Rebane's Ruminations

Chain of Consciousness

George Rebane

The recent burst of large language models (LLMs) from AI research has reinvigorated the Singularity related topics of machine sentience, sapience, super-intelligence, agency, ethics, morals, …, along with prognoses of what they may have in store for humans when/if they become ascendant.  Most commentators, including yours truly, see a high likelihood of a dystopian post-Singularity future for mankind.

Among these well-known AI experts are internationally renowned scientists like Nick Bostrom (e.g. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014) and Max Tegmark (e.g. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 2017).  These tomes are worth reading more than once, which I am currently doing.  It turns that both Bostrom (Oxford) and Tegmark (MIT) are established physicists, philosophers, and AI researchers (and both were born in Sweden).

Their counsel for humanity to proceed carefully into a future not dominated by our species is countered by more hopeful futurists like Hans Moravec (e.g. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, 1990) and Ray Kurzweil (e.g. The Singularity is Near, 2005).

About the Singularity, Moravec (Carnegie-Mellon) advises his readers that “human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. … Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.”

And it is our postbiological future that I would like to expand on here.  Moravec, Kurzweil, and others of their ilk have been describing a post-Singularity world that is inhabited by both intelligent machines and various forms of ‘transhumans’ – humans who have shed their evolved mortal coils and taken up new forms in both the physical and computational sense.  A popular scenario has some of us living in cyborg bodies.  Another inviting future has us living in virtual worlds as computational entities, and still others have us co-habiting the material (real?) world with superintelligent machines exercising some manner of peer relationships.

Welcome to the new ‘CNN Lite’

George Rebane

Fair, balanced, and scared shitless?

Unbeknownst to Tucker Carlson, last Friday he broadcast his last show, a  program that has become an iconic fixture in the homes of the largest fraction of America’s cable news audiences.  Readers of these pages have known for the last several years of my assessment that Fox News was losing its edge as the leading media voice against the anti-American Left that is daily championed by the Democratic Party through its boot-licking broadcast and online outlets.

Tonight Bret Baier’s flagship ‘Special Report’ took the Scared Shitless Trophy by not acknowledging the major news item of the day, let alone daring to even repeat the sparse announcement of the event that was released by Fox Corporation about the “parting of their ways.”

Everyone tonight is asking how did Fox come to that decision to fire Carlson.  It’s known that Rupert Murdoch is a tough old bastard who makes business decisions based on dollars and cents.  So people on other smaller and independent networks like Megyn Kelly on Newsmax are favoring reasons based on future profitability that requires moving FN toward the center of the political spectrum.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are standing by to see how Tucker, who can write his own ticket, will now land on his feet in a new sandbox more to his liking.  When he finally does land, you can expect a seismic shift of cable audiences.  The risky part is that he will then have to deliver even more of his gloves-off impactive commentary than in the past.  His new copy will have to shoulder not only the ongoing leftwing and government travesties, but also the added burden of real and represented slings and arrows that this transition made him suffer.

Sandbox – 20apr23

[In updating the government’s butt stupid department, we witnessed today a major speech by SecTreas Janet Yellen assuring the Red Chinese that that US has no intention in surpassing them in international trade and economic progress, let alone outcompeting them in military matters.  Then for what in hell are these people getting paid??  gjr]

Communism Arrives in California

From each according to his ability and to each according to his need – Communist Axiom

George Rebane

California consumers will soon be paying for their utilities according to how much money they make.  The long-denied face of Marxism will have arrived in full force if the utilities and the Public Utilities Commission have their way.

When this authoritarian regime gains a foothold, its principles will then be applied to control the means-based prices of life’s other necessities.  This is what always has happened when the butt stupid half of a country’s citizenry takes to using the government gun to milk their productive neighbors.  Our Left has always denied that their goal is organize America according to Marxist-cum-Communist principle.  Today they have gained enough support from our double dummies that they can talk about their progress to authoritarian rule out in the open.

