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  • The American AI Initiative & herding cats

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 February 2019.]

    The entire field of artificial or machine intelligence (AI) seems to be more misunderstood by the day, and not only on Main Street, but also in the highest levels of government.  President Trump recently signed an executive order to launch the American AI Initiative.  The purpose of this whatever it is, is to “focus federal government resources to develop AI” in order to “increase our prosperity, enhance our national and economic security, and improve quality of life for the American people.”

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 13feb19

    [Would El Chapo’s billions paying for border infrastructure satisfy Trump’s “… and Mexico will pay for it.”??

    NancyChuckAOC

    … and by their fruits shall they be known.  gjr]

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  • The Illuminated Great Divide (updated 13feb19)

    George Rebane

    Every now and then one of our progressive commenters takes the time to offer some thought-out remarks that shine a bright light on the hopeless nature of our country’s Great Divide.  The most recent came from a leftist reader who call himself Robert Cross.  Mr Cross often takes me to task in opposing every facet of my socio-political ideology that he claims to understand.

    Under ‘Progressive Pilgrims’ Progress’ we engaged in a thread that he launched with the astute lament that I blamed most of the country’s problems on progressives and their socialistic policies.  I encouraged him to read my extensive apologetics supporting such an assertion and responded in part –

    “But your main takeaway should be that the overwhelming share of societal problems are directly attributable to the various expressions of hubristic collectivism – and in the US today that happens to be virulent progressivism.”

    This motivated Mr Cross to ‘put pen to paper’ and deliver a speech that V. Lenin could easily have made in 1917 from the back of a truck to a crowd of Russians gathered on a blustery snow-covered Moscow street.

     

    (more…)

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  • Progressive Pilgrims’ Progress

    George Rebane

    My pal, fellow blogger, and comrade-in-arms for community connectivity and STEM education, Russ Steele wrote the following in the 11feb19 Union (here).

    As a proponent of rural broadband, I often read recently published books and articles on broadband technologies.  I am currently reading Susan Crawford's book, "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It." I was surprised by the depiction of Nevada City and Grass Valley as failed communities in their quest for broadband fiber networks with quotes like these:

    "Laissez-faire is not working for rural America, particularly in areas like Nevada City/Grass Valley where the local authorities are uninterested in intervening to ensure that their people have communications capacity."  "… one of the key reasons that both Greensboro and Grass Valley/Nevada City are making such slow progress toward any flavor of publicly oriented fiber is that there is no prominent public leader willing to stand behind it."

    This is only two, there are more damaging quotes.  After reading this book, it is highly unlikely Nevada City would be on anyone's list as a great place to live and work.  Now that Race Communications will be building out the fiber network which Crawford used to illustrate a failed project, local authorities need to promote a more positive image. More at https://ruraleconomytechnology.com.

    It’s not only that no “prominent public leader” in Nevada County has ever gone to bat for community broadband, instead it’s been exactly the opposite ever since progressives have become the dominant voice in this foothills community.  They have brought their (San Francisco) values with them, and that includes a disdain for business and entrepreneurship, and a profound ignorance of science and technology (e.g. their stance on cell towers, vaccination, consensus science, …).  So, for politicians hereabouts to get re/elected, they need to cater to the sentiments of the local liberals, more and more of whom lack any critical thinking skills, and that means to adopt ‘duck and cover’ when it comes to stepping up to promote any kind of growth that depends on the acquisition of modern broadband.

    Our proregressives have now elevated to a nationally prominent level their opposition to growth – we are a modern luddite posterchild.  But hey, that don’t make no never mind since we do have the ERC and various economic development meetings now and then to keep our spirits up.

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  • Redemption and the Virginia Three

    And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Mathew 7:3-5

    George Rebane

    “Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) said Wednesday that he dressed in blackface during college, adding yet another scandal to the tumult that now engulfs the entire executive branch of state government.  Herring, Gov. Ralph Northam and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — the state’s three top Democrats — all face wrenching questions about past behavior that threaten their careers.” reports the Washington Post. (here)

    I find it distressing that our public policy, mostly implemented by the progressive Left, does not give any politician or other public figure any slack on what they might or not have done in their dim dark distant past.  This is especially significant in the case of males whose brains, we are told, do not fully mature until their mid-twenties.  Most certainly they (we) still have great dynamism going on in our noodles at around the age of twenty.

