “global peril and salvation”.  This establishes the peril’s priesthood – for global warming it has been Al Gore and Jerry Brown.  Third comes the sudden realization that fixing it is going to cost a lot of money, more than anyone had imagined.  In the fourth cycle people have become accustomed to the volume of the hysteria, have become convinced that no one can fund the solution, and quietly enter the last cycle, shifting their interest to other more recent and immediate things, which then completes the sequence.

Today no one is really interested in actual global warming solutions as shown by the direction of climate-related philanthropy from the green-leaning foundations.  These overwhelmingly fund only “mobilizing public opinion and opposing the fossil fuel industry.”  Hayward concludes that “treating climate change as a planet-scale problem, that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme, transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.”

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Ruminations – 30may18 (updated 5jun18)

George Rebane

Politically incorrect and nationally syndicated economist Dr Walter Williams offers his thoughts on ‘Why Capitalism is Morally Superior to Socialism’.  The short essay is worth a read, as are some of its leftwing comments. 

The US poverty level has been a political football for years.  The Left keeps upping it regularly in order to bolster their agenda for increased taxation and regulation based on the narrative that America is the leader in wealth and income inequality.  For example, today I just heard from a KVMR regular that “40% of Americans are poor”; the statement passed without challenge as if it came down from the mountain on stone tablets.  For a new data-backed analysis of this issue, take a read of Cato’s Policy Analysis #839 ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’.  From its executive summary we read –

Many U.S. politicians are promoting policies to reduce income inequality and poverty by increasing taxes and transferring more income to lower-income households. These proposals rest in part on claims that income inequality in the United States is greater than that in other Western democracies and is growing, and that poverty persists at high levels. … The usual statistics invoked to support those claims, however, are misleading. Those statistics exclude about $1 trillion in annual transfer payments to lower-income households and do not account for the effects of taxes. When those transfers and tax effects are included, income inequality in the United States is lower than that in many Western democracies and has grown at rates similar to income inequality in other nations. Improved estimates of poverty show that only about 2 percent of today’s population lives in poverty, well below the 11 percent to 15 percent that has been reported during the past five decades.

[31may18 update] TBS’ Samantha Bee called First Daughter Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” for posting a picture of herself hugging her toddler son, blaming her for the fallacious reports that “the Office of Refugee Resettlement lost track of 1,500 immigrant children in the last three months of 2017.” (here)  Ms Bee is unscathed, but imagine what would have happened had a conservative media person so labeled an Obama or Clinton daughter.  The progressives do indeed live in a privileged world of their own.

AI encounters problems in being adopted by the medical industry which kills over 200,000 patients annually through medical mistakes.  For example, deep learning algos are daily discovering new, effective, and super-human diagnostic methods for early detection of diseases.  But their adoption is being stymied by authorities who reject them because their workings cannot be explained to humans – they just work and save lives.  The EU is doing a double dummy in this when it “implemented a regulation requiring all algorithms to be “explainable” by human engineers”, something that is impossible for most deeply learned algorithms from large datasets.  Again, government is guilty until proven innocent. (more here)

[1jun18 update] Hilary Hodge as a county supervisor??!!  From all available evidence, the woman has nothing in her record to recommend her for the position, especially when it comes to promoting business and economic development.  To my knowledge she has never even held a job that required someone to take money out of his own pocket to pay her – the concept of for-profit enterprise is foreign to her.  And a perusal of her political provenance and promoters predicts that the lady will attempt to ‘help’ the county by enthusiastically amplifying the regulatory, tax, and fee burdens that come down to us from Sacramento.

[5jun18 update]  Barabara Ross, Nevada Joint Union High School District Scholarship Coordinator, is retiring.  Since the news is now public, I want to express my gratitude for all the work over the years she has done, in addition to her other NJUHSD duties, as the Academic Chair of SESF’s TechTest.  She has administered the annual TechTest, coordinated the pre-test seminars, supervised the grading of the tests, and awarded the scholarship checks at the annual awards ceremonies.  In the 2007-18 running of TechTest, SESF has awarded more than $150,000 in merit scholarships to Nevada County’s brightest STEM-bound graduates.  I have had the pleasure of working with Ms Ross all these years, and we will miss her greatly as she heads out of state for greener pastures with her husband for a well-deserved retirement.  Thank you Barbara!