All this is in the works in California because this is the way Gavin Newsom’s state government wants it: “The income-based bill proposal is part of the companies’ compliance with legislation passed by the California state government last year requiring these types of plans for utilities. The California Public Utilities Commission would have to approve the proposal and make a final decision by mid-2024. The fixed rate could start showing up on bills as soon as 2025.” After that, watch for the wall to be built around California to keep those who are productive from escaping becoming slaves to “equity,” unless the whole country has embraced Marxism by then. (more here)

 

‘DEI meets East Germany’

“U.S. Universities Urge Students to Report One Another for ‘Bias’ ”

George Rebane

Professors Ivan Mannovic (Stanford) and John Ellis (UC Santa Cruz) report that today’s universities are laying in another expensive layer of administrative bureaucracies designed to encourage students and other academics to report each others’ DEI infractions for general approbation, remediation of the accused, and TBD punishments.  The East German Stasi (secret police) last employed one third of its population to perform similar functions on its citizens.  America’s Orwellian conquest proceeds apace, abetted by cadres of reprobates that have the moral credentials of sacks of shit (a more civil description will not serve) lining the hallways of college administration buildings.

According to a recent study by the free-speech watchdog organization Speech First, 56% of American universities have adopted schemes that encourage students to report on one another anonymously for “bias” or “protected identity harm.” This means that anyone who falls short of campus orthodoxy on “pronouns,” transgenderism, microaggressions and proscribed language might soon be denounced and deprived of basic due process, including the right to face an accuser. (more here)

This evil is, of course, promoted by our Democratic Party as one more of their nationally implemented anti-American initiatives.  Added evidence of this is that no leftwing media outlet nor woke ideological commentariat will acknowledge that this is happening.  Free expression by at least half our population has been relegated to surreptitious exchanges, perhaps whispered in bathrooms with the water running.

But perhaps the worst aspect of this scheme is that the most destructive of campus bureaucracies—the diversity, equity and inclusion brigade—will grow, for most of the campus bias-reporting systems are housed in DEI offices. Yes, the same group that polices language, forces ideological training down the throats of faculty and students, and mandates loyalty oaths from faculty candidates will be in charge of administering the system of informers. Woke ideologues will obstruct the work of those who still believe that the mission of a university is to foster the free exchange of ideas.

Sandbox – 6apr23

[Good news department.  It turns out that if you drink both modestly and regularly, then all kinds of health benefits can accrue to you.  For most men that means no more than two drinks (wine, beer, whiskey) a day, and no more than one drink a day for women – a drink contains about 12-14 grams of alcohol.  Hallelujah!  (More here) gjr]

Trump Derangement Syndrome – 31mar23

George Rebane

Now that former president Trump has been indicted by the country’s anti-American left, we are seeing the saner elements from both Right and Left decry the Manhattan idiot DA’s decision in countless media interviews and op-eds.  What strikes me is how these commentators are tippy-toeing around the notion of a violent opposition, while not exactly calling for one – but their message is clear – e.g. the 30mar23 Tucker Carlson program.  So let’s get cut to the chase, are we finally hearing that it’s time to start soaking the cannons?  Thoughts?

More later.

The Singularity is (almost?) here

George Rebane

Led by technical, industrial, and political luminaries like Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio, Steve Wozniak, et al have published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” as a warning to civilization about the potential harmful impact that recently released AI developments portend. (more here)  Specifically, the authors “call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

AI research company OpenAI recently released ChatGPT, a large language model of a very sophisticated neural network that can understand spoken/written natural language, search its enormous training dataset for pattern-matching answers, and compose a well-formed response, that, while not always factually accurate, is sufficiently compelling to influence its human interrogator.  ChatGPT, based on the GPT-4 LLM, has now been embraced by a number of large and small firms to study, modify, and see how they may integrate it into their daily operations.

In the interval OpenAI is developing the next advance called GPT-5, and other companies like Google are busy bringing out their own LLM general artificial intelligence systems.  There is a lot of money to be made and power(s) to be brokered by people who will command important knowledge and process domains in sectors like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, genomics, law, energy, quantum computing, algorithmics, and, yes, even physics in general.  And in one form or another LLMs and their descendants will ensconce systemic unemployment - legions of the terminally disgruntled - in the workforces of all developed countries.

At this point some may ask whether the Singularity has already arrived since we now have existential reasons to fear the seemingly ‘intelligent critters’ that have already crawled out of their cribs as having peer intelligence with us.  Moreover, these systems have also demonstrated that they perform better than the best humans in an ever-growing list of endeavors that were dominated by domain experts.  Today many of these LLMs can even fool humans to the extent of passing the Turing Test (q.v.).

So, as we integrate these AIs into the many systems (energy, transportation, education, law, governance, …)  that make up our civilizations’ grid, we are concerned of their being able to formulate and achieve performance metrics that are dystopic to humankind – in short, they may decide to treat us as vermin and use their grid-embedded powers to be rid of us.  We have reviewed many of such scenarios in this ‘Singularity Signposts’ category of RR over the last 16 years, and will continue to do so as the pace of AI development accelerates and systems yet to be imagined come to the fore.

In the meantime, the well-intended cautionary letter released yesterday will not slow the pace of research one whit.  The genie is out of the bottle, too many agents and agencies have easy access to the technology, and the rewards are too great to just bring things to a halt for while as we puzzle about notions like machine consciousness, morals, generalized intelligence, ethics, …, and so on.  From my perch, I don’t see how from this point on will we even understand the fundamental paradigm that makes them come alive.  Yes, alive – here I am taking the Skinnerian behaviorist definition of life – they are alive to the extent of what they according to their own initiative will do.  Exciting times ahead.

Sandbox – 22mar23

[Happy Spring!  If Trump is indicted and his trial starts going badly toward conviction, would that induce other Repubs not to throw their hats in the ring?  If so, Trump would be the hands down favorite for Republican nominee.  So if the Dems really want to run against Trump, would they not, as a tactic, want throw their case against Trump under the bus?  gjr]

Scattershots – 17mar23 (updated 26mar23)

George Rebane

David Stockman writes a comprehensive and worthy critique of the current banking crisis and it portents regardless of the bullshit that the government is trying to bake into its ‘solution’ – well worth the read here.  (H/T to reader.)

[26mar23 update]  TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chewgave the lamest excuse to a congressional committee this week about how the company handles data collected from US citizens.  He told the outraged panel that “I have seen no evidence that the CCP has sought or received such US data.”  However, none of the congress critters nor the media mavens were smart enough to point out that such advanced evidence need not be forthcoming from the CCP.  They can get TikTok data within the hour by simply demanding its transmission, or else people will disappear. 

Today’s ChatGPTs are robustly left-leaning

George Rebane 

In ‘The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation’ three German academicians - Jochen Hartmann, Jasper Schwenzow, and Maximilian Witte – publish the result of an early milestone study that confirms what many ChatGPT users have already experienced.  To give you more than an idea of its contents, here is the paper’s opening abstract in its entirety.

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts how humans interact with technology. Recently, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art dialogue model that can converse with its human counterparts with unprecedented capabilities. ChatGPT has witnessed tremendous attention from the media, academia, industry, and the general public, attracting more than a million users within days of its release. However, its explosive adoption for information search and as an automated decision aid underscores the importance to understand its limitations and biases. This paper focuses on one of democratic society’s most important decision-making processes: political elections. Prompting ChatGPT with 630 political statements from two leading voting advice applications and the nation-agnostic political compass test in three pre-registered experiments, we uncover ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian ideology. For example, ChatGPT would impose taxes on flights, restrict rent increases, and legalize abortion. In the 2021 elections, it would have voted most likely for the Greens both in Germany (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and in the Netherlands (GroenLinks). Our findings are robust when negating the prompts, reversing the order of the statements, varying prompt formality, and across languages (English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). We conclude by discussing the implications of politically biased conversational AI on society.

