George Rebane
President Obama’s background and biography is throwing people for another loop – at least those with their heads still exposed to the sun. Who knows where the man was actually born? Who knows what actually happened in South Chicago? All we know is that the Washington establishment (both parties) and the lamestream don’t want to go there, no matter what is discovered under newly turned over rocks.
And Obama’s ‘autobiographies’ will now have to be re-cataloged under fiction. The disparities from truth are becoming so easy to document that a high school sophomore could do it for her term paper, if only her teacher would countenance such research. PJMedia, Breitbart, and Drudge, along with some local blogs, have been having a field day on the new revelations about the background of our fearless leader.
Everyone with an ability to buy popcorn at a movie should now understand what a private equity firm like Bain does and did when Romney was there. Especially revealing is the Left’s celebrated cause of telling the country that Romney and company bankrupted GST Steel and destroyed 750 secure long-lasting jobs; worse, sent them overseas to cheap steel makers. (‘Bain Capitalism 101’) Ol’ Joe can say it best of all from the Team Obama side. Their lies are understandable, but the puzzle remains as to how well such lies work with the Left’s constituents. A lot of these must be the parents of kids like those in Florida who flunked the state’s reading test. The answer’s gotta be in the double helix.
We’ve never been able to compete with the Chinese in making cost effective photovoltaic collectors for the world markets. Once China decided to become the low cost producer and appropriately promoted the technology among domestic manufacturers, it was off to the races. We tried the same thing here and wound up with a bunch of Solyndras making stuff that no one could afford. At the same time a lot of Americans did what Americans smelling an opportunity do – they started solar installation companies, expecting the feds to use whip and lash to drive consumers to their door. For a second or two it even looked promising if they could install the Chinese low-cost leader PV products. But then along came …, who? I don’t know who the latest dummy was who decided to put a 30% tariff on Chinese PV imports.
So now no one knows what’s happening in the most recent travesty befalling green energy. All you can bet on is that more business opportunities will go down the drain along with their jobs. And government mandated, union made American PV is going to go nowhere while the rest of the world continues buying from China. Here’s a little schadenfreude – let’s hope China goes broke because the EU countries are pulling their subsidies from their PV projects. Maybe then we’ll all rush to put economically insane US-made PV panels on our roofs.
Finally, after socialist Hollande became President, it’s OK to out that France’s socialized (universal access) healthcare has now run out of its allotted portion of GDP, and Hollande’s fellow socialists are demanding a bigger share of GDP for healthcare, as are all the other similarly afflicted redistributionist programs in the country. This fact of life, shared by all EU countries with such social policies and reported on RR for years, has been continually denied by our collectivist neighbors. Here is a socialist cum communist author on truthout.com describing the situation in France, and giving advice to America on how to get into similar straits. It’s really easy, now everyone say after me, “Everyone contributes according to his resources and receives according to his needs.” This is the motto of the French healthcare system – no kidding. Where have I heard that before?
Here’s an easy prediction – the rampant, visible, and documented unsustainability of Europe’s wealth transfer programs will deter no American socialists from their efforts to have us follow Europe’s path.
[update] Well now, it seems that more and more people are beginning to write of Bayesian reasoning these days. Russ Steele pointed me to a piece in the American Thinker by criminologist and Cal State prof Dr Jason Kissner – ‘Bayes’ Theorem and Mr Obama’s Literary Agency’. The piece is a little dense, but does make the case that it is reasonable to assume at least agnosticism on Obama’s birthplace, even if before the latest revelations your prior belief in Kenya was mighty low. And if you started your reasoning at a point of open-minded ignorance about Obama’s birthplace viz Kenya, then the 1991 literary agency piece should push your belief to almost certainty that our President was indeed born in the land of his fathers.
It’s unfortunate that the good professor never once uses a graphic or shows the Bayes equation which would make his arguments that much more clear to a numerate person. But equivalently equipped RR readers can review the necessary background right here, starting with ‘Hello Bayes Theorem!’.
Kissner concludes his development in characteristic style with a double negative which for many of us require removing at least one shoe to figure it out. “Is the birther position at present unreasonable? Surely not; in fact, it may well be the most reasonable position to adopt even if you still think you had very good reasons to the contrary in advance of the promotional booklet’s release.”
[If time permits, in a future post I will present a hopefully more lucid form of Kissner’s argument. In the interval, I hope that my previous posts on Bayes will serve.]
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment