Rebane's Ruminations

We have forgotten 9/11 (updated)

George Rebane

Until we understand and address the role of the swamp, swatting individual mosquitoes will not reduce our suffering.

On 11 September 2001 we as a country vowed that we would never forget what happened on that day which took the lives of almost 3,000 innocent Americans.  Since then, we have built a magnificent Ground Zero monument and museum, and in somber ceremonies called out the names of our murdered country men and women.  But the tragedy more often than not has been observed as an act of God, similar to our remembrance of the devastation of Katrina.

During these observances someone will utter a brief reference to the ‘terrorists’ who flew those passenger airliners into buildings and into a field in Pennsylvania.  At best these faceless terrorists are also glossed over as having no further identity, ideology, and purpose than did Katrina.  We focus all our attention on the killed and their grieving survivors.

But many more than 3,000 Americans die every day, and no national memorials are held for them.  No one asks any longer what made these 9/11 deaths special, and why that date, as another one in our history, will live in infamy.  When we were still a proud country and suffered a great blow on 7 December 1941, we didn’t memorialize our fallen as some inevitable victims of a natural disaster.  We made it clear that everyone down to our kindergarteners knew that it was Imperial Japan, with leaders like Tojo and Yamamoto, that had perpetrated and carried out that dastardly attack.  And even though Japan is no longer a warmongering empire, we still remember who attacked us on that day of infamy, and how we as a country responded to that outrage.

This is not the case with 9/11 that we now briefly identify as having been caused by some band of vanilla terrorists of indifferent provenance.  Today during these hallowed observances we cannot even mention  that it was fundamentalist Islam that motivated, assembled, trained, and set loose the self-sacrificing killers.  And that fundamental Islam has not deviated a whit from its greater goal to subvert the globe to its merciless credo, proving its unflagging zeal by continuing to send an unending stream of Islamist terrorists to maim and murder in the west.

In response, our progressive and woke leadership cringes at even the thought of identifying the terrorists’ creed.  We even take down Old Glory from classroom walls if a Muslim student expresses ‘discomfort’ with that flag for which so many have sacrificed.  We continue mumbling that Islam is still a “religion of peace”, ignoring the wholesale global support by Muslims of anti-western terror as an acceptable tool to bring about their new world order.  And in response, we have turned on ourselves by quietly accepting the leftists in our government who have fabricated the lie that white supremacists make up the greatest terror threat America faces.

There is no doubt that twenty years on, we as a nation have forgotten what really happened on 9/11.

[update]  RL Crabb, our celebrated cartoonist who is also on the editorial board of The Union, is a local leading intellectual light in the cadre of our calcified cohort of collectivists.  His cartoon in today’s 11sep21 issue of the newspaper (below) underlines the point that I am making in the above commentary.  As a collectivist, for him 9/11 was just another tragedy of lives lost to an event perpetrated by some inscrutable terrorists of indifferent origin who no longer deserve recognition, let alone mention.  Most students of geo-politics and Islamic affairs find nothing inscrutable about the 9/11 terrorists and are anything but indifferent as to their origin.  Fundamentalist Islam is the geo-political plague of our times and as such has been endemic for decades.  And so it will continue to be as long as our progressive thought leaders, who are also masters of our media, deem this scourge as just another act of nature to be dealt only with a general trepidation and ill-directed preparations which must neither address nor insult its source.  These leftists wish us to focus only on those whom they designate as “rightwing domestic terrorists”, their paramount threat to our republic.

A fruitful read on the entire matter of global Islamism is ‘The War on Terror Shifts to ‘Brainistan’’ by Tawfik Hamid, an American physician who in his younger years was himself an indoctrinated jihadist ready to martyr himself attacking the west.  He presents the case that “The West needs a better system for identifying radical Islamists and cutting out the religious underpinnings of jihad.”  Ignoring the ideological origins of 9/11 is not part of such a better system.  More such sentiments are presented today in essays such as 'Purposeful Forgetfulness' by Pedro Gonzales, associate editor of Chronicles, who argues that "Americans have been encouraged to forget about 9/11 and to focus on the enemy within."

Afghanistan Reflections (updated 21aug21)

George Rebane

Diplomacy unsupported by the threat of force is nothing but duplicitous hot air.

Has Kabul fallen?  For all intents and purposes the answer is yes.  How else to explain all those towelheads carrying their AKs and RPGs, casually walking the streets of that city of six million, while thousands are desperately trying to get on a flight out from the airport’s military side still under American control?  Last we looked, the Afghani ‘security forces’ who had yet to flee were still wearing their uniforms.

Our display of existential historical ignorance is on parade.  Even backwoods snuffies like me have known for decades that Afghanistan is not a ‘country’, but a region of ethnically and culturally similar tribes of the mostly fanatically devout and concomitantly ignorant Muslims.  As recounted here numberless times and echoed by RR’s commentariat, attempting to deal with that region as a unified sovereign nation-state has been a fool’s errand, as history confirms.  The only time Afghanis unite and cooperate is when they fight to expel foreigners from their sandbox.  All foreign policies should start recognizing those truths.

In Appreciation – 14jul21

Sell your stuff at the price of courtesy, for that imposes the heaviest obligation; …courtesy not only pays, but it pledges, and it is gallant manner that imposes the greatest obligation; nothing costs a man of conscience more than something given him, for it is sold him twice, and at a double price, that of its own value, and that of politeness.  Nevertheless it remains true, that to men of mean spirit such noble talk is mere gibberish, for they do not understand the idioms of good style.  Gracian #272

George Rebane

Recently I’ve been doing some review and archiving of the last 14 years of RR’s contents.  And in the perusal of the voluminous comment streams in these pages, I am overcome with gratitude for the content of the almost 200,000 comments from readers of all socio-political persuasions.  Most humbling to me are the long, thoughtful, and citation-supported comments that append to and expand on my commentaries.  Most of these, over the years, have come from a small and faithful cadre of regular commenters.  It is a rare blog where comment contents abet and also vie with the topical posts – RR is so blessed.

I am also grateful for the cadre of readers who trade their ideas with me through emails, giving rise to long and fruitful exchanges, some of which I have been able to post.  And lastly, I have to also thank our readers of the Left.  Some of them take me and RR’s more rightwing readers to task on other blogs, whereon they can swim in more comfortable waters without having to match wits with those whom they criticize or seek to silence.

But the greatest thanks go to those liberals, progressives, et al of today’s woke cadres who now and then have the fortitude to take up their lance and do battle in our comment streams.  It is their welcome attendance that gives spice to the debates and that illustrate most clearly how differently our polarized sides see the same world, and the diametrically opposite directions each side wants to guide our republic.  After all, for a more complete telling, we need from all sides the observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man.