In the paper’s conclusions the authors state –

As political elections are one of the most consequential decision-making processes of democratic societies, our findings have important ramifications. Moreover, the “partisan content” that ChatGPT automatically generates at unprecedented scales may attract users who share similar beliefs. In turn, the feedback that OpenAI actively solicits from its user base to improve its model outputs may amplify and perpetuate this ideological bias in a vicious circle. As automated chatbots have the potential to influence user behavior, it is crucial to raise awareness about these breakthrough systems’ flaws and biases.

Thet then point out the meticulous care that was taken to ‘fine tune’ ChatGPT which included mediation by humans in the attempt to remove ideological bias.  The obvious inference here is that there exist unbiased humans with demonstrated processes that can politically sanitize (neutralize?) right/left tilts.  To my knowledge no such individuals have yet to be identified who are acknowledged by both sides to possess such neutral attributes and the talents to apply them.  If we can’t find genuine middle-roaders among ourselves, what chance to we have of training politically vanilla chatbots to advise us with such problems as public policies and elections?

From my perch during these pre-Singularity years, I recommend taking the ideological opinions and political advice of AIs in the same manner as one accept that from any other intelligent and selectively informed being.

Sandbox - 5mar23

[Apologies for the delay of new sand.  My malady is definitely slowing things down on RR, and I appreciate your continued hearty participation and patience.  gjr]

Scattershots – 5mar23 (updated 8mar23)

George Rebane

Here on Hind Tit Road our power went out on 27 March for the second time and has been out since.  I scheduled an immediate delivery with Amerigas when it first went out on 21 March and was promised delivery during the next two days – nothing.  Numerous calls to their call center allowed me to talk to a bunch of east Asians who had been taught carefully to lie to their customers – all the way up from the supervisors to their ‘Dispute Resolution Center’, and all of them were expert at bullshitting their customers.  The entire company appears to be fashioned on ignoring customer fulfillment needs, and responds only to internal convenience.  Finally, yesterday as heavy snow again began falling, a marginally competent Amerigas driver shows up with our propane delivery.  He goes on to make difficult the simple job of pulling up next to the tanks and filling them.  But now we have several more 24/7 days of running our faithful 24KW Generac.  Time order more tomorrow, and install another 500gal capacity when the snows stop.

Meanwhile, PG&E makes spam calls to their customers claiming to inform on latest estimates of power restoration while saying nothing of the sort – we have been totally in the dark, figuratively and literally, as to when a semblance of normalcy will return.  Rumor has it may be tomorrow.  This what passes for meritorious and competent service in today’s big corporation America.

[6mar23 update]  Central control of everything by teams of experts.  The Pacific Legal Foundation has released the documentary video ‘Trust Us’ that takes America through the history of bureaucratic control during the administrations Teddy Roosevelt all the way to the present day.  It makes clear that FDR did nothing to shorten the Great Depression – he lengthened it and made it more severe – and that LBJ’s Great Society spawned a scourge that is still with us and has worsened all of our lives.

There is nothing in this telling that will be understandable to today’s progressives, especially of the woke-bent.  These people are terminally ignorant willing believers, ready to hand their fates, fortunes, and futures to the administrative state run by faceless technicians claiming expertise of which they have none.  But then again, there’s the off chance that watching the video …

[8mar23 update]  Power finally came back on today at 1530.  It went out at 2350 on 23 February, and the Generac has been running 24/7 ever since, consuming 2-2.5gal/hr from a 500 gal tank that was topped with 186 gal refill in the interval.  Turns out the break came from one of our old oaks falling across the power line on our neighbor’s property on the other side of the fence that separates us – of course it took out a section of the fence.  Several other trees also came down in our forest.  Time to buck them and stack them by the splitter ready for another season or two of firewood.  It ain’t cheap.