    But without even accounting for that, don’t we have even a little room for redemption, any notion of remission, and only focus on what may be seen as eternal retribution?  I don’t think any of the above mentioned Democrats, currently being pilloried and asked to mount their political tumbrils, should suffer such a fate.  And that any more than did Justice Kavanaugh and other Republicans before him.  Today all three Virginians are matured and different men than they were in those days of yore (when morals and manners were not yet perfected to today’s pristine standards).  They have performed their public duties admirably as far as anyone can tell, and are now at the prime of their ‘service lives’.  So why sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness, an altar on which daily are offered the professional lives of worthy people, almost all to serve political ends and not to provide any future margin of safety to the public at large from their ongoing ministrations?

    Once this persecutorial plague is loosened, where will it stop?  How many public figures, or any of us for that matter, can survive the dredging of such ludicrous liabilities?  Were I king, we would look back only on the recent and relevant parts of a person’s career, and not claim that the divers path each of us took through our youth did then mangle our minds and morals forever.  People do change, and perhaps in this area of public life we should revisit the plaintive questions posed by those oft-quoted philosophers Hillary Clinton and Rodney King.

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  • Scattershots – 9feb19 (updated)

    George Rebane

    ‘How a tiny country bordering Russia became one of the most tech-savvy societies in the world’ reports CNBC on Estonia’s eternal love affair with technology.  As the world’s leading country in its integration of the internet into literally every facet of Estonian life, the implementation of such cooperation between public and private sectors underpins the Rebane Doctrine commentaries on collectivization.  The bottom line has always been that the smaller and more culturally coherent a cooperating cohort, the better can collectivization be implemented in such a society.  While Estonia’s experience and those of other Scandinavian countries sing a siren song to our progressives, what they always overlook are the stark differences between a large, inhomogeneous, and culturally diverse America, and the small, culturally homogeneous countries that dot the globe.  The only way we can even attempt to replicate the idylls of small country harmonies is to create a hierarchy of ever smaller and distributed jurisdictions (as envisioned by our Founders) in our land which then can enjoy the benefits that derive from common cultures.  Sadly, our Left has taken us beyond the tipping point toward big government socialism (centrally controlled cohesion by the gun) and the tyrannies that inevitably lie beyond. (H/T to correspondent)

    The current spate of cold winter weather has me tending daylong fires in our big front room fireplace.  Many RR readers know my longtime interest in the care and feeding of wood fires (here is a more complete treatment).  Getting the fire going this morning reminded me of an aspect that I have not emphasized enough – the form of the fire that you should attempt to maintain for the longest time possible.  Most people think that a robustly flaming fire provides the most heat to those sitting in front of the fireplace or around a campfire – wrong.  Bright cheery flames primarily heat the air which then convects vertically upward.  It’s the radiant heat that flows out sideways (and all other directions) that provides the desired warmth from such fires, the rest goes up the chimney.  And that radiant heat comes mainly from the red-hot coals.  So, the ideal fire is one that has finally generated enough coals, both on the coal grate and the sides of still burning wood, to provide a large red radiating area toward you and the room you are sitting in.  At this phase of the fire you want to minimize the burning rate, keep the flames sparse and small, and let the developing coals glow and radiate.  When you finally do have to add another piece of wood or two, try to add it so that large horizontal fire pockets (q.v.) remain visible from which radiation can still escape.  (Using a keeper chain is ideal for structuring such vertically ‘open front’ fires backed by a yule log.)  Here’s picture I took this morning of the fire having achieved its ideal heating phase.