Open Letter to our Government Employee Neighbors

George Rebane

This piece appeared (here) in 18jul09 Union when I was a regular columnist for the newspaper.  It was written in response to the dawn of the Obama age which already gave ample portent to the hard times ahead as he began stifling the normal rebound from the recession that was already starting to show promise.  Obama’s eight years confirmed my apprehensions and delivered a historically lowest growth recovery with higher taxes, huge regulatory overload, bigger government, and a humongous growth in national debt.  The advent of Team Biden and the Democrats control of Congress has already demonstrated that we are now due for even more punishment than before as our economy struggles to recover from the government-induced Covid recession.  It is time to reprise this slightly edited, open letter to the growing ranks of today's government employees.

*****

These are difficult times for all, times that now shine a bright and revealing light on things hidden and unmentioned in our communal life. Governments at all levels are broke and broken. And they are not so because we taxpayers have failed to pay our due. Today, we know that governments are failing because they have grown too big, bewildering and expensive. The major cost of government turns out to be you in your sheer numbers and the compensation packages that you command from us.

Overall, you are a coddled and privileged class, buttressed between unscrupulous politicians and your public-be-damned union leaders. For what you do, you are paid wages that few private employers could afford, and your benefits are a lavish scam that will soon reveal itself – a story of its own for another time. We know all this because you are being fired and furloughed in unprecedented numbers by jurisdictions that can neither borrow nor print. The feckless feds who still can are increasing your numbers. When forced to balance accounts, our electeds know their budget busters – the salaries and benefit packages that you have quietly installed for yourselves with the help of your unions and spineless politicians.

You and your handlers (whom we also fund) frequently portray your labors as selfless sacrifices to the rest of us. We don’t see it that way.  You provide expensive, often unwanted, “services.” And even in your most dangerous jobs, you do not match the risks to life and limb that more of us encounter daily in the private sector. (Bureau of Labor Statistics.) There is no doubt that we need some of you to be there for us. The military, law enforcement, certain emergency services, and our border guards have an unquestioned role in keeping our country whole.

The Evil Party – more lives lost to the Left (updated 21jun21)

The fact that Joe Biden is even considering opening our southern border to a group of unvetted illegal aliens in a massive caravan – in the middle of a pandemic, while millions of Americans are unemployed – tells you everything you need to know about Democrats’ priorities.  - Anonymous

George Rebane

In voices hushed by the evil Democratic Party and their lamestream mouthpieces, evidence continues to pile in that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IMT) are effective preventatives and curatives for Covid-19 (more here and here).  Both are worldwide established pharmaceuticals that have been in constant use for various diseases for decades.  HCQ was initially approved by the FDA for treating C19.  Then approval was withdrawn due to a politicized study that itself was later shown to be faulty.  Since then, additional studies have been performed, cited, and censored showing the benefits of both drugs.

The latest is a study of patients already on ventilators who received HCQ in combination with Azithromycin (AZ).  The results showed patients receiving HCQ/AZ had a survival rate almost three times that of those who were denied the treatment.  Other studies that were not recognized in the US showed that both HCQ and IMT were also effective as treatments for C19 in the pre-ventilator stages of the disease.  There are countless reports of both drugs being used quietly by healthcare workers in unpublished subrosa protocols to save the lives of their patients.

When these performance stats are applied to the millions of C19 patients who have died over the past year plus (600,000 in the US alone), then the extent of this evil is revealed, and begins to compare itself to the order of magnitude of the Holocaust and other politically motivated genocides.  The political motivation in our country was TDS – denying President Trump any credit for his successful policies fighting the C19 pandemic.  In this light, our Democrats and their proto-communist factions are directly culpable for the readily preventable deaths of uncounted tens of thousands of Americans.

To our Left, these political sacrifices are merely the “few eggs that must be cracked to make their (socialist) omelet” - with a nod to Josif Vissarionovich.  And there are many more such cracked eggs to come as they continue their unabated fundamental transformation of America.

[21jun21 update]  “New Study Links Ivermectin to ‘Large Reductions’ in COVID-19 Deaths”  The number of lives that could have been saved by the anti-Trump Left not proscribing Ivermectin easily reaches into the hundreds of thousands.  However Teams Pelosi/Schumer/Biden abetted by Team Fauci were perfectly willing to sacrifice these thousands of lives to maintain their narrative driving toward victory in an election year.  For them there was no doubt that the end would justify any horrendous means available.  And as in any communist and/or third world country, no one will be held accountable – ongoing existential evil in our midst.

When Compassion Kills

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 December 2019.]

‘Tis the season of peace, joy, and giving, of both the complimentary and compassionate kind.  Every year during these weeks we are deluged with pleas to open our wallets for uncountable good causes.  ‘Twas ever thus.  But compassionate giving on an international scale has often been the precursor, if not the actual cause, of the subsequent death for tens of millions.  And as a nation that continues to give and has given lavishly in the past, this should give us Americans some pause as we reflect on the history of such gifts.

Recently published is one such history of a program of compassionate giving that turned out to give rise to the subsequent deaths of 20 to 30 million Soviet farmers in the 1930s.  The book is The Russian Job – the forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin (2019) by award-winning historian Douglas Smith. (reviewed here)  In it Smith describes in devastating detail of how during 1921-23 the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, working over a vast land area, saved 10 million Russians from certain starvation.

Happy Thanksgiving - 2019

Jo Ann Rebane: Thanksgiving reflections from my childhood 

My family lived in Alhambra (southern California) and so did my maternal grandparents, my bachelor uncle, and my paternal grandmother.  We always dressed up for any meal at my grandparent’s house, especially Thanksgiving.  Daddy wore a suit, Mama wore a nice dress, and my sister and I often wore matching dresses that my mother had sewn for us, and of course our good shoes.

Grandma Clara was a fine cook, roasted a turkey to perfection, made tasty smooth gravy, and was a master of flaky pie crust which usually had a pumpkin filling.  The dining room table was set with Grandma’s fine china decorated with little yellow flowers, thumbprint Fostoria crystal goblets, and white linen table cloth and napkins.  My Grandparents sat at either end of the table.  My mother sat between my sister and me with our backs to the buffet while Daddy sat between his mother and my uncle on the side of the table facing us. 

The Thanksgiving table scene could have been straight out of the above Norman Rockwell painting.  Grandpa Charles sat at the head of the table and to my right.  Between us was a card table where the side dishes resided.  After my father said grace, Grandpa, a butcher in his youth, conducted the ritual sharpening of the carving knife against the steel.  Then he proceeded to create perfect slices of white meat and laid them on the edge of the turkey platter.  He released the drumstick and skillfully worked between the tendons to separate the dark meat. 

My job, which I took seriously, was to serve a portion of each side onto each plate after Grandpa had placed the turkey on it and then pass it along.  Conversation centered on school and church news, sports, and my uncle’s recent experiences in the Navy.  After the meal, Grandpa excused himself to listen to the ball game on the radio (before TV).  Daddy followed his little girls into the front room to read the newspaper, or watch us color, and also read when we were older.  Clean up was conducted in the kitchen with Grandma washing every dish, pot and pan, Mama rinsed, and my uncle did the drying, often flourishing the dishtowel like a matador’s cape.  