Sandbox - 19feb23

[Here's an interesting backlash from the more conservative faction of our nation's youth reacting to the nation's woke tsunami. (here) "'Asbury Revival' marathon worship enters 10th day, similar services grow on other college campuse."  And then take a look at what is happening with the recertification kerfuffle of the University of North Caroling, Chapel Hill as the school attempts to augment its curriculum with actual mainline courses that the Left opposes. (here) Light at the end of the tunnel? gjr]

New California – Our 51st State?

George Rebane

The initiative to launch part of California as a new state, provided for by a number of treaties, agreements, and founding documents, has begun (here).  No matter how legal and above board the effort to liberate at least part of the golden state from its mire of tyranny, this effort will be opposed by all the usual political, monied, and anti-American institutions in the land.  However, our interest should be peaked in this kind of initiative because it shows that the desire for a return to constitutional liberties and governance is not yet dead and buried.

Stupid is in residence

George Rebane

Robert Summa, the new minder and regional editor of The Union, is a functional idiot.  Gold Hill California Media, the new owner of the newspaper, is on a rampage buying up small town newspapers all over the west with the aim of introducing neo-Marxism to the heretofore conservative hinterlands in laying the groundwork for the advent of Agenda30 (aka Agenda21).

Certain of his emails censoring reader letters discussing CRT and Wokeism (here) have been made available to me.  The man refuses to publish such communications on the basis that he is not aware of what wokeism is beyond a rightwing dog whistle that denigrates progressive ideas.  Really, he is so auto-insular that he has never heard the Left use or discuss the notion and concepts of wokeism (here) that have swept the land from academe to the military, of which he will “not continue to platform conspiracy theories and disingenuous arguments that lead to violence or is purposefully spreading misinformation or disinformation to harm others …”.

His ignorance binds him so tightly that he has not even heard of the multi-edition, best-selling leftwing manual to promote wokeism – Don’t Think of an Elephant – and its author, nationally celebrated progressive philosopher George Lakoff (here).  Nor is he aware of the massive response from the country’s Right to counter wokeism – e.g. Counter Wokecraft.  In this sense, in addition to ignorant, we must add ‘stupid’ to his assemblage of professional attributes.

Scattershots – 5feb23 (updated 12feb23)

George Rebane

Chinese spy balloon.  One of the more intriguing and scary test purposes for the balloon could easily have been to see how easy it would be to float EMP nuclear devices over the American mainland.  The published altitude range for effective EMP explosions is about 60K-80Kft.  Such considerations make it even more important to immediately shoot down these incursions as soon as they enter US air space into payload recoverable territory.  I suppose then if an EMP device or test package was found, it could be considered an act of war.  But in such a contingency things would immediately get very complicated with the introduction of a lot of other factors.  The news about today’s underwater recovery results are guaranteed to be lies and propaganda; we should not tell the Chicoms what we found or didn’t.

[7feb23 update]  Microsoft to integrate ChatGPT into Bing in today’s announcement (here).  ChatGPT is the ‘complete natural language’ response system that represents the latest quantum leap in advanced deep learning systems and has already demonstrated how the new generation of smart machines will converse with users on a rapidly expanding base of human knowledge.  My son-in-law who does advanced AI research at Microsoft Research tells me to “stay tuned, this could be history in the making.”

[12feb23 update]  From post-SOTUS media reports, Democrats finally admit that Republicans have a totally opposite direction they want to take the country, and that neither side believes in each other’s facts.  Given such terminal incongruity, what could then be the purpose of pursuing common goals for returning to or going forward to seek an unhappy state of America’s reunification.  Isn’t it past time to start negotiating a peaceful Great Divide?

