George Rebane

Lots of pot businesses coming to Nevada City.  In the 5feb18 Union our George Boardman documents (here) the lament he shares with many of the town’s locals and most certainly many other county residents.  Now I’m a longtime proponent of legalizing MJ (to avoid Einsteinian insanity), but I’m not yet smart enough to know how best to do it.  My advice has been for our little community not to spearhead bringing in multiple dispenseries and processing facilities – let some others do it first and let’s see what we can learn from them before making our county the state’s Marijuana Mecca.  We need to heed Mr Boardman’s call for more citizens to get involved in debating this on councils and boards.  (See also Don Bessee's related byline here.)

The Nunes memo was the modest payload, and now here comes a load Schiff’s chaff to cloud the entire matter of congressional oversight of the DoJ and FBI which have clearly transgressed.  But that they have done their dirty work in favor of the Dems, they now get their deserved protection.  The people most hurt by all this will be those who have not been paying attention – they will simply throw up their hands say ‘A pox on both your houses’, and dismiss the whole issue and other evidence to come.  Which is exactly what the Dems want.

The markets are making their long-awaited correction.  Many retail investors have started investing with the new robo-advisors that more and more financial houses are offering.  The fever recently jumped the pond and is picking up steam in Europe (here).  I wonder how the robo-advisors are taking this correction into account.  Do they see it as the buying opportunity that it will turn out to be?

[6feb18 update] Medical care is surprisingly lethal.  The current (3feb18) issue of The Economist features technological advances in the healthcare industry that increasingly lets each of us become more involved in detecting, diagnosing, and doctoring our inevitable ailments.  This will provide two major areas of benefits – lower costs and better treatments.  By ‘better’ is meant that they will be more timely and effective.  And both factors are related to your untimely death.  Timely, because all socialized (‘single payer’) health care programs have unconscionably long waiting times for care, and effective because all medical practice is shot through with lethal medical mistakes.  Countries with nationalized healthcare don’t keep those stats for obvious reasons.  The US still does, and here are the latest from The Economist (seatbelts please) – “Many of the 250,000 deaths in America attributable to medical error each year can be traced to poorly coordinated care.” I was a bit shocked because I had been reporting the dated 125K/year for that travesty.  But it turns out that medical practice kills us at the equivalent rate of having at least two jumbo passenger jets crash every single day of the year.  Were that to happen, I think riots would shut down flying until the problem got fixed.  Yet with healthcare, since their screw-ups are distributed, hushed up, and not reported, we continue to die at this horrendous rate without even a national whimper.  Now what do you think would happen under ‘single payer’?

FalconHeavy nails it.  Along with thousands this afternoon I sat on the edge of my chair watching the countdown for SpaceX’s first test launch of their FalconHeavy rocket carrying a whimsical payload of Elon Musk’s electric Tesla that will be put into a heliocentric orbit.  As a registered professional controls engineer and a former designer of missile control systems, I was awed at the number of concurrent and synchronous control systems (numbering in the hundreds) that the missile had on board and functioning perfectly to carry out the bazillion things that all had to go right for that monster to do what it did.  And then to top it off, the piece de resistance was the two outer boosters detaching and doing a graceful suborbital ballet to reverse trajectories and double back to two perfect synchronized landings at Cape Canaveral.  (The fate of the third to land on an ocean platform has yet to be announced.)  The technology that was implemented there by that roomful of cheering boys and girls was something to behold, and I’m just sorry that most folks have no idea what it takes to make real the sights they witnessed from all those ground-based and onboard cameras.  It literally brought tears to my old eyes. U-S-A!

[9feb18 update]  Re Nancy Pelosi’s eight-hour screed on the House floor on illegal aliens – you know the people who demonstrate about their “rights” under DACA or Dreamer labels.  Pelosi’s words, “Illegal immigrants are a blessing, they are doing what the Founding Fathers would wish, they are the best of the best, more American than Americans, reinvigorating, they are fabulous, beautiful and patriotic, yes, very patriotic.”  Then the question, ‘If dreamers are so patriotic, why do they always wave the Mexican flag, but don’t want to live in Mexico?’  Me?  I wonder how better would a migrant and hostile anti-American population surreptitiously carry out Reconquista from the inside?  (more here, here, and here)