George Rebane

Google is diving into the anti-aging drug markets by teaming with R&D firm AbbVie and deals with big pharma in the offing.  This is one of the inevitable tacks that the big search firm is taking with Dr Ray Kurzweil at its technology helm.  Kurzweil (q.v.), a proselytizer of the Singularity, is a longtime advocate of human longevity, and has been going through some serious pill taking to assure that he survives until he can merge with the smart machines.  (more here)

The Wales NATO summit may have eked out something productive, but just barely.  To stop Putin from applying Hitler’s Sudetenland paradigm to Russia’s neighbors, NATO has promised to set up a brigade sized rapid deployment force in central Europe.  This brigade could then be quickly moved to anywhere from the Baltics to Poland’s eastern boundary to counter the Russian bear’s new program of expansion.  (But the Baltics and Poland have a long memory of British/French guarantees from 1939 as they were overrun by Stalin and Hitler.  When they called London and Paris for help, the response was, ‘We were just kidding.’)

What was highlighted again at the meeting is the EU’s timidity and the sorry state of its militaries.  Participation in NATO calls for its members to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense.  Only four members qualify – US, GB, Estonia, and Greece.  If Germany, France, Italy, or Spain had to send troops to an eastern front, they would have to hitchhike.

And no one really wanted any part of our president’s new coalition of the willing to stop ISIS in the middle east.  That for the simple reason that our NATO allies no longer trust US leadership without which no projection of force is possible.  In the meanwhile Russia and radical Islam continue their ‘outreach’.

Obama’s Depression2 economy continues to creak along with the August new jobs coming in at 142K, and the concurrent workforce participation dropping sufficiently to lower the unemployment rate from 6.2% to 6.1% (more here and here).  Calling this a recovery is a cruel bamboozle on Democrats’ least capable supporters – those with poor thinking and job skills.  We recall that the annual effluent from our educational system is over 4M.  Now divide that by 12 and see how many new jobs are required every month just to stand still.  Both our federal and California governments are doing everything possible to hobble economic growth, not the least of it being in the promotion of history’s biggest fraud – manmade climate change is real and will destructively heat the earth, but economy killing public policies will save us all.  For the numerate reader, more on the ‘recovery myth’ was explained here.

Tesla’s relocation to Nevada will provide us a little comic relief right about here.  California electric car company Tesla has announced it will build a huge battery making factory outside of Reno for all the reasons still obvious to some Californians, but totally inaccessible to most of the double dummies in Sacramento and their equally deprived voter base.  Now I’m told that a few loonie lefties here are putting a little lipstick on this pig with hopeful reminders that California’s Tahoe region could even benefit a bit from all those skilled Nevada factory workers, some of whom may drive up the hill to have California’s lucky laborers ask them ‘Will you be having fries with that?’

Finally, the long running global warming hoax has been signed, sealed, and delivered by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  They have finally conceded two important conclusions about which scientists and engineers have been telling them for the last two decades.  First, there has been no global warming for the last 19 to 26 years, depending on which part of the atmosphere you measure.  Second, existing computer (general circulation) models are hereby discredited which, according IPCC’s own standards, could not account for the measured plateauing of temperatures.  And that, dear reader, disqualifies ALL of the extant GCMs, especially those whose predictions have been used by government grant guzzling ‘scientists’ to assure our pre-convinced central planning politicians that preventable manmade global warming is taking us all to hell in a handcart.

Matt Ridley in the 5sep14 WSJ summarizes the details in ‘Whatever Happened to Global Warming?’ (image filched from the article).  In there he writes –

… this is all that’s left of the global-warming emergency the U.N. declared in its first report on the subject in 1990. The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3).   Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.

First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or “hiatus”), but that it doesn’t after all invalidate their theories.

Alas, their explanations have made their predicament worse by implying that man-made climate change is so slow and tentative that it can be easily overwhelmed by natural variation in temperature—a possibility that they had previously all but ruled out.

But what is the response to this outpouring of evidence?  Absolute crickets.  The media are simply silent on the matter as they report the Obama administration’s doubling down on its attempt to get some more draconian ‘climate change regulations’ on the books, especially if it requires end-running a non-cooperative Congress.  As Ridley points out, the UN’s next scheduled climate change propaganda convention is to be held on 23 September.  But the hard to suppress science on climate change is now so embarrassing that major countries like China, India, and even Germany have announced that they will not be attending.  Nevertheless, America’s progressive elites are going full speed ahead with their religious mantra ‘The Debate is Over!’, and promise to deliver new national policies that mimic California’s green blight.

[6sep14 update]  Grass Valley vice-mayor Jason Fouyer understands the ‘pinecone preservation principle’ that underpins our wonderful lifestyle in Nevada County.  As RR has long argued, the cash importing retirees are a major stave of our economy and support of the county’s quality of life.  They/we could have moved anywhere when we left the job markets, but we chose to come here.  Why?  Well, most certainly not because the county also has become an attractant for coastal progressives whose understanding of economics stops at toeing the regulatory line so as to keep the state and federal funds rolling in.  Running again for GV City Council, Mr Fouyer writes in the 6sep14 Union –

We need to bridge the gap between our retirement community and our young working families. We need to ensure that our young families have wealth-creating opportunities. We accomplish this by recruiting businesses that want to be part of our pinecone lifestyle, and willing to help preserve the reasons that our retirees have brought their wealth to our community.

These young families will serve Nevada County by working at the service enterprises that support our “pinecone lifestyle” and attract our tourist trade, or being a part of local enterprises that sell to the outside world and therefore also join the retirees in bringing cash into the county.

To successfully recruit the kinds of businesses Mr Fouyer wants requires two things – 1) easy access to enterprise level broadband, and 2) re-opening the county to private enterprises by rolling back the business toxic atmosphere that has settled over Nevada County like a blanket of choking smog. 

But impeding all this have been California’s progressive programs at state and local levels, programs that drive out businesses, make living here beyond the means of most, create the nation’s largest welfare class, and stifle economic growth in every imaginable dimension.  Implementing this on the local level are our Lefties, activists for whom a sustainable Nevada County economy is one which attracts the kind of people and agencies that depend on the taxpayers in Silicon Valley and Indiana to fund their regressive social and environmental programs and projects.

Brown-Kashkari Debate.  Speaking of retirees, we watched the very exciting and feisty debate between our Governor Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown and his Republican opponent Neel Kashkari (here).  My own assessment is that Moonbeam’s mind retired at least a couple of decades ago, and his sock puppet political career has been resuscitated and maintained by California’s labor unions and out-of-state progressive PACs.  The debate was very informative, one in which most analysts on both sides agree that Kashkari ate Brown alive – what a difference between the two.

Brown visibly stumbled in his attempts to both answer but mostly evade questions from a panel that included correspondents from Telemundo and the LA Times.  The only time Moonbeam’s mind came off its flat line was when asked why he wouldn’t want to debate Kashkari again – he nailed it by stating he thought the debate had already sufficiently exposed both candidates.  If we want to have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of making California golden again, then there’s no doubt as to who should get your vote.  Kindness would be to let Moonbeam’s body join his brain already comfortably ensconced in Sunset Acres.