Sandbox - 1feb23

[About time for fresh sand.   Please note the new Trump post for things Trump related.  Thanks. gjr]

Trump Derangement Syndrome – 31jan23

George Rebane

Per the suggestion of one of our readers to gather under its own category all things concerning the ongoings of our intrepid former president Donald Trump, at Typepad’s pleasure I am attempting to add the category of ‘All Things Trump’ in an effort to cleanse future RR’s comment streams of the years-long repetitive Trump-related flotsam and jetsam, especially the ongoing drone of TDS comments.  Readers who continue to enjoy such affinities now have a place to go, consume, and contribute to these diatribes.  We’ll try inserting here from time-to-time fresh ‘sandbox like’ TDS entries to this category to maintain currency with the 2024 election’s advent.  So this is your first repository for all-things-Trump comments.

I will do my best to delete Trump-drivel from other comment streams.

Mensis Horriblis – January 2023

George Rebane

The month that changed my life and perception of the human condition.  Due to the onset of a number of health related factors last year, including both Jo Ann and me coming down with Covid, my kidneys decided to go into acute renal failure, and I came to within one day of leaving this orb before they put me on dialysis and refined the diagnosis to prescribe the hopeful treatment regimen that allowed me to return home after three dreadful weeks under the tender mercies of my medical team at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital in Grass Valley.  (I will write more later about what I learned about our post-Covid healthcare system – it was eye-opening, up close, and very personal.)  I was in the hospital from the first week in January, and returned home last Thursday.

Here I want to thank all of you in our RR community for the outpouring of well-wishes and prayers for my recovery – I am overwhelmed and blessed by all the kindness that you have shown.  My family, of course, rallied around the homestead and helped Jo Ann shoulder the stress of caring that included planning sessions for my on-off incipient death as new test results came in.

So now the prognosis du jour is that my kidneys have a good chance of recovering after an appropriate interval of dialysis and steroid treatment – but no guarantees.  After 80+ years of excellent health, I have now been shown the other side of the coin and understand what it means to be an utterly helpless potted plant.  But today, onward!

A View from the Eighties

George Rebane

I am 83, still functioning but past my prime. Most of the college professors and high-school teachers in my cohort have already been shuffled out of the classroom. I concede I shouldn’t be running for president or chairman of a board at my age. I’m terrible at understanding new trends and technologies. But history and literature—the events and works of the past—don’t change at all. All we can do is to try to understand why long-gone people did what they did and said what they said.

So writes retired Prof Wight Martindale Jr (here) as he looks back and looks around at what useful functions we older people can still perform, and especially to our newest generation itching to make their mark.  I too am in my eighties and share most of the good professor’s thoughts about some of the unique things those with many birthdays can do for our young.  These past many years readers have been subjected to my own particular outlook, biases, and predilections presented in an unabashed style, big words and all.

I view the eighties as one of life’s special decades, one in which many of us still retain most of our marbles and memories, and one from which most of us will exit on a gurney.  In the US fewer than two out of five males reaching eighty will see ninety.   Females fare better, almost half of them reaching eighty will reach ninety.  But any way you cut it, in your eighties you have arrived in the ‘decade of dreaded diseases and death’.  So, while you hope for the best, have your exit plan in place.

Sandbox – 1jan23

[Well, Happy 2023 everyone and we might as well start the new year off with a fresh sandbox.  In the 19dec22 Sandbox Mr scenes offered an intriguing suggestion (830am) in an attempt to eliminate the detritus of TDS and things gratuitously Trump from continually contaminating practically every other topic with yet another boring lap around the Trump barn.  He suggested that RR add a Trump category and restrict posting of Trump-centric comments to that category.  I envision it being structured like the Sandbox with dated, and perhaps even topical, labels so that the comment streams don’t become too long.  I need to noodle on this and invite readers’ ideas about how it would work.  gjr]

‘Democracy Dies in California’

“To impose a new burden on fast-food restaurants, the state plans to ignore the constitution’s right of voters to review laws.”