    RadiatingFire02

    [update]  George Kennan’s 22feb46 ‘Long Telegram’ to SecState George Marshall is one of the most prescient and useful intra-government communications in US history.  In it Kennan lays out the coming world order and the proper role of the US as hegemon to contain the already obvious post-WW2 spread of communism.  Bottom line, in order to avoid fighting WW3, be prepared to be the white hat global sheriff by always deploying small contingents of troops in critical locations all over the world, and to fight small ‘brushfire wars’ as they become necessary.  And prepare to do that indefinitely – with allies if possible, alone if necessary – as the cost of doing business to prevent the world from falling into a new age of global tyranny.  And with that Kennan nailed the foundation of our foreign policy for the last 70+ years.  I had to post this as the topic of our ongoing foreign policy came up at a recent dinner with friends.  (The original archival copy is here, with a more readable version here.)

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  • Deciding with Minimally Known Processes

    George Rebane

    [Trigger warning – this post is primarily for our technically oriented readers.]

    We encounter ongoing minimally known processes (MKPs) continually in our daily round, and we often need to make decisions based on the likelihood of their terminating during a specific future time interval, or surviving it.  Yet few are aware of this perspective of the daily round, and fewer yet know how to obtain quantitative information from such processes, information that is important for decisions in such fields as finance, medicine, environmental risk, and other areas of science and technology.

    The ongoing MKPs considered here are 1) a process about which we know only its age, or when the process started (label these MKPA); and 2) a process about which we know only its lifetime, or the length of time before such a process terminates (label these MKPL).  Both kinds of such observed and observable processes are of interest in that we want to know the probability the process will end during or survive through a specified future time interval.  A simple example of a MKPA is, say, a spring which started flowing five years ago, and today we want to know how likely it is stop sometime during the next nine months (or its complement, how likely is it to continue through the next nine months).  An example of a MKPL query is, given that such an ongoing process is known to last ten days, what is the probability that it will end or continue through the next 90 minutes.

    The answers to such and even more complex questions can be calculated quickly through the use of formulas whose development is based on an ingenious application of the Copernican Principle first demonstrated on an MKPA problem by physicist J Richard Gott in 1993.  For reasons unknown, his work was discussed briefly and then quietly laid to rest.  My own involvement began with its serendipitous discover while researching approaches to solving another problem.  Since then, I have reformulated Gott’s work to expand and obviate its applicability, and expanded it to the class of MKPLs.  An interesting use of MKPLs is in allocating resources in the observation of periodic processes about which we only know their periodicity.

    I have found these results useful in my own analysis of securities’ performance, and in making of healthcare decisions.  A little thinking on what processes qualify with the Copernican approach to minimally known (understood) processes continues to yield new uses.  As an important footnote to the application of this theory is in Bayesian decision making that require a reasonable prior probability to kick off the calculations as new evidence comes in.

    We looked at MKPAs in a previous RR post here.  To update the elements of this theory and its resultant formulas, I have written a short technical note which you can download here – Download TN1902-1_lifetimeMKP , the progenitor of which you can download here – Download TN0708-1_GottExtensionConfirmation190120A .

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  • The Green New Deal (updated 8feb19)

    A rose by any other name would smell … .  Wm Shakespeare

    George Rebane

    Well, the last bits of doubt about our Democratic Party have been swept away by the new House resolution describing a fundamental transformation of America (Barack Obama, call your office).  The Green New Deal, sponsored by AOC and Senator Ed Markey (whom we have met on these pages), is socialism writ large.  So large in fact that the reporter interviewing AOC on NPR this morning had a hard time keeping from audibly gulping as he asked the feather head details and sources of funding for the individual mandates of the GND.  She, of course, had no answers other than taxing the bejeezus out anybody and everybody in the land who could still create wealth after the proposed strictures derive their power from the barrel of a gun.

    So what do these two socialists propose in their fundamental transformation?  You can read the resolution here, and some more expanded analysis here, here, and here; but let’s just lay out a few of them in short form for the sake of discussion.

    • US carbon neutral in 10 years. “…this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.”
    • Guaranteed government job for all. “… provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”
    • Government control of all medium and large corporations. “Employees would elect 40% of directors, who would be obliged to consider “benefits” beyond returns to the owners.”
    • Vastly higher taxes. Top rates for death taxes, income tax, and payroll taxes would increase markedly.  Also proposed is the institution of a “wealth tax” on assets.
    • Government take over of industries like healthcare, insurance, manufacture of certain products like pharmaceuticals, etc.