Later the adults played canasta at a card table set up in the front room where a fire crackled in the fireplace.  This was followed by the best part of the day - for a late snack we each made our own turkey sandwiches on good bread onto which I liked to put on lots of mayonnaise, crispy lettuce, and pickles.  After that we all said good night and Daddy drove us home in the dark.

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!!

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.

Techshots – 19dec17

George Rebane

Programming was women’s work.  The WSJ has been running a series on the history of women in technology, and their being “pushed out” in the years following WW2 (more here).  During and after the war women were the workers who ran the early computers of the day and also programmed them.  Programming was then considered a kind of clerical work best suited for the fair sex.  This all brings back some interesting memories from my early engineering career.

In the mid-60s I was a young engineer, fresh out of the Army, working in aerospace, going to grad school, and raising a family with small children.  My employer was Singer-Librascope, a big defense contractor based in Glendale that was a major supplier of the Navy’s shipboard combat systems (specializing in nuclear submarines).  I worked in their bleeding edge R&D department where we were inventing new things every week, prototyping them for shipboard testing, and then analyzing the data from the test ranges and secret missions before incorporating some of the findings into the newest systems.  Pretty heady stuff that set the direction for the rest of my career.

During that time engineers were supposed to derive new algorithms from applicable science that would be incorporated into the Navy’s weapons and the systems that fired them.  We had equations and models coming out of our ears.  The company’s mainframe was the mammoth CDC3300, that computer took up the floor space of a small cafeteria and handled everything from accounting, inventory, and engineering.  Programs were coded (and stored) on punched cards and magnetic tape, and the output came back to you on reams of tractor feed paper.  Each punched card represented one line of Fortran code.  The company also maintained state-of-the-art keypunch and programming departments, these were ‘best practices’ at the time.

Engineers were required to coordinate with programming to get one or two programmers assigned to your project.  Programmers were all men, with a few women left over from the old days, to whom you explained the equations and the algorithmics you had in mind, and they would write the code.  Then you would go through laborious debugging, and finally specify the data runs that you had to make.  You could plan on two runs a day, and perhaps a third overnight if you talked nice to the computer people.

The programmers actually wrote down the lines of Fortran on 80-column sheets, precisely denoting where every character would go.  Then these sheets would be handed to the key-punch department that was staffed by all ladies (everyone knew that typing was women’s work) who would return a stack or boxes full of Hollerith formatted punch cards.

This was a long and laborious process, and in our department we young Turks soon took matters into our own hands.  All of us quickly learned Fortran, had a keypunch set up in our office area, and ‘fired’ the programming and keypunch departments.  Over time other engineering departments did the same, relegating the programmers to do Cobol programming for accounting, payroll, and inventory tracking.  The good programmers quickly left – going down the street to Disney where they started its Animatronics division – and from then on, all engineers did their own coding which became even easier when remote computing arrived (around 1970) that allowed us to write and upload both Fortran and Basic programs and get our output on teleprinters.  We now could make an unlimited number of runs per day – debugging became a breeze. 

A significant number of women started coming back to technology in the early 70s.  We then wound up with three degreed female engineers, but learning to work with them in a free-wheeling take-no-prisoners technical environment presented new challenges.  Technically they were our peers, but the ladies still had to be handled with kid gloves during project review meetings, and no-holds-barred technical critiques.

All this happened when men and women were still different, and before we all were mandated equal in the workplace.  That is until today, when we are again not equal in the workplace, and working with them, men again have to walk on eggshells lest … .

*****
We had a more recent technology related experience this summer when Jo Ann and I took our grown daughters to Estonia to experience the country, visit the ancestral farm, villages where my parents grew up, and my grandparents’ graves.  I have described my native Estonia as a small country on the Baltic that is acknowledged as perhaps the most advanced in its development of internet technologies and the adoption of these into its governance and the lives of its citizens.  (more in My Story)

To update these developments, I want to share a current article in The New Yorker that was sent to me by a reader and correspondent.  Entitled ‘Estonia, The Digital Republic’, the piece describes the most recent leap forward in implementing e-Estonia through a bevy of new online services and functions available to everyone from consumers and entrepreneurs to government administrators.  In Estonia broadband is ubiquitous, and everyone conducts their daily affairs on their smartphones, pads, and laptops.  As the leader in providing automation and utilizing the internet, that little country serves as a beacon as it demonstrates the art of the possible to more cumbersome larger countries like the US, and most certainly to technological backwaters such as own progressively punished Nevada County.

‘Gun Violence’, girding for the next chapter

George Rebane

With the Las Vegas massacre still fresh in the news, and memories of previous such shootings indelibly burned into our collective memories, the ongoing debate in these pages about preventing children from accidentally shooting themselves or others assumes a heightened focus and an inevitably extended scope.  We are all standing by for the new spate of progressive platitudes and proposed proscriptions of the lawful ownership and possession of guns guaranteed by the Second Amendment.  This guarantee is not recognized by many of our newly educated citizens, most leftwing politicians, and all lamestream journalists.  But the only guarantee we have is that when the dust of the latest tragedy settles, and it will settle, this next chapter of the debate will leave us more separated than ever – the Great Divide ratchet turneth.

So, back to preventing accidental gun deaths.  I wonder what would happen to current statistics if children were taught about gun safety in kindergarten and/or first grade.  Today concerned parents have no hope of denying their child’s knowledge of the existence and, yes, the romance of guns since the world’s cultures glorify their existence as objects of power, adventure, status, justice, crime, coming of age, … .  Today all of this is drummed into the heads of the little darlins through immensely popular and engaging shoot-‘em-up computer games, realistic movies, and TV/online videos available 24/7 on the youngsters’ phones and pads.  And the more such parents attempt to keep children from having early ‘gun experiences’, the more attractive guns become to kids as the forbidden fruit that when serendipitously discovered, must immediately be handled, explored, surreptitiously shared, etc.

As a youngster (and child war veteran) in 1950s middle America, I was as interested in guns as were any of my friends.  In those days fathers (mine included) put guns into the hands of their sons (and many daughters) when they were, by today’s standards, very young.  I got my Red Ryder Daisy BB gun when ten, and my first 22 mag-fed bolt action rifle when thirteen.  (One of my grandsons now has it.)  I taught my children and grandchildren about guns and gun safety before they were five, and to shoot before they were eight.

Before the age of political correctness it was rare to hear of a youngster tragically discharging a found firearm.  Although kids did have their share of hunting accidents when improperly handling their firearms.  But then such accidents were not political or politicized events, no one became hysterical as a result and started militating for some new draconian laws or regulations that proscribed or constructively denied the then legal ownership and disposition of guns.  Overall, these were viewed as childhood accidents similar to when a kid seriously injured himself on a swing or other playground equipment, or riding his bicycle, swimming, climbing trees, or … .  These were simply tragic accidents the solution to which was more/better safety training.  We recognized that life lived to the fullest has inherent dangers, and their attempted eradication would also eliminate other unintended desiderata that contributed to our quality of life – in sum, the overzealous quest for safety itself has a price, as we see all around us today.