George Rebane

California suffers a continuous stream of social, economic, and political disasters.  All of these are formulated, brought to bear, and implemented by the state’s virulently anti-American Democratic Party.  Most of the public policy tragedies arrive unknown and unannounced to the state’s shrinking share of maker residents.  The takers don’t care since they know that all the wealth transfer programs, no matter how scurrilous, all go to buy and pay for their votes.

The latest of these promises an historic change in how California’s referenda will now be treated.  Slated to go into effect tomorrow (1jan23) – “The law creates a state council to dictate wages, working conditions and benefits, among other things, for fast-food workers who aren’t unionized. The law is intended to coerce fast-food franchises to surrender to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).” (here)

What’s different is that this law was passed late in the legislative session to deny Californians any reasonable review of the matter.  However, an astute watchdog organization, Save Local Restaurants, has gathered over a million signatures on a petition opposing the referendum and filed it with the state.  According to California’s constitution “a law is required to be put on hold once a referendum petition with enough signatures is filed.”

The constitution is very specific about this 1911 amendment which reserves “to the people the power to pass judgment upon the acts of the legislature, and to prevent objectionable measures from taking effect.” Once a referendum is filed, “no such act or section or part of such act shall go into effect until and unless approved by a majority of the qualified electors voting thereon.”

The state is ignoring its constitution, and has stated it will “temporarily” implement the law until the signatures are verified, a task that will be completed sometime in October 2023.  At that time the law will either be withdrawn or made permanent.  Such an unconstitutional, temporarily-in-effect provision has never been attempted before.

If allowed to stand, this legislative tactic – passing bills late in the legislative calendar in order to limit their opponents’ ability to stop them from taking effect - will become yet another tool and precedent for our monopoly political party to continue its destruction of California.  Sleazebags on parade.

The only remaining hope on this is an order by a state judge prohibiting enforcement of the law until a hearing is held in two weeks.  Else “businesses would have to temporarily comply even though the laws may be later suspended once signatures are verified and eventually overturned by voters.”  So it is no surprise that we continue to witness large numbers of our businesses and people vote with their feet by leaving California.

Peeking Into Progressive Minds

George Rebane

As most RR readers know, the Rebanes have been in local leftwing crosshairs for some years now.  Jo Ann’s prominence in Republican circles - Nevada County Republican Central Committee, President of Nevada County Republican Women Federated, ... - and her long hitch on the Union’s editorial board have reserved for her a regular ration of opprobrium from our Left.  In today’s (29dec22) Union she garner’s the paper’s Hits & Misses column headline – ‘Miss to Rebane’s comment on immigrants’.  Thereunder reader Richard Howell writes, “To Mrs. Rebane’s comment (12/23) ‘… five million illegals and hundreds of thousands of known got-a-ways(sic) invade our country?’  Actually, 5+ million were intercepted trying to cross illegally into the U.S.  Perhaps next week she can write a ‘Hit’ comment for our border patrol under President Biden.”

Can’t rightly tell whether the man is terminally bamboozled by the lamestream’s misreporting our border crisis, and thinks that the 5+ million were denied entry, or that when illegals are intercepted by the border patrol on our side, they then have broken no laws and it’s OK for them to be turned loose and stay here.  And wanting a hit for Biden is beyond ludicrous – the president who has created the most porous border in the country’s history, and is personally responsible for tens of thousands of migrant and America’s drug overdose deaths that continue to mount daily.

Also right below was the following letter from a George Roberts to the editor labeled ‘Misguided immigrant comments’.

