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  • Demise of Capitalism?

    George Rebane

    The world’s population is stabilizing, if not starting to ‘stagnate’, and will soon start declining.  This argument and its impacts on humanity are presented in two newly published books – The Human Tide: How Populaton Shaped the Modern World (2019) by Paul Morland, and Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.  As a result, capitalism as we know it will disappear explains Zachart Karabell who reviews the books in the Sep/Oct issue of Foreign Affairs – ‘The Population Bust – Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It’.

    The crux of that striking conclusion rests on the theory that capitalism remains viable only in an environment of eternal growth; once growth stops or reverses, then capitalism, as we know it, will collapse.  “If global population stops expanding and then contracts, capitalism – a system implicitly predicated on ever-burgeoning numbers of people – will likely not be able to thrive in its current form.”  But I have no idea where this ominous ‘predicate’ comes from.

    Capitalism is fundamentally based on human nature organizing economies in an environment of open markets in which prices effectively communicate the supply and demand for goods and services.  Therefore, if demand slows down and then contracts, so long as open markets are allowed to operate, capitalists will adjust their enterprises accordingly.  The only aspect of such a contraction of available services and things for sale is its impact on the value of money. 

    The value of any given supply of money depends on the amount of available goods and services it can command in transactions.  Its value, as reflected in open market discount (i.e. interest) rates will track the size of the economies in which it is used as the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value.  For example, the value of a lot of fiat dollars will decline if there is less to buy or build with them.  But again, such values will adjust accordingly as central banks ply their wily ways of taking money out of and injecting it into economies.  Granted, if human perceptions about markets change rapidly, then there will be financial shocks as the value of monies held by governments and the public also changes rapidly – after all, we must always remember that fiat money by its very nature is strongly faith-based.

    So here we are in the pre-Singularity years as birth rates all over the world are dropping and populations are aging (older folks don’t consume as much as younger ones).  Advances in healthcare and productivity promoted through capitalism are making poorer countries richer, and encourage the richer countries to maintain growth through immigration. The current world population of approximately 7.6B will probably not exceed 10B by mid-century before it starts pulling back.  And given the impact of accelerating technology on systemic unemployment and income inequality, global population pullback is not something to be feared, but to be managed through judicious wealth distribution so as to maintain civil societies that continue to provide an increasing quality of life.  And once the Singularity does occur, all bets are off, as most then alive scramble to become trans-humans (q.v.).  For an entertaining and stimulating treatment of such a plausible future, I recommend Childhood’s End (1953) by A.C Clarke.

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  • Dropout Derby – 15aug19 update

    George Rebane

    And now Hickenlooper has hit the silk.  The results gentlemen.

    DropoutEntries190815

    DropOutCandidates

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  • Steven Frisch answered, yet again (updated)

    George Rebane

    Mr Steven Frisch is one of, if not the, leading leftwing intellectuals in the northern Sierra.  He earns his keep as CEO of the Sierra Business Council, a cynically named non-profit, progressive NGO that promotes all manner of leftwing policies and causes in this part of California.  SBC also consults to regional government jurisdictions and agencies in their implementation of ‘sustainable development’ as most easily discerned by the recommendations contained in the UN’s Agenda 21 objectives and the initiatives promoted by its derivative ICLEIs across the land.  RR has covered A21 issues for many years and devotes an entire category to it under which are gathered the relevant commentaries and postings.

    Mr Frisch has seen fit to visit these pages with some regularity to debate issues with which he does not agree in my commentaries and in the attendant comment streams.  As a liberal and progressive, his approach to debate is primarily to either misrepresent what has been written, or to attack strawmen that he constructs with the standard liberal shibboleth, ‘We know what he really meant.’  The sequel of this post amply illustrates this mode of attack.

    In past screeds Mr Frisch has called me ‘unpatriotic’, ‘un-American’, ‘traitor’, ‘racist’, …, and recommended my departure from everywhere that ranges from Nevada County all the way to shores of the USA.  In my turn, I consider the two of us to have been brought up and now live in different universes.  With some assuredness, lavishly documented here over the years, I can state that Mr Frisch knows next to nothing of the areas in which I claim some expertise.  I’m sure he reciprocates that sentiment.

    My response to Mr Frisch here is motivated by an extensive comment that he saw fit to post this morning under ‘Scattershots – 12aug19’.  It is reproduced hereunder in its entirety, along with my responses interleaved in italics.

    (more…)

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  • The Lone Wolf Killers

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 August 2019.]

    Each spate of mass shootings reveals yet another aspect of current American politics and how easy it is to manipulate the country’s masses.  As a result of the El Paso and Dayton massacres we are drenched in daily calls to ‘do something’, anything to stop rightwing ‘racists’ and ‘white supremacists’ from continuing their reign of terror wherever innocent people gather.  The ‘do something’ cries have reinvigorated our Second Amendment opponents to take more “common sense” steps on the road to total confiscation of guns.  Currently these steps involve more background checks, red-flag laws, and, of course, the ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’.  (more here)

    Non-political experts continue to tell us that neither the current background check laws on the books, nor the newly House-passed Background Checks Act would have stopped any of these killings by first-time lone wolves with clean police records.  Nor would red-flag laws, already on the books in many states, provide any guarantee of prevention, since people naturally hesitate to apply them because of their high false alarm rates and their impact on personal relationships.  This latter point was highlighted by psychiatrist Richard Friedman in a recent NYT op-ed where he stated that “experienced psychiatrists fare no better than a roll of the dice at predicting violence. The evidence suggests that while red-flag laws do stop suicides, it isn’t clear they prevent mass shootings.”

    And our progressives, including the Democratic candidates, declare that the real problem for such indigenous terror is the presence of a persistent and burgeoning number of ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ Americans.  According to these leftwingers, the problem now is so bad that all of President Trump’s supporters can be classed as ‘white supremacists’.  It is this massive body of misfits that spawns the killers of innocents among us.  For such progressives, America is still a racist country overrun by white supremacists who continue to deny people of color their legal and constitutional rights.  These assertions are ludicrous on their face as argued by among others, historians such as Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute and David Harsanyi of the Federalist.  America is the overwhelming destination of emigrants from all over the world, and over 90% these emigrants are people of color, most of whom clamor for entry from Hispanic America and Africa.  So, what do all these would be immigrants know about white supremacy in the United States that Democrats don’t know?

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  • Scattershots – 12aug19 (updated 14aug19)

    George Rebane

    A long march to protest over-regulation in California is planned to start on 13 August in Vinton (the northern terminus of Hwy 49) and wend its way through 300 miles of rural mountain and hill country roads to end in Oakhurst on 25 August.  It will be done in daily segments which takes it through Nevada City/Grass Valley on 16 August.  People are asked to join it and/or encourage the marchers as it passes through their communities.  This grass roots civic action is the latest expression of desperation with encroaching governments at all levels that daily increase their constraints and constrictions of movement and use of public lands a la A21.  It’s to be seen how such efforts will be received and persist in a state that no longer reflects our inherited culture and values from a fast-fading America.  More here.

    President Bill Clinton’s 1995 SOTU speech to Congress on his “illegal alien” policy.  Since Clinton spoke, the situation has gotten orders of magnitude worse with today’s unlawful ‘undocumented immigrant’ policies and programs promoted by our anti-American Left.  Take a look at this 90 second video, it is one that Republicans should play continuously until November 2020, if they had the balls.  Sadly, that will never happen.

    [13aug19 update]  ‘Never Again’ Means Nothing If Holocaust Analogies Are Always Off Limits. This WaPo op-ed is one of the most ignorant pieces of writing I have read in a coon’s age.  Author Danya Ruttenberg attempts to excuse AOC’s comparison of our deporting illegal aliens to Hitler sending Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.  Such comparisons are especially damaging and divisive to the mildly educated minds that populate our land and now embrace socialism, they don’t have the historical background to parse the ridiculous analogies Ruttenberg presents in her column.  You have to read it yourself to understand the new directions of the Left’s propaganda machine.  Is this another one of their Big Lies?

    [14aug19 update]  That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a good looking yet abysmally ignorant shill for the DNC’s radical left wing is known to all who pay attention.  She was elected by the fewest of voters from her district, and receives campaign contributions from fewer still – 10 in the first half of 2019.  Her re-election campaign is funded by unknown sources outside her district, and she is handled by equally mysterious agents who consider her and her ‘Squad’ as extremely useful idiots used to manage the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party in fashioning its image as the election season heats up.  (More here)

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  • Sandbox – 11aug19

    [Gun confiscation in disguise is the topic du jour, and the disguise has now become a very thin, translucent veil still useful for fooling some of the people all of the time.  gjr]

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  • Democrats’ Big Lie #3671 – America’s economy

    George Rebane

    In the lead-up to the 2020 election, our Left has marshalled their legion of liars to spread the word to the lightly read that Trump’s revamping of our economy to historical levels has not happened, and that only the top 1% derived any benefit from the tax cuts and regulation rollbacks.  This kind of concerted lying campaign does immeasurable harm to the lower half of the IQ curve, causing these folks to vote against their own self interests.  But that makes no never mind to our progressive Democrats; do whatever keeps and increases your power, and bamboozling the snuffies has always been part of the drill.