Are we really a better society as a result of fifty years of social histrionics wherein we have sought to impress each other with our social consciousness and caring that today mandates almost everything that we do, say, or think.  How many mass shootings did we have when young people knew more about guns and had easier access to them?

“THE LAST ONES”

[This little essay on the children of 1930s and 40s was sent by a RR reader and correspondent.  He shared it with a number of us who join in an ongoing dialogue about the times and events.  It is posted as received.  gjr]

By Denise Eyherabide

Born in the 1930s and early 1940s, we exist as a very special age cohort.  We are the “LAST ONES.”  We are the last, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with fathers and uncles going off.  We are the last to remember ration books for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves.  We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans.  We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available.

We are the last to hear Roosevelt’s radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors.  We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.

We are the last who spent childhood without television; instead imagining what we heard on the radio.  As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside until the street lights came on.”   We did play outside and we did play on our own.  There was no little league.

The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like.  Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.  Newspapers and magazines were written for adults.  We are the last who had to find out for ourselves.

As we grew up, the country was exploding with growth.  The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow.  VA loans fanned a housing boom.  Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work.  New highways would bring jobs and mobility.  The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.  In the late 40s and early 50s the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth to its new middle class.  Our parents understandably became absorbed with their own new lives.  They were free from the confines of the depression and the war.  They threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.

We weren’t neglected but we weren’t today’s all-consuming family focus.  They were glad we played by ourselves “until the street lights came on.”  They were busy discovering the post war world.

Most of us had no life plan, but with the unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide we simply stepped into the world and went to find out.  We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed.  Based on our naïve belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we went.

We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future.  Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this experience.  Depression poverty was deep rooted.  Polio was still a crippler.  The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 1950s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks.  China became Red China.  Eisenhower sent the first "advisors" to Vietnam.  Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.

We are the last to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland.  We came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease.

Only we can remember both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.   We experienced both.

We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better... not worse.

We did not have it easy.  Our wages were low, we did without, we lived within our means, we worked hard to get a job, and harder still to keep it.  Things that today are considered necessities, we considered unreachable luxuries.  We made things last.  We fixed, rather than replaced.  We had values and did not take for granted that "somebody will take care of us."  We cared for ourselves and we also cared for others.

We are the “LAST ONES.”

To Declare Wars or Not

George Rebane

After the end of our last declared war, diplomat extraordinaire and historian George Kennan wrote in 1946 what has come to be known as the ‘Long Telegram’ (q.v.) outlining a policy to contain the post-war global aspirations of the USSR.  That was quickly followed by his now famous ‘X article’ – ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ in Foreign Affairs – which expanded on the recognition that Stalin’s real objective was to dedicate the USSR to foment revolution to “defeat the capitalist forces in the outside world” which required the overthrow of western governments.  In this piece his oft-quoted seminal observation was that -

“… the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies ... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”  (emphasis as in its subsequent references)

This policy with variants was adopted and implemented in its essence by all subsequent US presidents until the USSR collapsed in 1991.  Fundamentally, history has judged the containment policy through “adroit and vigilant applications of counterforce” wherever needed to have been successful.  During the entire period from 1945 to 1991 and to the present, neither the US nor any developed country has bothered to apply force or counterforce under an umbrella of a formal declaration of war.  World order, such as it is, has been maintained by the ad hoc application of military force by individual nation-states acting alone or within some loose alliances cobbled together for political reasons.

But the pragmatism that has underpinned such undeclared hostilities for more than half a century is easy to see.  Three principal reasons to proceed without formal declaration come to mind –

1. A declared war needs to have an objective of victory over an identified enemy that controls territory, people, and resources. The declaring party needs also then to put its nation on a wartime footing with all the concomitant sacrifices in force.
2. Foreign policy objectives can be achieved by the use of many kinds of force without the declaration of war which requires the commitment of foreign powers to declare themselves an ally or some other form of a committed partner of the declaring nation.
3. A formally declared war must continue until some formal instrument of peace or cessation of hostilities is negotiated and signed, else it continues indefinitely. Such terminating negotiations are more often than not difficult, expensive, and take a long time.

Now regarding Islamists and dawa, I tend to hold with Popper and Kennan as far as a responsive policy is concerned.  To understand what I mean, take Kennan’s paragraph above and substitute Islamist et al for the USSR et al.  It would then read –

The main element of any United States policy toward Islamism must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of dawa and Islamist expansive tendencies ... Islamist pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Islamist policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence. 

None of this involves a declaration of war against Islamism, since that in its essence is a state-less distributed assault, especially in its promotion of dawa inside the borders of western countries already suffering from unassimilating Islamic colonization.  Were we to seek the stasist solution, promoted by many libertarians and progressives, of waiting for Islamism to condense into an attackable nation-state, it would be too late for the simple reason that this will never happen.  That kind of a world has passed a good many years ago.

And if people still believe that our current Constitution does not already provide for America to fight for its survival, without the declaration of war, through the timely, adroit, and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, then we should appropriately amend the Constitution to make that possible.

Redux - What Economic Recovery?! (updated 6jan17)

George Rebane

A couple of years back I introduced readers to a more detailed look at our Democrat ballyhooed economic recovery.   In addition to the explication therein I was trying to make the point that we really did not have a recovery underway that would get us back on the long established track of economic growth.  The 2jan17 WSJ just published this graphic of US GDP since 1970 that clearly establishes the country's nominal growth trendline that I illustrated and discussed in my 21jun14 post ‘The Recovery Rigamarole’.

The graphic from my post is shown below which, when compared with the above, clearly demonstrates that we are in the R3 mode that represents the weakest kind of recovery, if it can be called that since this will not get us back on the long running 3.2%/yr trendline.   The voters for Hillary clearly understood none of this, or were quite satisfied to live in a ‘has been’ country under an admittedly ‘has been’ administration.

[6jan17 update]  Russ Steele’s 619am comment presenting CNSNews.com’s record of Obama’s accomplishments in the labor and workforce area scooped my own posting of it – the man simply starts his day at an ungodly hour.  Anyway, here it is repeated more prominently with a previously (misplaced) graphic from the Federal Reserve on Obama’s economic accomplishments which are now covered up by the lamestream as they report on his depressing farewell tour around the country.

(CNSNews.com) - Barack Obama's presidency began with a record number of Americans not in the labor force, and it's ending the same way.

The final jobs report of the Obama presidency, released Friday, shows that the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009, when Obama took office, continuing a long-term trend that began well before Obama was sworn in.

In December, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record 95,102,000 Americans were not in the labor force, 47,000 more than in November; and the labor force participation rate was 62.7 percent, a tenth of a point higher than in November.

The participation rate dropped to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent on Obama's watch, in September 2015. It was only 3-tenths of a point higher than that last month.

Back to Fort Sill in place and time

George Rebane

We got home yesterday afternoon from a visit to Ft Sill, OK and Denver, CO, a trip that also let us catch up with a lot of what’s happening in the country.  Ft Sill is the world’s preeminent artillery development and training center.  If you are an American cannon cocker or tactical missile man (Army or Marine), you have gone through Ft Sill.  The place is located on an ideal patch of land that has little use for things other than maneuvering guns and impacting shells.  All of us who graduated from there agreed that ‘if the world needed an enema, then they’d stick the tube …’, you know the rest.