Scattershots – 25may18 (updated 27may18)

George Rebane

Legal CCW guns continue to save lives.  The recent spate of shootings again demonstrates that only a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun – everything else is progressive blather.  A reader’s comment highlights the FBI’s recently released ‘Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2016 and 2017’.  That report “indicates 16 percent (1 of 6) of crimes that qualify for inclusion in the paper were stopped by a law-abiding citizen with a gun. The figure represents more than a five-fold increase from the agency’s 2000-2013 study, when the figure was 3.1 percent. … The 2014 and 2015 report, the first biennial study on the topic released by the agency, adds statistical weight to the long-term trend. During those years, 5 percent of the attacks were stopped by armed citizens.”  That is quite a lot of potential murders prevented.

The elected Democrats continue to denigrate the intelligence of the people who sent them to Washington.  Rep Joaquin Castro (D-TX) is one of the Left’s poster children in this as he was interviewed on NPR citing the Republicans in Congress “going after” the DoJ and FBI when requesting evidential documents that they had every right to see, and accusing President Trump of “bullying” high-level Deep State bureaucrats like FBI’s Rosenstein who have done everything in their power to obstruct congressional oversight investigations.  According to Castro, Trump’s assessment of Rosenstein’s performance was bullying because Rosenstein may eventually give in and provide the needed documents because “(he) is afraid of losing his job.”  Anyone at that level who would consider doing something unethical or illegal in order to keep his job, doesn’t deserve to hold it in the first place – they should immediately resign if forced into such a position.  But these kinds of ‘obstruction of justice’ arguments are all that the Left has, now that their allegations of ‘collusion’ have run out of steam.  The pivoting Dems know that their loyal constituents have nowhere near the needed resources to evaluate what their Castros are telling them.

Trump has shown up his eager critics again with his recent letter to the Ugly Fat Kid cancelling the summit.  All kinds of historically challenged experts on diplomacy crawled out of the woodwork to point out how such a move was wrong on all counts.  As even the humble RR pointed out, Trump’s letter was just the next well considered move in response to the UFK’s sudden declaration that NK’s nuclear programs were not to be considered at the summit.  We expect this dance to go on before it gets resolved, instead of what the naïfs predicted was Trump’s clumsy mistake to torpedo progress, progress that they conveniently forgot was only due to all of the other ‘diplomatic mistakes’ that Trump has made getting us to where no other US president has even gotten close.  Stay tuned, the hourly entertainment will continue - provided by the UFK in NK, and the never-Trumpers closer to home.

[26may18 update]  Deep learning AI algos are flooding into the medical field demonstrating their abilities to monitor and predict patients’ life-critical pathologies and events.  These abilities reach far beyond what human physicians are able to do.  Some of the algos even prescribe timely treatments selected from a set of endless candidates which a human under stress and time constraints have a low likelihood of getting right.  Today, human medical personnel are still in the treatment loop, but soon they will not be and the AIs will handle the cases autonomously and report what they have done.  More here.

Yellow journalism is fast becoming the standard in lamestream media.  The latest example of this is their quiet cover-up of one of Obama’s Great Lies that he is continuing to spread on his current speaker’s circuit – namely, that his administration was scandal-free.  PJ Media is one of the outlets that will not let this atrocious claim lay unchallenged (here).  The truth of the matter is, of course, that Obama’s scandals cost lives, corrupted our political system, and demonstrably affected national security; this as opposed to the collusion allegations and sex peccadilloes that the Left is using in their attempt to hamstring the Trump administration.  But as far as the lamestream is concerned, there was no evil to see, hear, or speak of in the Obama administration – and there still isn’t.

[27may update] Former CIA head Michael Hayden explains (here) the government’s unrestricted use of spying on Americans anytime, anywhere, and for any reason, as long as it can later be claimed to have been an undercover counterintelligence effort.  Hayden described this kind of embedded spying as being “stunningly normal” in the course of our intelligence and security operations.  Inserting such paid “informants” into any activity carried out by Americans does not require any kind of special warrant or evidence of criminal conduct; just putting someone in there to poke around and see what they can find is reason enough.  I don’t think we Americans have been explicitly made aware that citizens may no longer have concerns or conduct legal activities that they can keep confidential.  All this is also fine and dandy by some Republican conservatives such as Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL).  As taught in these pages, security and freedom are seesaw benefits with no clear understanding of an acceptable balance.  The more cynical and/or distrustful the deep state, the more government spying we should expect.