    It’s instructive to take a look at the magnitude of this particular stream of lies from the Left that started back in Obama’s time when we were assured that a max of 2% annual growth was going to be “the new normal”.  And, of course, Team Obama demonstrated that dictum over his tenure which averaged growth under 2%.  These people pulled every trick in the book to stifle the economy and keep workers’ wage growth essentially flat, all the while lying that they were helping the little guy and middle class.  The little guys took it in the shorts also as the Dems boosted the minimum wage wherever possible so as to make the lower rungs of the economic ladder ever more inaccessible to our unskilled and youngest workers starting their careers.

    Conservatives and capitalists have known for generations that a rising tide lifts all boats, in direct contradiction to the Left’s teaching that the only friend of the poor and unskilled is big and bigger government.  Here’s a graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate the difference between Obama and Trump (filched from the 5jul19 WSJ).

    EconomiesObamaVTrump

    By 2012 it was clear to most Americans that Obama was a socialist who had little interest in implementing demonstrated economic principles to recover the economy from its 2009 Great Recession lows.  I waxed eloquently on this in my ‘What Recovery?’ essay.  In that piece I presented a clear and concise systems flow diagram for how the GDP is calculated from its major components.  It even pointed out how and where the government just pisses away generated wealth.

    Most of us don’t have a clue when talking about economic recovery and growth.  Recovery is in the eyes of the beholder, and economic growth is not experienced as a one size fits all – different sectors benefit differentially from any given level of quoted aggregate growth, as the following graphic illustrates.

    RecoveriesAmerica’s economy has grown in a remarkably constant range of 3.3-3.4% annually from 1880 to 2008 on the eve of the Great Recession.  To explain the different recovery flavors, I indicated such an exponential growth as the green line in the above graph taken from ‘The Recovery Rigamarole’.  The arbitrary GDP amounts shown vary as a function of time, say, in years.  At year 40 a recession/depression occurs that takes the GDP from around 225 down to 135 over a ten year period.  At year 50 the economy begins to recover.  But from there several ‘recovery’ paths are possible, three of which (R1, R2, R3) are shown.  At this point it’s important to keep in mind that if the economy’s dip (red line) did not occur, then it would have continued growing at its long term (green line) rate – e.g. at year 50 it would have been about 265.

    R1 is clearly a true recovery that regains the long-term growth curve.  R2 is a more tendentious recovery that does achieve the pre-recession growth rate, but perennially lags the sans recession GDP growth trend.  And finally, R3 is at best a propagandized faux recovery, achieving neither the pre-recession growth rate nor its long term trend.

    The continuing dissemination of this Big Lie about Trump’s economy by the lamestream is one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the ongoing progressive propaganda onslaught through the auspices of fake news.

     

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  • The tragically populous tails of terror (updated 10aug19)

    George Rebane

    Last weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings are today’s national conversation, a conversation that does not yet communicate much beyond the emotional demand that something must be done.  The conversation is yet a babble that has little reason, meaning, or direction in either working toward a shared understanding of the problem, and most certainly not toward any shared understanding of possible solutions, were they even to exist.

    The little contribution here is only to record my own perceptions and feelings, and not offered as some definitive insight, the application/adoption of which would miraculously relieve our national pain.  The overarching insight is that all these nativist massacres (as opposed to those motivated by foreign ideology/theology) are the inevitable result of a growing cultural deficit.  The population distribution of cultures has become flatter as the former dominant cultures are practiced by ever fewer people – in a statistical sense, the tails of such distribution of multiple cultures are becoming fatter, and therefore more populous.  This means that the number of people who invent, join, practice new and extreme cultures and belief systems is rapidly growing.  The inevitable result of such an amalgam is that more and more individuals are out there on the borderline of doing something to act out their recently acquired and strongly held beliefs about what is wrong with the society in which they find themselves.  And with more on the borderline, more are likely to cross it with the results we see.

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  • Sandbox – 6aug19

    [We will now have to dissect the when and how President Trump was the prime cause of all these massacres.  And one thing is clear to many of our tight thinkers, the man is able to make such things happen in cities where he previously held a campaign rally.  So finally, after all the years of mass shootings, we have identified their cause.  Socialist science marches on.  gjr]

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  • Scattershots – 6aug19 (updated 11aug19)

    George Rebane

    The true costs of ‘renewable energy’ are both unaffordable and hidden. Those of us who can do arithmetic have known the unreported high costs of renewable wind and solar power for years, and how the climate calamity acolytes and the lamestream have suppressed reporting the costs of making the world work with renewable energy.  Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute writes a short, fact-filled piece on the matter in the 6aug19 WSJ (here).  He cites the work of the International Renewable Energy Institute based on the demand forecasts of the International Energy Agency.  The bottom line is that if you take into account the ‘cradle to grave’ costs and environmental impacts of spreading solar and wind power production worldwide, then humanity will have an existential disaster on its hands.  The amount of mining, transport, construction, and waste elimination required swamps all conceivable benefits from such ‘clean power’ which will turn out to be the dirtiest and most expensive that we can attempt to buy.  As an example, “building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.  And these materials will have to be mined, manufactured, and assembled in not so very nice places according to the Sydney-based Institute for a Sustainable Future.  None of this is known to our garden-variety progressives (some in these pages) who continue to mindlessly tout subsidized ‘clean energy’ and claim its unrealizable economic benefits.

