George Rebane

• Lamphier and Diaz victories
• Smart meters and robots
• Overseas Contingency Operations
• Time to blow the well from hell?

I guess if The Union says it’s so, it must be so.  Terry Lamphier’s victory over incumbent John Spencer for District #3 county supervisor was a most curious display of self-interest by the voters.  It wasn’t as if Lamphier’s qualifications were a mystery as RR and other local blogs pointed out months ago.  But for those paying attention, Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter played out right here in Nevada County.  Mr Lamphier simply ran a better campaign, betting that the voter had no clue as to the qualifications and demonstrated experience of both candidates.  He won the bet, and the county lost.

In the Diaz/Pruett race for Clerk-Recorder we had another case of the word not getting out as to Mr Diaz’s competence.  Again local blogs tried to lift the lid on the matter, but Mr Diaz had the support of the county leadership which was a too heavy burden for first-timer Barry Pruett to overcome.  It took an election to confirm the minority opinion about incumbent Diaz’s competence.  I’m sure even more will emerge later, unless, of course, all of it gets buried along with the egg scraped off some pretty prominent faces around here.

Wherever you live, you’ll soon be getting a ‘smart meter’ to measure and control your electricity use.  Then you’ll be buying appliances and other electric powered devices that contain a little chip that tells the powers that be when and how much it is being used.  That little puppy will also allow the powers that be to make it so you can’t use the device when you’re not supposed to use it.  And if you think these things will be just used to control your energy usage, then you should go back to watching American Idol.  For the others, Russ Steele is tracking this brave new world, and has posted an expanded piece on all this here.

Meanwhile smart machines have already invaded the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to an extent that should make all free world citizens thinks twice (thinking twice is not allowed under autocratic governments).  In addition to those Unmanned Aerial Vehicles firing Hellfire missiles down on the ragheads, we have all kinds of other automated thingies that sense, communicate, and kill.  Some of them are very small, some fly, some crawl, some even change shape to get into hard places.  As described in a good Scientific American article here, and here from my friend Dr Larry Press, this field is literally exploding with the advances in AI and computing power.  For some reason the article does not contemplate the use of such technology by a government to suppress dissent within its own borders.  But then, maybe the smart chip in your dishwasher will allow them to nip that kind of dissent in the bud.

Speaking of ragheads, Faisal Shahzad, the American raghead who tried to blow up Times Square, told us again in court that we are in a war against Islam, and deserve to have our women and children blown to smithereens.  Meanwhile our feckless leaders have gone into terminal denial about all of this, not even deigning to call the sumbiches terrorists, and trading in our already weak soup recent ‘war on terror’ for ‘overseas contingency operation’.

Finally, is it time to blow the well from hell?  The more we read about that BP blowout in the Gulf, the more it sounds like all the possible risky scenarios of trying to plug it on the seafloor have not been made public nor fully evaluated.  For more on the ongoing saga of this disaster, a RR reader recommends this link.  The relief wells are now within 200 feet of the spewing well casing.  This is within striking distance of what I described here.  Someone somewhere should be considering this alternative before we have a Mt. St. Helens under water.