Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. – John Adams
George Rebane
So where’s all the wildlife? asks a visitor to a local pond and hiking trail here in Nevada County. Our cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb drew this little funny filched from the 18aug12 issue of The Union. And true to Bob’s perspective on the human comedy, the cartoon’s message can be twofold. First, the guy is a (probably conservative) doofus who expects the place to be still dripping with critters after everyone has started using it as a recreation area – what would you expect? And then he could be an ecologically sensitive individual expressing his disappointment on the transformation of the formerly uninhabited and wild area before all the humans showed up.
We expect the latter constituency to start demonstrating any day now for the restoration of Hirschman’s Pond to its pre-peopled pristine position as a natural habitat in perfect balance. No doubt this could be accomplished by a federal grant or two in addition to some more rangers or sheriffs deputies to enforce the ‘Nature Preserve, Entry Forbidden’. Actually this little nascent swamp was of little use to anyone but mosquitoes before the county (with aid from Ohio) made it accessible to local residents. And what someone should teach the ecologically sensitive is that nature has many points of balance, none of them lasting too long before the critters pick a new point to balance on. So suffer the suffering critters to leave the Pond, and enjoy those that remain in the new balance of nature that now includes you.
Obama’s hopeful message on the economy continues to depend on the national horde of the ignorant. The employment rate includes in the denominator the number of people who still have a hope of finding a job. As those give up, employment rate goes up, and unemployment rate goes down. Here is some more data on that.
Actually Obama is a Zero. So argues Jack Wheeler (here), President Reagan’s cold war strategist. Wheeler succinctly summarizes –
The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No résumé, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract empty rhetoric devoid of real substance.
He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya. Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.
What he isn’t, not a genetic drop of, is “African-American,” the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn’t a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.
Municipal debt defaults have been covered up by no less than our vaunted Fed. RR readers have known for some years now that these jurisdictions were rushing headlong into a fiscal brick wall. Remember those intrepid rating agencies – Moody’s and S&P – that didn’t see the subprime mess coming? Well it turns out that they have also been underreporting municipal bond defaults before finally downrating them. The New York Fed is blowing the whistle (here), and people are starting to get very concerned, led by no less than Warren Buffett who bailed out billions that Berkshire Hathaway had invested in credit default swaps that insured munis. The problem of bankrupting cities and towns is a big one as the nearby graphic shows – many private investors have always looked to munis as a secure well paying investment for their retirement portfolios. The race to the bottom will now accelerate as borrowing costs go sky high for jurisdictions already strapped by public employee pension driven unfunded liabilities.
We’ll end on a higher note and report on the advent of the MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) which are the new format for all kinds of remote and online learning. My longtime friend Larry Press has a report on these which are causing a stir among the academics in higher education. Dr Press, CalState professor of information systems, is an internationally recognized expert on the internet and education technologies.
We all use internet search engines. Here is a useful MOOC that Google developed to teach people to become ‘power searchers’ on their search engine. Enjoy.
rebanesruminations.com 
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