Criminal Uses of Drones & AI

George Rebane

It didn’t take long for criminals and terrorists to start using affordable, commercially available drones for surveillance and even weaponized munitions delivery platforms on the battlefield.  Terrorists routinely launch their own eyes in the sky when being attacked by the militaries of countries seeking to destroy them.  In the US drones have already been used by prepared criminals to actively harass the FBI during a hostage situation.  And there’s more to come.

With affordable face recognition AI, authorities are anxious about the launch of assassination drones in built-up areas to search out and then kill a designated human target either with a firearm or explosive.  Drug smugglers are using ever more sophisticated drone platforms to monitor and catalog border security procedures and process so as to pick the proper times and places to bring in the drug payloads.  Smaller deliveries of high value narcotics are already handled by drones from Mexico.

Our military and law enforcement are playing catch up with counter-systems and delays caused first by the usual calcified bureaucratic assessments of ‘oh, they’ll never be able to do that’ to R&D and procurement red tape that doesn’t allow the good guys to invent and test as fast as can the terrorists and criminals.  Of course, all that government can field against the bad guys is the same stuff that they can field against law abiding citizens to keep the rest of us on our mandated straight and ever-narrowing paths.  As someone once said, ‘There is no free lunch.’  And that goes double for advanced technology.  Stand by for ram.  (more here and here)

 

Climate Industry’s Shameful Science

George Rebane

A correspondent alerted me to an important new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation titled ‘Global Warming – A Case Study in Groupthink’ by Christopher Booker.  This extensive report examines the now institutionalized global hysteria embracing the belief that humanity is in the grip of catastrophic yet heroically preventable manmade global warming.  In these pages we have commented and debated extensively on the groupthink aspect that has been dominant in politics and academia.  Booker’s monograph provides a comprehensive chronicle of its psychological basis which we see playing out daily in the media, and even more fervently among those most innocent in the sciences.

The foreword to the report is by Prof Richard Lindzen, recently retired Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT.  It follows in its entirety –

“The bizarre issue of climate catastrophism has been around sufficiently long that it has become possible to trace its history in detail, and, indeed, several excellent recent books do this, placing the issue in the context of a variety of environmental, economic and political trends. Darwall’s Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex and Lewin’s Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deserve special mention in this connection. Booker’s relatively brief monograph asks a rather different but profoundly important question. Namely, how do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, contradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications. Booker convincingly shows the power of ‘groupthink’ to overpower the rational faculties that we would hope could play some role. The phenomenon of groupthink helps explain why ordinary working people are less vulnerable to this defect. After all, the group that the believers want to belong to is that of the educated elite. This may have played a major role in the election of Donald Trump, which depended greatly on the frustration of the non-elites (or ‘deplorables’, as Hillary Clinton referred to them) with what they perceived to be the idiocy of their ‘betters’. Booker’s emphasis on the situation in the UK is helpful insofar as there is nowhere that the irrationality of the response to this issue has been more evident, but the problem exists throughout the developed world. The situation everywhere has been reinforced by the existence of numerous individuals and groups that have profited mightily from the hysteria (including academia, where funding predicated on supporting alarm has increased by a factor of about 15–20 in the US), but why so many others have gone along, despite the obvious disadvantages of doing so, deserves the attention that Booker provides.”

The importance of the GWP Foundation’s work receives its strongest testimonial from the constant attack it has been under since its inception by those who have the most to lose in grant funded livelihoods, ejection from groups with pre-calcified credos, reputations based on irredeemable advocacy (i.e. manmade global warming cannot be falsified), and constituencies induced with politically profitable fear.

Trump and the Ugly Fat Kid

George Rebane

There’s more to be said about President Trump’s anticipated meeting with NK’s Ugly Fat Kid (aka Kim Jong Un), the murderous dictator who today runs the world’s largest forced labor camp in the world.  That Trump got the UFK off the dime and issue an invitation is laudable in itself, and has really miffed all the professional diplomats who for over more than half century have gotten nowhere with that workers’ paradise.  Actually, it’s been even less of an accomplishment than that; the pros have gotten us into a situation where today the UFK’s about to get a deliverable nuclear weapon that can reach the continental US.

The big deal now in preparing for the meeting is how do we make sure that Trump doesn’t wind up circling that Bamboozle Barn one more time.  Trump’s unorthodox and straightforward approach should work for him in this regard.  The conduct of the meeting should be on an announced no-bullshit basis.  Everyone knows that America (and others?) want to have the UFK give up his nukes program, and that should be as a precondition for whatever else we are willing to give in return.  Rebane Doctrine calls for such negotiations to be done on an open declaration of interests basis (cf the Harvard Negotiation Project).

Our interests are known to the world, but the UFK’s not so much – in fact, he really can’t openly declare them for fear of getting a bullet through the back of his head or worse.  (Recall he fed an entire family of a feared high-level muktimuck to hungry dogs in an arena where the rest of the NK leadership was forced to watch.)  The UFK knows that he is the most despised human being on earth today, and he’s got a tiger by the tail.  He’s finally run into a US leader who may actually launch an attack of black helicopters preceded by a massive fleet of stealthies taking out his SAM installations, followed by a squadron of C-17s dropping MOABs on the artillery positions overlooking Seoul.  In any event, he won’t survive such a scenario because then he will more than likely fall in a quick coup led by his generals who will have nothing to lose and everything to gain with his sudden departure.  And that kind of thinking defines the UFK’s interests – his own and his family’s survival.

Healthcare Apples, Oranges, and Fruitcakes

George Rebane

The perennial healthcare debate didn’t get any more clear with the latest release of US life expectancy data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the British Medical Journal.  Our life expectancy is 1.5 years lower than the average in OECD countries, and it decreased by another 0.1 year to 78.6 in the most recent (2016) calculation.  The single-payer (nationalized healthcare) advocates always jump to this stat to argue that we should adopt the highly propagandized and unsustainable socialized system like Canada’s or the British National Healthcare Service.  But such simple thinking behind single-payer neither discovers the causal factors of longevity, nor points to a workable reform of our healthcare system.

As cited in the BMJ and by the CDC, the US death rate, hence life expectancy, is almost completely determined by our wealth and culture, and not by how healthcare is delivered and consumed in America.  We have the money and the cultural support to continue killing ourselves early with everything from illegal drugs, prescribed opioids, horrible diets, sedentary lifestyles, growing suicide rates (mostly among rural whites), …, in short, activities that less wealthy and more traditional populations don’t value or have the time, wherewithal, or interest to raise to lethal levels.  (more here)

But all that makes no never mind to our central planners for whom nationalizing healthcare is just one of many steps they prescribe to fundamentally transform America into a second world country in which government is the gentle giant and end-all in people’s lives.  The issue recently rose to prominence when President Trump called the British NHS “broke and not working” (here)  This accurate assessment, of course, caused the usual anti-Trump uproar, especially from British politicians who have been unsuccessfully wrestling with attempting to make the NHS work for several decades.  Today the system’s shortages in physicians, hospital beds, and diagnostic facilities (e.g. CT scanners) is critical as reported in the British press (here and here).  NHS waiting times have always been long, both for scheduled treatment and daily in the waiting rooms (often exceeding 12 hours).  Recently these have “spiked” even higher, driving ever more people to seek private healthcare services both in and out of country.

The problem with the NHS and ALL other nationalized healthcare systems is lack of sustainability.  Their costs are constantly overrunning the nationally budgeted funding levels which also increase year-over-year.  But more importantly, the healthcare budgets are commanding ever greater percentages of the countries' GDPs and government budgets – the litmus tests of unsustainable enterprises.  The socialists' only answer to all such undertakings diving for the mud is that ‘well, it ain’t crashed yet’.  And while the rush to collapse continues, the daily solution to the problems entails ever more rationing, and simply doing without (which is also what lengthening waiting times constructively do).

In the US and elsewhere, none of this information must be allowed to concern our already neurodiverse fellow citizens.  ‘Neurodiverse’, ‘neurotypical’, ‘neurodivergent’, … ??  We’ll soon be hearing more about these new ways to look at and describe our neighbors and co-workers, whether we like it or not.  Stay tuned.

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.