The Army base itself is a small, well-kept city home to thousands of GIs and their dependents.  We also train our allies’ artillery officers there, so you see a lot of different uniforms on base.  On this occasion the historical (pre-Civil War) fort hosted the veterans who served in Babenhausen, Germany during the Cold War from the 1940s to the 1980s.  Babenhausen was already well-established in American history by the time WW2 ended.

Located in Hessen, Babenhausen was the home base of the Hessians who fought ineffectively (cf. Washington crossing the Delaware) for the British in our Revolutionary War when King George III got a deal for mercenaries he couldn’t refuse from a long lost German cousin who ran into some money problems.  (see also ‘Babenhausen Remembers’)

Ruminations – 9nov14 (updated 12nov14)

George Rebane

The Berlin Wall came down 25 years ago today.  Many people are celebrating that milestone in human history, but Vladimir Putin rues the day as the beginning of greatest human tragedy of the 20th century which ended the horrors of the USSR and its spreading of international communism.  As a young lieutenant stationed in Germany in the early 1960s I took a weekend leave with Jo Ann to visit a divided and tense Berlin.  Because of my job and security clearances – at the time the S-2 (intelligence officer) of our only STRAC nuclear capability artillery battalion in Europe – we had to travel on the daily diplomatic train from Frankfurt to Berlin.  By the Potsdam treaty the train was a rolling piece of US sovereign territory that was sealed before entering East Germany and again unsealed in the western zone of Berlin.  The trip across the leading exemplar of communism’s workers’ paradise (the USSR and other places were much worse) was an eye-opener for those who had just read about what communism does to a people.  In Berlin we went to the Brandenburg Gate and stood looking across The Wall; the difference between the two sides of the same city was stunning.  (It would be another 25 years until from the same spot President Reagan would demand, “Mr Gorbachov, tear down this wall!”)  While most visitors to West Berlin were allowed to tour East Berlin on busses; because of my status, I was not.  The most chilling part of the visit was Checkpoint Charlie where a platoon of our mainline battle tanks faced their equivalents in the Red Army, separated by about 100 yards with their leveled main guns pointed at each other.  WW3 was literally a trigger pull away in those days.  It was quite a weekend.

Today President Obama finally admits to a very peculiar responsibility of his administration in the Democrats’ devastating loss last Tuesday.  On ‘Face the Nation’ he finally acknowledged that his party had taken a drubbing, and as its leader he was culpable, saying, “… the buck stops right here at my desk.”  But the problem for the nation is that the man doesn’t understand that his demonstrated policies were rejected on their substance.  Instead he believes it has only been a problem in communicating his “good ideas” to the American people – in other words, he didn’t put enough lipstick on that herd of pigs that he and his let loose on the country.

[update]  Congressman Xavier Becerra (D-CA) on Fox News Sunday demonstrated the utter contempt in which Democrats hold their own constituents’ intellectual capacity.  Reporting on Friday’s lunch at the White House, Becerra was asked about what topics were discussed around the table.  He said that because Speaker Boehner raised the comprehensive immigration issue with regards to Obama’s threatened executive order to end-run of Congress, that there was no time for the President to talk about anything else – Obama took the entire allocated time to talk about immigration reform.

‘Allocated time’??!!  Yes, you see according to Becerra their lunch had a time limit because Obama had a scheduled Pentagon presentation by high ranking military officers for right after the lunch.  Utter bullshit!  When you have the newly and historically elected leaderships of a heretofore multi-year dysfunctional Congress assembled specifically to come together and talk about the way forward for the next two years, the Commander-in-Chief can and should have his row of four-star generals standing at parade rest outside the dining room door with their pocketed powerpoints for as long as it takes – even if the meeting needs to go on until 1AM the next morning.  To tell the nation’s Democrat voters – no Republican would be dumb enough to swallow such crap – that this important meeting was time limited because of a previously scheduled military briefing simply boggles any reasonable mind so exposed (which, of course, excludes the sheeple who voted for and continue to worship their messiah).

Given these shaky beginnings, I don’t see anything possible for the next two years except for the Repubs to do everything they can to stop the business-as-usual from the White House as soon as possible.

[10nov14 update]  Harvey Silvergate in ‘Liberals Are Killing the Liberal Arts’ brings us up to date on the latest efforts to shut down free speech and discussion of issues in our universities have become little more than conclaves of collectivist thought and socialist propaganda.  Silvergate opens with –

On campuses across the country, hostility toward unpopular ideas has become so irrational that many students, and some faculty members, now openly oppose freedom of speech. The hypersensitive consider the mere discussion of the topic of censorship to be potentially traumatic. Those who try to protect academic freedom and the ability of the academy to discuss the world as it is are swimming against the current. In such an atmosphere, liberal-arts education can’t survive.

He then goes into some detail on a truly unbelievable albeit fully documented conference at Smith College named “Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Free Speech, Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts”.  The principal exchanges (including the now de rigueur use of ‘Trigger Warnings’) and their aftermath at both Smith and Holyoke illustrate the long-known ‘freedom and liberty are only one generation deep’, and could have taken place at any of the party educational meetings that workers were required to attend in the USSR.  Silvergate concludes –

Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement—a disorder whose lethal spread in academia grows by the day. What should be the object of derision, a focus for satire, is instead the subject of serious faux academic discussion and precautionary warnings. For this disorder there is no effective quarantine. A whole generation of students soon will have imbibed the warped notions of justice and entitlement now handed down as dogma in the universities.

[11nov14 update]  Gas prices are down, and guess who wants to assign credit to whom?  It's the lamebrained lackeys of the same Messiah who promised to raise energy prices through the roof, worked his tail off to accomplish same, continues to impede developments to lower energy costs, and promises to also transform that part of our economy.  But fracking on private lands (government lands are a no-no) has produced a surfeit of gas and oil to the extent that huge tankers now lie at anchor in bays across the world, used as floating storage tanks because the land-based ones are full.  Isn't central planning wonderful?

[12nov14 update]  Germans land instrumented probe on comet.  This is a big deal that has been ten years in the making.  Mission controllers in Darmstadt announced that the spacecraft Rosetta, orbiting in formation with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, had successfully launched and now landed its probe Philae on the comet's surface.  We are now in great anticipation awaiting the first picture taken by Philae from the comet's surface.  As a lifelong worker in the control & estimation field (I am a California professional engineer in the Control Theory field, and a former DoD 'missile scientist'), my hat is off to the engineers who calculated and controlled the very complex sun-orbital maneuvers Rosetta executed during its ten-journey to 'sync up' with the comet, and then precisely aim, release, and control Philae to a soft landing in a 500m diameter area.  The last worry is that Philae will land on the edge of a boulder and tip over, thereby screwing up the lander part of the Rosetta mission.  Realtime control is not possible since the whole thing is taking place about 26 light-minutes from earth, so the problem is being solved locally by an onboard Bayesian brain.  (more here)

Did you know? – 18jan2014 (updated 20jan14)

George Rebane

This launches the sometime series of things that I did not know, or was not fully aware of the details.

