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  • Scattershots – 4feb19 (updated 7feb19)

    George Rebane

    My heart goes out to our cartoonist Bob Crabb in his kerfuffle with a (fellow?) progressive lady who has accused him of dissing the transgender community with one of his offerings. (more here)  I know Bob, and he would be the last on the planet (if not Nevada County) to ever knowingly hurt the feelings of a class of people who are indelibly part and parcel of the same social orientation as is he.  He has now walked into the expanding “minefield” of progressive thought and talk policing, a prominent aspect of revolutionary political correctness that has become so virulent in limiting free speech that it has predictably started eating its own.  Self-consuming politically correct speech became wholesale in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, and served as inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, and, of course, today also for our own resurgent Left.  After such verbal assault, I hope that Bob doesn’t pull in the horns too far on his wit and wisdom.

    Take a look at the kinesiology and kinetics of robots as being developed by companies like Boston Dynamics (here).  In these pre-Singularity years this is only one aspect of how human abilities are being matched and superseded by advancing technology.  Such advancement explains the divergence between the price of labor and productivity that still continues to puzzle some and enrage others.  In the US economy, labor and productivity tracked each other almost perfectly until the early 1970s.  At that point productivity maintained its growth trend, but the price of labor almost leveled off and has been increasing at a very modest rate since then.  The 1970 date is significant in that it coincides with the milestone of the introduction of commercially successful minicomputers into our economy – e.g. Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8.  (I immediately bought one for my R&D company, and quickly upgraded it for a PDP-11 when that became available.)  With such computing power available to ‘everyone’, US industry was off to the races, and the increases in productivity were now due mostly to invested capital instead of labor.  Ever since then, labor in the aggregate has strained in the competition to provide value in the workplace.  From my perch, this divergence was easy to predict and has been preached here for years under the larger category of systemic unemployment (see also John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man).

    ProductivityLabor

    Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has always come across to me and mine as our local good-hearted and well-intentioned walking monument to intellectual innocence.  In his 2feb19 column ‘Will House shirk duty to initiate impeachment?’ he attempts to make another case for ‘indict first, find evidence later’, which is now the established mode of progressive jurisprudence practiced in government, entertainment, and by the leftwing commentariat.

    Millennials against capitalism.  Author Malcolm Harris in Vox – ‘Why Millennials are burned out. Capitalism’ – is the latest to write about the millennial generation and their travails in adjusting to earth.  My basketball coach back in Indiana told his charges about how performance and risk fly in tight formation.  His wisdom was corroborated by years at university and later in business where I confirmed that the greatest achievement, and most certainly every human advancement, is always brought about at the ‘edge of the envelope’ where stability is marginal and risk is highest.  This ‘law’ cuts across ALL endeavors, be they in engineering, finance, sports, or the arts.  Most of those who paid attention came to know this through schooling in the academy and/or of the hard knocks variety.  However, it is clear that this is another wisdom of the ages that is absent from today’s snowflake curricula.  Harris, himself a Millennial, explains why Marxism appeals to this generation, and how they see capitalism exploiting labor, just as Herr Karl said it would.

    [5feb19 update]  “This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?” Andrew Cuomo.  I love it when every once in a while a progressive experiences a smiphany (a smidgen of epiphany) about the way real humans behave.  We recall that the Left has always maintained that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior, and the Laffer Curve, well, it’s just worth a laugh.  Now with NY’s very high tax rates combined with Trump’s tax cuts, the state’s rich have been doing the Sayonara Samba to greener pastures, leaving the state’s coffers $2.3B in the red.  The Empire State progressives are asking each other ‘Whoulda thought?!’  But my bet is that even with his t!t in a wringer, Cuomo has learned nothing that will stick with him for more than a week.  And, of course, the remainder of the nation’s Left will pay it no mind – the mantra ‘To increase govt revenues, just raise taxes’ is alive and well. (more here)

    [7feb19 update]  We’ve all heard that gold is ‘an ancient relic’ from government elites whose job is to convince to value fiat money über alles.  Governments themselves, of course, know better and value gold as the mother’s milk that really nourishes and upholds the function of dollars to drachmas to serve as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value.  This truth was again underlined with Russia’s announcement that recent confirmation of vast amounts of gold under Siberia will make its currency bulletproof against sanctions imposed by the west.  And they are right, it will because everyone really wants to know that those little pieces of paper and computer bits are really backed by something that everyone agrees has value, no matter how ancient.  (more here)

    The Olympus of hubris. Former President Obama has continued to take credit for today’s booming economy, you know, the one that took off a bit after President Trump had a go at it (more here).  But on second thought ol’ Barry may have something there.  It took some mighty dedicated mismanagement to keep America’s stellar economy hobbled to less than 2% growth for all those years.  Obama did indeed keep our economic pressure cooker plugged up until someone, anyone, would come along who did not want to fundamentally transform America.  So maybe he can take some credit for finally getting out of the way, and letting good times return again.  (Of course, the Dems have their Plan B – aka the Green New Deal – ready to go to really sink the country.)