    RenewableEnergy

    ‘1984’ has arrived on campuses.  “Bias response teams” are now an established institution on most college campuses, and the disease is spreading rapidly.  Christian Schneider reports (here) on “a chilling look inside colleges’ systems for reporting and policing offensive speech.”  The growing archive of such petty incidences of one student snitching on another, often unsuspecting, student is testimony to another of the progressive-promoted illiberal insanities in our society.  Reading the record of cited incidences is simply mind-boggling to most of us.  The accused offenders are then required to present themselves to the schools’ administrative “diversity” panels for examination of their violations.  As with sexual abuse allegations, there is no appeals process, and such allegations go on the students’ records which may later be used to impact careers and other life-opportunities in these looney tunes times.  For all this, go thank your local leftists who have enthusiastically made all this possible, and continue to do so with every ballot they mark.

    [update]  Tonight on FN we saw an ugly leftwing mob assembled across the street from Majority Leader McConnell’s house with signs and flood lights screaming unspeakable epithets at the senator and people to “Stab him through the heart!” and “Cut his fucking throat!”.  How many lamestream outlets showed this?  How many rightwingers have gathered to put on a scene like that in front of Democrat politician’s house?  Biden and Booker both stated that they want to “beat up” President Trump; how many Republican politicians have ever come even close to such violent language against a Democrat President.  And none of these are isolated incidents carried out by some backwater communists, these are carried out regularly by mainstream leftists all across the country.  In progressive circles and in their lapdog lamestream media President Trump is regularly referred to as a “white supremacist”.  Where is the evidence for that?  I join with Victor Davis Hanson and most other conservative commentators in declaring that I have never met a rightwing white supremacist, nor do I know of anyone who has ever met such a person.  Yet the lunatic Left continues to accuse all of us daily of being white supremacists.  (check RR comment streams)  It is these insanely cynical asymmetries that confirm our having passed the tipping point and promoting the Great Divide.

    [8aug19 update]  To further confirm the tsunami of censoring conservatives that is sweeping the country’s media, Twitter concluded that the video I reference above was too damaging to the progressive narrative about who actually are purveyors of hate and violence.  CNBC reports that “Twitter locked Mitch McConnell’s campaign Twitter account, Team Mitch, for posting a video of a profanity-laden protest outside of McConnell’s home in Louisville, Kentucky.”  (more here)  You literally cannot make this stuff up – politically motivated censorship is now a daily happening, most of it not visible.

    [10aug19 update]  ‘Shaming’, even FN doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, and plays patsy to the Dem candidates’ attempt at that in their desperate attempts to intimidate President Trump.  These political sleazebags, now joined by Uncle Joe, are all claiming a direct causal relationship between Trump’s public speech and the El Paso and Dayton killings.  This is supposed to shame the president.  People who still care about the language know that a person accepts shame only when 1) he acknowledges the veracity of the allegations against him, AND 2) the society around him also embraces the same allegations.  Neither of those conditions exist for Trump re the massacres, nor the 100M+ Americans who are paying attention.  The desperate scumbags who seek to make such ludicrous claims stick don’t have a clue about this, and are mainly relying on the segment of their constituents who are innocent of current events and most other things that quality education delivers.

    [11aug19 update]  Leftwing dumb is definitely a terminal mindset. Any kind of discussion with them is nigh impossible because they fail the basics of an IQ test that asks questions about whether this is like that, and if not, what is the difference.  Years of examples of such deficit thinking are archived in RR comment streams, and today we see it in the comments under Jo Ann’s recent Union piece (here) about the treatment LaMalfa received at the hands of the leftists when he visited here.  The Union leftwing commenters equate the crowd’s cries of ‘Lock her up!’ at Trump rallies with their own thuggish behavior of shouting down a congressman of the opposite party.  They haven’t a clue that one set of voices is in support of the speaker, and the other set of voices is meant to disrupt a speaker trying to respond to his audience.  To those pinheads these two situations are identical, and they consider their loutish behavior as Democrats to be a proper response to the Republican audience’s behavior at a Republican rally.  Is there someone with even garden variety smarts on the other side who can see a profound difference here?  Exit question: how often do you see Republicans do that when a Democrat comes to speak?  (I don’t usually comment on Jo Ann’s columns, but this time the number of butt-stupid responses was overwhelming.  H/T to GregG and ToddJ for their valiant attempts to explain the matter in that comment stream.)

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