The censoring of free speech on college campuses is much more pervasive than the lamestream has led us believe.  It turns out that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has been keeping tabs on the shenanigans that liberal dominated academe has been practicing.  In 2007 FIRE found that three out of four colleges and universities in the land explicitly proscribed students’ and faculties’ First Amendment rights.  The situation has gotten better.  Today FIRE reports that the 2013 fraction has been reduced to about three out of five.  These diktats are all to be interpreted by the accusers who might claim to being offended on account of what they overheard someone say about sex, race, age, religion, national origin, color, marital status, pregnancy, disability, or status of veterans.  My question is why stop there when you’re on a roll?  Anyway, I didn’t have a clue that such a large majority of campuses were down on free speech which the Constitution guarantees us exactly because it may be offensive to someone else, but not in the ivied halls where enquiring minds are hobbled as they gather to discover and debate.

California’s Cap & Trade law is following the Pelosi Principle to the letter.  State Senate president Darrell Steinberg is starting to worry out loud about all the undiscovered effluent that the “quarter baked” legislation is beginning to disgorge.  Well, the Democrats did get a glimmer of the crap they had cobbled together when early on they kind of forgot that the passed ‘Global Warmings Solutions Act’ (aka AB32) should really be referred to the ‘California Air Pollution Reduction Act’.  Of course, both names are ludicrous.

But the real disaster for the Dems (and the rest of us) was the discovery that AB32 is driving businesses out of the state.  During strong denials of the same, the scumbags opened up the carbon credit markets to out-of-state participants that today reach as far as Quebec in order to let the state’s desperate businesses find cheaper avenues for making their mandated protection payments.  Now, of course, this means that the state will not get the projected monies for projects having nothing to do with ‘green’ or ‘global warming’ (e.g. high speed rail to nowhere) – we all (save the local leftwing lackeys) knew it would be another slush fund for liberal politicians buying votes.  When voters get stupid, they pay through the nose, except when they’re the transferees of transfer payments.

[Added]  Reader Greg Goodknight has a considerable opinion piece in today's Union that covers global warming and Common Core among other topics.  Hope it's not paywalled.

Happy 2014 thoughts

George Rebane

Well, 2013 is now the year that was, and boy, was it a doozer!  By now we’ve all read countless reviews of the fights, feasts, and foibles of the past twelve months.  But I keep coming back to what kind of a world we have created as this year draws its last.  Obamacare aside – for it will be a ‘gift’ that keeps giving – our national fortunes in 2014 will be determined largely by the disastrous foreign policy which has now been firmly ensconced by this administration.  The litany of its failures is torturous and long, and has resulted in our loss of respect in the eyes of both our friends and enemies.  A short recounting of how our hegemony has gone to hell in a handcart is recounted here in the 31dec13 WSJ – ‘Global Order Scorecard: A reader’s guide to the world’s traumas’.

So as we face the new year, to what really do we have to look forward?  The loss of liberties will continue and pick up with the new regulations that have become a blizzard from Washington and all the state houses.  Remember, our common wisdom teaches that if a legislature does not give us more constraining and expensive laws during its session, then for some odd reason we call it unproductive and label it a ‘do nothing’ collection of central planners bent on extracting more while delivering less.  Mark Twain and Will Rogers taught the obverse.

The upcoming November election will guarantee to make half of us very sad, while the other side celebrates staying or changing the course.  My own wish for the political scene is to welcome a movement toward multiple parties that more closely reflect the ideologies of smaller constituencies.  Today’s two big tent parties deliver everything you would expect from an oligopoly, and in my estimate wind up truly serving only about one out of ten Americans.  The rest of us, especially the ignorant poor, take it in the neck as the country goes deeper into debt (wait till the interest rates go back to normal) and our ability to project power continues to shrink.  As China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the Muslim Misery really start flexing their muscles while we scramble to ‘lead from behind’, everyone will come to appreciate what Pax Americana has delivered in the years since the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, that doesn’t mean that the domestic silly season will end any time soon.  There will always be those history-challenged who will point out America’s ‘transgressions’ in Korea, Vietnam, mid-East, Iraq, Afghanistan, …, and claim that nothing has changed since 1945.  So looking backward, I paraphrase the question asked Mrs Lincoln, ‘Other than that, how did you like 2013?’.  And looking forward I anticipate next year’s question, ‘Other than the election, Obamacare, (insert your favorite international atrocities, etc); how did you like 2014?’

But all that aside, we are still a hopeful and a ‘can do’ people.  So I leave you, dear reader, on this New Year’s Eve with a wish that your own 2014 will be prosperous, healthy, and productive.

Supervisor Weston to Manage County’s Unfunded Liabilities (updated 16nov13)

George Rebane

The 14nov13 Union announced that Supervisor Hank Weston will seek a 3rd term for the county’s fourth district.  Among the reasons for his re-election Mr Weston cited his “budgetary experience” that will now be necessary to manage the county’s response to its unfunded liabilities that are coming home to roost.  In particular CalPERS has informed Nevada County that it needs to pay $1.3M per year for the next five years to satisfy minimum contribution requirements for its retirement account maintained for country employees.

Seven years ago SESF analyzed the county’s unfunded liabilities which it found to total over $48M as of 2006.  These findings were published in ‘TR0712-1: Unfunded Liabilities – Our Community’s Fiscal Time Bombs’, and presented to the Board of Supervisors by Michael McDaniel, the report’s lead author.  As I recall, the supervisors politely thanked us for our labors, and promptly dismissed the matter from further consideration.  At the time the county had almost $20M in reserve, and all was well.

This was in the heady days of 2007 when CalPERS was reaping double digit appreciations on its portfolio, the real estate market was on its way to the moon, and everyone was drinking the kool-aid.  Our warnings of the unsustainable performance of such investments were lost in those days of wine and roses.  I think we were judged to be out of our depth; after all county finances, especially public employee pension funding, are a complex matter not accessible to everyone.

The point of this missive is that the liabilities are now starting to come due, with the operational word being ‘starting’.  The $6M+ demanded by CalPERS is just the beginning of what the county must start making up if it is not to default on its pension commitments.  CalPERS has demonstrated itself to have a deficit in both accounting and investments when it comes to astute portfolio management.  Way back when, it was content in calculating its future fiscal health by predicting 7.5% annual returns.  The market has delivered these since the depth of the Great Recession, yet now CalPERS is going to the counties and displaying its newly discovered sore finger.

The point here is that Nevada County’s plans should include contingency responses to when CalPERS discovers more shortfalls in its ability to make ever increasing pension payments to the state’s growing cohort of public employee retirees (many from jurisdictions in or teetering on the edge of bankruptcy).  I fear that the bills to our county will quickly amount to tens of millions as the markets react to the inevitable ‘tapering’ of the Fed’s $85B/month quantitative easing.  Yellen is inheriting Bernanke’s folly, and she will own it if she does not start slowing down the gratuitous printing of dollars that is now going on at a trillion dollar annual rate.  This reputed monetary dove will be the one to take away the punchbowl, you can bet on it.  And then she will be known as the Fed’s Black Swan.