I just finished reading Joanne Rebaine’s (sic) hits and misses holiday rant (12/24) about the asylum seekers.  She must have special glasses to have spotted specific “sex traffickers, fentanyl dealers and terrorists.”  Sort of like Trump’s “rapists and murderers.”  I don’t have those special holiday glasses.  All I saw were some poor, cold, hungry, scared but hopeful human beings.  I think the Christian bible would call them the most vulnerable and precious of god’s children.  “Feliz Navidad” to Ms. Rebaine.(sic)

It is clear that Mr Roberts belongs to the country's tens of millions of news nebbishes who don’t have a clue about what’s really going on at our southern border and its follow-on impact across the entire land.  The lamestream media has so effectively papered over the ongoing tragedy that it’s coverage and communication to a large population, one with purportedly free speech rights, will be studied for years by anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists as one of history’s most effective campaigns of large scale propagandized fake news.  The Third Reich’s Göbbels and the entire Soviet ‘truth’ nomenklatura were not able to convince even a smidgen of their populations to their versions of ‘truth’ (Pravda).

The dimensions of Roberts’ ignorance are immeasurable.  He hasn’t an inkling that the overwhelming share of illegal aliens from all over the world come not as asylum seekers, but only economic opportunists (including criminal) who take advantage of Biden’s abandonment of America’s national security.

But dear reader, we must remember that the final and perhaps greatest tragedy and threat to our  republic is that the country is swarming with mind-mangled people like Richard Howell and George Roberts.

Scattershots – 26dec22 (update 29dec22)

George Rebane

Christmas 2022.  Jo Ann and I were again blessed to be in the bosom of our family on Christmas eve and Christmas day.  The whole affair took place at daughter Teine and Dave’s house (head of our Southern Tribe) in Alta Sierra.  Teine organized and put on dinner on the eve, Christmas brunch, and big Christmas dinner.  In attendance were also granddaughter Fiona (with child) with hubby Shawn and their daughter Maybelle, grandson Sean and wife Bella (with child) who arrived late on Christmas eve, driving in one day from snowbound Denver where they live (as part of our Eastern Tribe) along with granddaughter Claire, hubby, and four more great-grandchildren.  Throw into that mix two male dogs and a Maine Coon cat, and you get a rough idea of all the goings on in the house and yard.  Our Northern Tribe, headed by daughter Sini and hubby Roland, was snowbound in their Seattle area home along with their timely assembled kids Elizabeth, Lucas, and Catherine with hubby.  Needless to say, a lot of inter-tribal texting and sending of pics went on the whole time.

‘Into each life some …’  The regular reader will have noticed a drop-off in the frequency of RR posts.  As reported before, Jo Ann and I came down with Covid during Thanksgiving week.  And that malady has lingered with us, mostly me, over the last month.  I had some health issues (inevitable in your 80s) start earlier in the year which Covid compounded.  So anyway, we’re getting tested for this and that, and dragging a mite in the process.  Hope to be back online sooner than later.

[28dec22 update]  Our beloved Union is in the hands of junior varsity journalistic philistines.  Their new managing editor Elias Funez showed his hand in today’s edition by writing a very long, self-adulatory op-ed (here) that leaves no doubt the man either failed Introduction to Composition 1A, or never even gave it a try.

Given my extensive history covering wildfires over my now 17 years of newspaper reporting, It didn’t take me long for me to connect the dots between my penchant for producing breaking news coverage, live video, and print photography.

And I was finding out that not just her, but many many others as well. My live feeds had now have become a resource where folks were exchanging information in real time, and with many other members of the community.

There’s much more to lament about this man’s talents in running a newspaper.  I also recommend RR readers take a look at the newspaper’s completely revised website (here).  This monstrosity is basically broken – e.g. it will not accept former account holders, and does not even feature the paper’s Opinion (op-ed) section.  It appears to now start focusing on syndicated writers with a distinct leftward lean.  More about this later.

[29dec22 update]  ‘ICE Admits It Has ‘No Records’ For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Illegal Immigrants Released With Electronic Monitors’  The evidence of government incompetence and criminal fraud pours in daily.  The Biden administration has assured their various departments and agencies fomenting and promoting the illegal alien invasion that they will not be touched by the formerly ‘long arm of the law’.  Future favors accrue to the bureaucrats enabling the now bulging pipeline of future Democrat voters. (more here)