    Now all this is based on the fundamental socialist tenet that tax rates do not affect economic behavior.  This belief by the Left is totally immune to historical data, including what France just had to rescind, and what has made NK, Cuba, Venezuela, … what they are today, and what caused the downfall of the USSR, and the massive shifts in the economies of China, Vietnam, … .

    So there you have it.  Just keep your eye on the slated 40+ Democrats who sign up to sponsor this resolution – their true colors will wave proudly.  And also see how many more Democrats will be looking at their shoes while mumbling something about not belonging to the new socialist party of America.  Our Founders are spinning in their graves.

    [8feb19 update]  It appears that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may turn out to be the liberal loon for all seasons.  Both sides of the aisle seem to be happy dancing at the advent of this good looking 5-star ignoramus.  The Dems claim that her GND plan is just a negotiating “anchor” point stuck into the land of the ludicrous, a strategic starting point to get people dickering with each other about where we should really wind up.  Their hope is that any surviving putrid pot of progressive public policies will still be close enough to the GND anchor, and by comparison will look good to their light thinking constituents who will then support it as a ‘compromise’ with the Right.

    Meanwhile, the Republicans are convinced that AOC (along with mini-minded Markey) have handed them the penultimate political prize for 2020.  WSJ’s national correspondent Kim Strassel details the blessings in her ‘The Socialist That Could’, and offers a succinct summary of “AOC, the secret Republican weapon for 2020.”

    It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.

    And can you imagine the profusion of optics AOC has already provided and will provide during the next 18 months for Republican ads.  This woman has turned out to be a horn of political plenty for the Right that is scaring hell out of the Democrat leadership – “They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.”

    Given all this political largesse, my concern now is for AOC’s safety.  The RNC should offer to share with the DNC some of the costs for added security for the congresswoman.  No conservative in the land wants anything to still her voice, or deter her from advocating the clear path she has set out for America.

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  • Globalization, Globalism, Globalists, and Governance

    George Rebane

    RR commentaries have defined and used globalism and globalization interchangeably to mean the political and commercial progress toward a one-world government as long proposed by the United Nations and its proponents, and especially by those espousing the UN’s Agenda21 program (q.v.) promulgated by its worldwide network of ICLEIs (more here and here, and see also RR’s ‘Agenda 21’ category of commentaries).

    In recent RR comment stream exchanges, a couple of our leftwing readers reminded me, correctly, that most of the public understands ‘globalization’ to refer to the trade and commerce aspect of companies rapidly expanding to do business across national borders.  Moreover, that this same cohort, which includes our commenters, doesn't connect ‘globalization’ with today’s concurrent efforts by the international collectivists to abrogate the Westphalian order of nation-states and unite humanity under a one-world government.  Merriam-Webster defines globalization as “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.”  Clearly the focus and intent here is in the fields of commerce and not unified governance.

    Yet M-W and others define ‘globalism’ as “a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence”, and “the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations”. Here we definitely overlap into the area of politics and governance.  And people who are ‘globalists’ are those who share such an “attitude”, now on the track to one-world governance.  This has been the sense in which RR commentaries have interchangeably used ‘globalization’ and ‘globalism’, along with ‘globalist’.

    So, in the interest of continuing our tradition of precise definitions (which so vexes the Left), I will henceforth use the following definitions in my commentaries and comments –

    Globalization – the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by businesses and commercial institutions in sovereign nation-states expanding their products and services across national boundaries in conducting free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.

    Globalism – the ideology that treats the whole world as a unified sphere of political influence, and promotes institutions which place the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations, with the ultimate goal of achieving a one-world government.  A globalist is a person embracing such an ideology.

    These definitions will be included in the next edition of RR’s Glossary & Semantics.

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  • Sandbox – 6feb19

    [Our leftwing commenters keep reporting that all of our border problems are nothing but rightwing propaganda, so why have the national news been reporting illegal entry numbers surging, caravans at the border trying to get in, and more caravans on the way from central America?  And how come Dems keep saying that walls don't work, and the border security authorities keep testifying and presenting data that they do?  gjr]

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