I wish Hank Weston godspeed in his re-election, and then in his confrontation with the All-devouring Beast.

[16nov13 update]  Then there are those who believe that Yellen will launch her chairmanship by really turning on the money nozzles.  This will doubly guarantee that there will be no soft landing for the economy, but it sure would blow the lid off the stock markets for a bit.

But it's really our own RL 'Bob' Crabb who in the 16nov13 Union nails the essence of how the present, shown above, pilfers from the future.

‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’ – 2013 style

George Rebane

[I'm not sure that much of this is comprehensible to younger generations, but many of us older people do hearken back to some grand years in the good old US of A.  Granted, time has worn off some of the rough edges.  Nevertheless, here're some ramblings to mark another milestone that we pass in an age that is so different from the America of days gone by.]

For those of us born in the 1940s, it’s already in the bank, and no one can take it away.  We have been blessed to live in the iconic America that reached its apex during the 1945 – 1965 period.  It was an age when America was the world’s white knight, having emerged victorious from vanquishing two global foes, then pouring its enormous wealth and productive capability into rebuilding a shattered world, and setting itself to stand guard against the surviving evil of communism.  We had a common public culture, boundless energy, and a pragmatic vision of how we would continue to make ours a more perfect Union.

But best of all, most of us were free and working to bring such freedoms to all.  The beguiling bamboozle of 1930s socialism cum communism, that so enthralled America’s leftwing elite during the Depression, finally showed its true face as the Iron Curtain divided Europe into the history’s largest prison camp on one side, and thriving nations reaching new levels of prosperity and quality of life on the other side.  In schools we learned about American exceptionalism and then lived it as we hit the streets when school let out.

We were also free to work our butts off.  As kids we could get about any job we could talk ourselves into.  We flipped burgers, carried papers, mowed lawns, or even worked as field hands doing stoop labor on farms.  As we got older we could get jobs using the skills we learned in high school shop classes.  My own jobs path was going from a farm laborer into aerospace light manufacturing as a sixteen year old cutting and brazing jet engine electrical conduits.  My next stop was an aerospace draftsman drawing awesomely complex functional diagrams of submarine combat systems as a teenager in college.

There was no government to tell employers that they could not hire me, and no government telling me I could not work here or there, or taking my parents to task for ‘abusing’ me if I decided to work long hours months at a time.  In fact, I bought my first car, a used 1957 VW bug.  After arriving in Los Angeles, I registered with the California Youth Employment Agency in Hollywood.  They sent me on called-in daily jobs located from Orange County to the canyon country north of Los Angeles.  I did whatever my boss for a day (or more) would tell me to do, whether it would be to wash windows, clean out the garage, rake leaves, polish floors, or paint a porch.  America’s youth was then enabled by the state, not inhibited.

And fearing government was something we learned about in school and saw in other countries, but none of us experienced government overreach in our own or our parents’ lives.  We could go where we wanted and do what we wanted (within reason of course).  Public lands were then truly public lands.  We could throw a backpack and gun (it had to be visible) into the back seat, and before the sun set we’d be in a very remote spot sitting around a campfire with a dubiously cooked meal warming our bellies.

Our entertainments were salutary to God and country.  Coming out of a movie – whether a grand western, a biblical epic, filmed version of a Broadway musical, war story, or comedy – you invariably felt uplifted.  Hollywood was on the case, giving us a gratifying respite from our daily labors which were many.  And television echoed all that during its ‘golden age’, those shows whose recorded kinescopes are still entertaining and somewhat unbelievable to the current generations.

Columbus Day 2012

George Rebane

Today we observe Cristofo’s grand achievement in 1492 that started the European conquest of the Americas – the Vikings blew their attempt about 500 years earlier.  This national holiday is specifically eschewed in Hawaii, Nevada, and, of course, California.  Nevertheless, I was reminded by a reader that RR would be remiss in not taking note of this auspicious beginning.

Actually, on this day I want to commend Queen Isabella of Spain for launching the three ships.  It was her investment that made the Italian’s trip possible, being the first among his countrymen to arrive in this hemisphere ‘without papers’, thereby establishing the denigrating ethnic label to a generation and more Italians who followed him 400 years later.  But that’s another story.

Here I wish to draw your attention to one of the most momentous of all government investments – and it truly was an investment, totally unlike the spending programs of today – to find a shorter route to India, since Portugal ruled the long route around Africa to trade with that fabled land.


So anyway, Columbus sailed bravely onto an ocean that many thought would come to an abrupt end at the edge of the world as depicted in many woodcuts of the time.  After a long voyage he blundered into a new hemisphere instead, while still believing that he had landed on some outer archipelago of Asia.  But then who knew.  The map he got from his subscription to the National Geographic of the day was drawn by some clown named Toscanelli who should have opened a restaurant instead.

Later voyages by true Spaniards – they got the WOP out of the way, and even prosecuted him for some financial shenanigans – confirmed that this was a new world, and that it contained riches beyond their wildest dreams as soon as they could get rid of some pesky Indians.

After the peskier Indians were dispatched, the remainder were put to work digging out and hauling in unimaginable amounts of gold that was then shipped off to Spain.  Some of it got nailed by hurricanes and pirates, which again is another story.  But here I’d like emphasize what the Spanish government did with their windfall.

The first thing they did was to establish a behavior that has come to be known as ‘spending money like drunken sailors’, which is exactly what they did for the next three centuries.  (This part of California's Spanish heritage is still practiced in Sacramento.)   Who needed to work when all that gold was coming in?  It was all eat, drink, and make Mary, or merry, or was it war?  The bottom line is that like all governments, Spain spent itself silly for 300 years until the gold shipments stopped, mostly through the efforts of Spain’s European neighbors like the French and the English, whom the profligate Spaniards had managed to piss off to a fair thee well with successive attacks, wars, and other sundry intrigues.

In the 19th century Spain was broke, and through revolution and competitive imperialism it managed to lose all the possessions in the New World it had discovered.  America, flexing newly found international muscles, put a bow on the whole sordid affair in 1898 with the foisted Spanish-American War in which Spain lost its remaining overseas possessions – we got Cuba and the Philippines, and some other sundry real estate.  And Spain was reduced to making sangria for tourists, and muttering something about their shoulda, coulda, wouldas.

By the way, Spain learned nothing from its centuries long government spending.  In the 20th century Spaniards gave various forms of socialism a try, settling finally on what we today know as the European model.  This got them into policies that called for even more ‘investments’ in things like green energy, public employee pensions, 25% unemployment, and a national debt up to their collective interglutial cleft.

So happy Columbus Day, and the next time you hear someone from Washington talk about government investments, consider the sad tale of España. Ole!

