George Rebane

Reading the papers this morning before running some errands in the flats, three little topics tickled my ire – which readers know is easier done than said.

Columnist and nationally known analyst of international affairs Bret Stephens shared an insight about the liberal way of lying from our national scene.  He attributes the latest fine tuning of the methodology to the Clintons that started in the 1990s, and which has been brought to its present state of perfection by Obama, who has most recently demonstrated its best practices in his Iran “framework” monologues.  But first, let’s see how it works and give credit where it’s due –

To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge. … What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?

Today we see this across the lamestream airwaves, with homespun versions being echoed by our local progressives.  Now understand, here Stephens and I both give credit where it is appropriate.  Although there is little to recommend the cognitive capabilities of the hardcore liberal base that constitutes about 20% of our population, we cannot so indict these “initiated” liberal cadres who are the public voice and supportive chorus for the regime’s version of what is and what has gone down.  They know better, but devoutly believe that you don’t.  (more here)

Nevada County’s unfunded public pension liabilities continue to recede into the fog.  We have never been given an estimate of what the range of annual payments to Calpers and Calstrs would be under some reasonable planning scenarios.  When I have asked, the answer has always been that it’s too complicated to estimate, and you wouldn’t understand it anyway.  Today the county’s chief executive again reminds us that there is a $1.3M annual additional payment that must be made for each of the next five years to keep our pension accounts at least current.  Again, I don’t know why, but making good this bump in our out-year expenses seems to be a bit of problem.  But there’s more to the story here.

I would really like to see a graph of our county’s financial obligations for, say, the next fifteen or twenty years under a trifecta of hopeful, scary, and middle-of-the-road scenarios, matched against corresponding revenue projections.  If the county cannot do this analysis, then I offer them a solution.  Mom sent me to school to learn how to develop, program, and exercise complex stochastic cashflow models whose outputs are probability distributions suitable for risk assessments and planning.  I have earned part of my daily bread doing these for corporate clients.  Moreover, the Sierra Economics and Science Foundation, of which I am a director, has additional talented professionals expert in banking, finance, and investments management.  We are a 501c3 and would be glad to work with county staff and contribute our services to the community for the development of such a financial planning model which the county could then keep and exercise under additional scenarios as they become apparent over time.  Just a thought, and such a deal.

To add to the urgency for such tools that provide some clarity into the foggy future, few people are aware that stocks have now become so risky, given the world situation and our stuttering economy, that pension funds have been massively shifting their portfolios into bonds.  That, of course, will make it harder than ever to achieve their recently rosy projections of pulling 7.5% annual returns – investment grade bonds will yield at best about a third of that as more corporate and public pension funds increase their bond shares.  Projected payments from jurisdictions like Nevada County have been based on deep draughts of this kool-aid.  What happens to our unfunded liabilities and the mandated payments when pension funds must make do with returns from portfolios prudently filled with ‘safe’ bonds? (more here)

President Lincoln was shot 150 years ago today.  Lincoln is remembered for many things that surround his ‘saving of the Union’ during the dark days of our war between the states.  Lincoln was a Republican up from the grass roots.  Today our progressives are claiming Lincoln as one of their own who increased the role of the federal government and reduced states’ rights across the board.  These same leftists paint the GOP as being the party of Jefferson Davis, with all the bad baggage of that implied, if not directly spelled out in media outlets like MSNBC and the Washington Post.  Columnist William McGurn summarizes the current propaganda battle and the conundrum it presents the interested reader/voter –

Indeed, these days about the only folks willing to stand up and make the case that the modern Republican Party is very much Lincoln’s child are those on the right who regard Lincoln as a warmonger and hold with the left that the Great Emancipator was the father of Big Government.

McGurn makes the case that the reality was a bit more complex when Lincoln is viewed in the context of his times.  (more here)

[15apr15 update]  ‘Muslim jihadists (like ISIS) are not religious believers, but merely use Islam as a cover for their wanton terrorist acts’ has been droned by Team Obama as its constant apology for why America should bend over backwards in catering to Muslims’ sensitivities in the west.  RR has argued for years that such acts, which involve so much self-sacrifice on the part of the Muslim terrorists, are perpetrated by dedicated followers of their prophet, desperate to bring about his teachings on how Man should live under God.  Progressives and other leftwingers attribute such arguments as the fomentations of the ignorant and the racists.

In the May 2015 of Scientific American – anything but a rightwing publication – Michael Schirmer (publisher of Skeptic) examines the moralistic motivations of ISIS, citing works and interviews with sociologists and academics who have established expertise in divining why people readily kill when claiming justice on their side.  Quoting sociologist Donald Black, Schirmer writes –

Many American liberals and media pundits have downplayed their (ISIS’) religious motives, but as Black told me in an email, “Muslim terrorists should be taken at their word that their movement is Islamic, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, etc.  We have their word as evidence, and in my view that is the proper basis on which to classify their movement.  Would we have said that the violence used by Protestants and Catholics during the Protestant Reformation had nothing to do with religion?  That would be absurd.”

No less absurd is the belief that jihadists are secular political agitators in religious cloak.  As Graeme Wood in “What ISIS Really Wants”, his investigative piece in the March issue of The Atlantic, “much of what the group does look nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringin about the apocalypse.”  Yes, ISIS has attracted the disaffected from around the world, but “the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”  Wood concludes, adding that its theology “must be understood to be combatted.”

Please remember, you heard and saw it scorned here first.  And I do expect the liberals’ duty cricket corps to reply to this more recent, broadly correct albeit belated assessment of the enemy we are fighting across the world.