George Rebane
Disagreeing with a progressive's view on an issue automatically identifies your 'hatred' of the cause, principles, values, ethics, and/or people involved.
More kudos for Mr George Boardman for his excellent apologetics about the recently passed Measure B school bond issue that appears in today’s (12dec16) Union (here). I will believe that the monies will actually be spent for deferred maintenance when I see it. All that aside, if I don’t watch it, these pages may get a bad reputation for so many celebratory reports about our favorite left-leaning columnist. It’s time for him to write something that will allow us to reestablish a more balanced view (aka really piss off all of us knuckle draggers) of his political perspectives. Oh well – my duty as I see it.
Gold hits a ten month low, again surprising those vaunted analysts who predicted its price would soar after Trump’s victory (more here). The Chinese, with millennia of on/off hard times behind them, are buying the stuff to add to their families’ stashes. (Chinese buy 30% of the world's marketable gold.) My own feelings about owning gold is that it should be hoarded simply as an insurance policy against any of several scenarios which will instantly increase its value and allow it resume its historical functions as money regardless of how governments will manipulate their fiat versions of it. For the average retail investor, gold should not be a speculative investment to trade on anticipated price changes. I leave you with the perennial exit question about gold – if gold is such a ‘barbarous relic’, why do all governments continue sub rosa to buy it, store it, and use it to settle accounts?
Safe spaces are different for the Left and Right. For the Left, a safe space is a location in which its occupants are not exposed to ideas with which they disagree. For the Right, a safe space is a location from which they can freely exercise their First Amendment rights. This is a seminal difference that the liberal mind has no ability to master as witnessed by their snarky reports of conservative students also seeking a safe space on campus from which they may be safe from physical attack and administrative retribution. To the liberal, these are equivalent safe spaces that justify what the campus 'snowflakes' have been provided. The interested reader can review many other such logical tours de force in posts assembled in our Liberal Mind category.
[14dec16 update] The double dummies at CALPERS finally admit that “a 7.5% annual return is no longer realistic.” As long reported in these pages, anyone with even a modest appreciation of our nation’s economy knew that years ago. The 14dec16 WSJ reports (here) that, “Top officers of the largest U.S. pension fund want to lower their investment targets, a move that would trigger more pain for cash-strapped cities across California and set an increasingly cautious tone for those who manage retirement assets around the country.” Exit question – how come these “top officers” are not looking for work in less demanding fields? Or are they already working in such a less demanding field?
The feds are incompetent at almost everything they attempt – fundamental tenet of Rebane Doctrine and recurring RR theme. More proof rolled in tonight with the report that the federal IT tit is in the wringer re fighting cyber crime and hacking. It seems that NO ONE in the federal government has been smart enough to keep its IT systems anywhere close to current. The fed’s systems are so badly dated that today IT budgets go almost entirely to putting bandaids on old systems to keep them from crashing; there’s nothing left over to even consider upgrades. And maybe that’s a blessing in disguise – what institutions have the worst reputation in the ability to upgrade their systems?
Progressives continue examining the wrong end of their alimentary canals re the CIA and Russian hacking of DNC and Clinton emails. Some of them – abetted by their incontrovertible lamestream sources – even claim that the CIA recently reported their conclusion that it was the Russians who were the guilty parties. Nothing could be further from the truth. The last testimony and report to Congress from the intelligence community was on 17 November in which Director of National Intelligence (America’s intelligence boss) James Clapper states on video that his agencies are “unclear” as to the source that supplied Wikileaks those pesky leaked emails. Now don’t expect CNN, MSNBC, … and other sterling leftwing sources to air such old news in the face of today’s third party reports about CIA beliefs.
How about all that undeniable climate science that our Left and the feds constantly cite to push their agenda for collapsing the economy in order prevent manmade global warming? Before the progressive age undeniable science was presented openly by undeniable scientists. Today these undeniable scientists cannot be identified along with their undeniable published literature. Team Obama says it’s all a big secret – ‘Trust us, we know who these scientists are and what they believe, but we can’t tell you their names or what makes them believe, other than it’s a lot of overwhelming evidence. Now doesn’t that answer all your questions?’
[15dec16 update] Master sci-fi author and Hugo award winner Liu Cixin has written a masterpiece in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (wonderfully translated by Ken Liu). The Three Body Problem is the 400-page ‘hard science fiction’ epic that launches the trilogy. It is a page turner that makes my sessions on the treadmill go really fast – I’m about two thirds through the first volume. As a Lucky Strike Extra the reader is introduced to China's perspective about the world along with some of the realism of China’s horrific Cultural Revolution (ca 1970) in which over 100 million Chinese died, and which class warfare atrocity has been largely buried by the lamestream and western progressives among us as they continue to wage their own class warfare. While it is a bit heavy (and happily so) on the science and technology side, the story of our first encounter with ETI is wordsmithed well enough to engage and educate intelligent readers from a wide range of backgrounds. I recommend it to you.
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