Local Control of Business Development – we’re basically screwed

George Rebane

Last Friday I attended a part of what has now become institutionalized as a biennial ceremony that passes for efforts to develop business in Nevada County.  I think I have attended about five of these during the years we’ve lived here.  This one featured the elected city councils and the county’s Board of Supervisors as the target audience.  The public was invited to witness the doings and have a short Q&A at the end.

I lasted through the first panel presentation which included Machen MacDonald (Sierra Commons Faculty), Steven Frisch (Sierra Business Council), and Brent Smith (Sierra Economic Development Corp).  Messrs Frisch and Smith gave extended and informative presentations of what their organizations do to foster business in the Sierra.  Mr MacDonald stood up and mumbled something about businesses “not being in alignment” which turned out a bit too complex for this commentator to follow – mercifully, the message was short and he sat down.

An apology for all occasions

George Rebane

[In my long working career I was privileged and very lucky to have worked with and under some truly remarkable and very smart people.  One of these was an older systems engineer extraordinaire and a complete gentleman by the name of Skip Case.  I was technically his peer, but I never considered myself as such.  In a number of different ways Skip taught all of us who worked with him.  Those who also bothered to learn, benefitted from his wisdom.

Skip died a few years back, a little before I started RR, and was then only occasionally posting on the SESF website.  When I heard the news, it hit me that over the decades I and several others had been profitably using a phrase that he taught us years ago.  To remember Skip, I wrote the following vignette and posted it on the SESF website.  My most recent use of the phrase in a comment recalled the vignette, and I retrieved it to share with RR readers.  You may also find it useful some day, especially in the heated discussions of complex issues we cover here.]

Skip Case RIP

George Rebane – 21 May 2007

The conference room was crowded with the company’s elite engineering talent and top management for a very important system design review meeting.  The decision taken today would impact the company’s standing and future role as the nation’s leading nuclear submarine combat systems developer and manufacturer.  In 1968 as a young hotshot engineer I was privileged to be included in that tense gathering of greats in a very secretive industry critical to the country’s well-being, yet almost completely and purposefully unknown to the outside world. On board every operational fleet ballistic missile and attack submarine of our Navy, our company’s systems were the ones that would likely fire the opening salvos of WW3.

One of the company’s senior project engineers had just completed a presentation of an important design concept on which the effectiveness of the new system would hinge.  He was a man in his late forties of small yet lithe stature and thinning neatly combed hair.  What especially distinguished Skip’s presence was his gaze – he had the most focused and level gaze which when turned on you established an intellectual connection that would bind like a taught rope.  Using the fewest words needed, Skip always spoke precisely and with a calm urgency that made the listener want to lean forward in his chair so as not to miss a single pearl.

Engineering, as a demanding technical profession, is often a ruthless forum in which mistakes and errors are pounced upon by peers for ego gratification, reputation enhancement, and generally counting coup.  Such critiques are most often spontaneous but sometimes, especially when corporate management will be present, they are planned ambushes of great sophistication.  That morning a mid-level division manager with a short career as a practicing engineer rose to deliver a withering critique of the just concluded presentation.  It was obviously a long-planned critique that had still been in deep rehearsal while Skip was talking. And it was apparent to us all that he had not understood the very essence of the design approach.  As he concluded with a knowing glance to the company’s chief technical officer (Chief Engineer in those days), all eyes turned to Skip.

Remaining seated with hands folded, Skip fixed his attacker in that signature gaze and, with incredible calm and no hint of sarcasm, said,
 
“I’m sorry, I didn’t say it well enough for you to understand.”
 
… and paused.  As the semantic impact of this simple sentence settled in our minds most of us were astounded.  I remember scrambling to record those words in my notebook and I wasn’t alone. The managerial upstart was dumbfounded, he didn’t know on whom those contrite words put blame or shame.  He wanted to strike back, but no obvious target had been presented.  While his would-be nemesis was so consternated, Skip proceeded to quickly correct the man’s error and the meeting went on to a productive conclusion.

In his wisdom Skip Case settled a potentially contentious and divisive situation with a sentence that allowed everyone to draw their own distinct yet proper meaning of the occasion depending on their position and perspective.  All of us left the room with those words in mind.  I was fortunate to count Skip as one of my mentors and to sit at his knee during those early years.  And since that time I also have learned to apologize when I could not say it well enough for my respondent to understand – but still not as well as Skip.

Happy Mother's Day

George Rebane

 

Ellen Rebane (1914 - 1990)

 

Ruminations - 8may12

George Rebane

Happy VE Day!  On 8 May 1945 the Rebanes were in Liederberg - a small German farming village that just a few days ago was firmly brought under the control of Patton’s Third Army (more here) - and ready to be carted off to Augsburg and four years of internment in post-war displaced persons camps.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the world the battle for Okinawa was raging with Marine and Army divisions locked in a no-quarter-given combat with Japanese forces that had only one mission, die as slowly as possible while killing as many Americans as possible.  Okinawa was bigger than D-Day, but in America people were too busy celebrating Hitler’s downfall to notice.  That August the world would again change.

Newly elected Hollande promised to tax France to growth and balanced budgets.  And the French believed him.  Now nothing like that will happen, but what the hell, the French could frolic in the streets for a couple of days before they double down on their loudly proclaimed misery.  The French government's spending already accounts for more than 50% of the country’s GDP and it doesn’t generate any wealth.  All it is capable of doing is buying votes with tribute exacted from its private sector whose top marginal tax rates are now going to go above 70%.  The same silly people there as here believe that someone will actually risk their euros to build/expand businesses from which, if successful, the government will leave them 30 cents of every euro they earn.

Some writers view this latest installment of socialist failure in Europe as a golden opportunity for America (here).  They argue that America will be the only place left in the world for entrepreneurial and investment opportunity.  To me it seems that not everyone is paying attention to what Team Obama has accomplished, and what more they have in store for us should they win in November.  America’s crosshairs are focused squarely on being able to replicate the European toilet economy.  And some independents on this side of the Pond still ask, ‘why would we do that?’

The answer is that the socialist on both shores see none of this going on in Europe.  The EU and its subsequent eurozone are instead seen as triumphs in governance.  Happy dancing in the streets as national healthcare systems go broke, retirement ages are lowered (Hollande will return France to 60 from 62), endless vacations at every turn, can’t-get-fired jobs, minimum wages pushed above $20/hr, austerity measures reversed (no more spending cuts), … what’s there not to like?

No one there or here remembers nor has been taught that when governments have taken over the means of creating the country’s wealth, they have created the sorriest places for human existence on earth.  It has always started with taxing the bejeesus out of ‘the rich’, until everyone who earned a private paycheck found themselves suddenly designated as ‘the rich’.

This is also graduation season and our colleges are in the process of disgorging another million or so of young people (the entire US education system releases 4.3M onto the economy each year).  They are of the 'Me Generation', and the great part of them will land in the job market without marketable skills, and dumber than the proverbial 2x4 with a face painted on it.  Bret Stephens in the 8may12 WSJ writes the Class of 2012 a sobering letter; it begins –

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.