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  • NASA now reports global cooling

    George Rebane

    Now here’s a report by some people from the mother temple of global warming that is guaranteed to summon the Left’s crickets.  More cool-headed scientists have been reporting on the new cooling trend that correlates with low sun-cycle activity for years now.  This has been echoed and amplified on many serious websites (e.g. Anthony Watts, Russ Steele, …, and, of course, RR) written by people who understand the science involved and not just echo ‘consensus science’. (H/T to reader)

    Now ‘NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity’.  At NASA’s Langley Research Center, Dr Martin Mlynczak reports, “We see a cooling trend, … high above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.” (more here and here)

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  • Sandbox – 2feb19

    [Our favorite cartoonist RL 'Bob' Crabb and I share thoughts on the US benefitting from a multi-party (four or more) political smorgasbord.  Bob offered this good rendition, filched from the 2feb19 Union, of Howard Schultz's presidential ambitions.  There should be a lot more to say about that.  gjr]

    RLCrabb190202

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  • Ruminations – 31jan19 (updated 1feb19)

    George Rebane

    Global warming conspiracy’s agenda is about destroying capitalism, so admits Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.  At a Brussels news conference she said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”  This revelation is not news to RR readers who have been repeatedly informed of this for over a decade.  (H/T to reader, more here)

    Socialists have an endless list of bad habits, beliefs, and behaviors.  One of the worst on their list is about OPM – they never seem to get enough of it to spend, and they also don’t hold back telling other people how they should spend their own money.  Apropos to that, in the 29jan19 WSJ Jason Riley describes how “progressives are more interested in scapegoating the wealthy than they are in relieving poverty.”

    ‘Conflating Ideas Weakens Constitutional Principles’ (from RCP).  “The left’s conflation of conservatism with fascism and the right’s conflation of classical liberalism with progressive extremism combine to conceal the concrete political realities that inspired the rise of liberal democracy in the West. These conflations also suppress the multiple traditions that merged in forming the American constitutional order. And they obscure the compelling reasons for conserving this precious inheritance.”  (Trigger warning for some of our readers who have complained about big words, long sentences, and large paragraphs – this piece has them.)

    American republicanism, as intended by our Founders, is dead, having succumbed over the years to poll preening politicians.  Moreover, the nation’s pundits and public demand that the pols be ever responsive to the latest polls.   And they are more than happy to comply so as to do ‘the will of the people’, and relieve themselves of having to make potentially contentious decisions about what to support and vote for – after all, getting reelected is job one.  So now we have government by randomly gyrating, soundbite propagandized, uninformed public opinion.  This is exactly the kind of chaotic direct democracy that our Constitution was written to shield us from with a republic of elected representatives.

    [1feb19 update]  ‘Ownership as an endangered species’ by Rob Chrisman (1feb19 Union) is a good piece about the vicissitudes of private property in these days of leftward careening progressivism.  Mr Chrisman also writes an occasional blog – notallradishesarered.org – which saw its last of many excellent posts in June 2017.

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  • Earthshaking News – Cancer Cured?

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 30 January 2019.  An edited version of this commentary appeared in the 2feb19 Union.]

    Standby for the next tranche of earthshaking news.  You know, the kind of report that promises to make a big impact on the lives of each of us.  Well, there’s another one of these that has come out, but has yet to make a big splash in the headlines, which today are probably more interested in keeping the latest Trump/Pelosi brouhaha at a boil.

    Remember the earthshaking news back in 1989 when a couple of scientists claimed to have cracked the code on cold fusion (here).  Fusion energy is the holy grail of humanity’s search for a clean and virtually limitless source of power to make our civilization hum without polluting the earth with fossil fuels residues and/or fission power catastrophes.  From our high school science class most of us remember that fission power is generated by splitting atoms which releases the desired energy, along with a bunch of deadly radiation and radioactive stuff that needs to be contained and then disposed of safely.  Today fission reactors around the world power everything from electric grids to big carriers and missile submarines.  The other bad part about fission reactors is that their operation must be constantly controlled lest they go into an unstable meltdown like the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

    Fusion energy comes from hydrogen atoms being fused into the heavier helium atoms in an environment of extreme gravitational pressure and ten million-degree temperatures such as occur naturally in the cores of stars including our sun.  If for some reason the pressure is released or the temperature goes down, fusion stops instantly.  And the only bad byproduct of controlled fusion is some high energy neutrons that tend to corrode anything that attempts to contain the process.  Well, the cold fusion experiments ended as an embarrassing bust, and to date no one has made much progress on controlling ‘hot’ or thermonuclear fusion.  It’s turning out to be much more difficult to contain and harness on earth what goes on naturally all over the universe.  So the arrival of fusion power has yet to shake our world. (more here)

    Now, get ready for today’s earth-shaker – seatbelts please.  Israeli scientists announce that they have a demonstrated a cure for cancer.  This ongoing development, to be completed “in a year’s time”, is reported in the Jerusalem Post and Forbes magazine.  The scientists work at Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd (AEBi), a pharmaceutical company located in Ness Ziona, Israel.  The reported cure is more than a bit mind-blowing since it can be targeted to attack all types of cancer cells.  And once it kills them, the cure is permanent, there will be no lurking cancer stem cells left that will later bloom into a full-blown cancer that is so common to the disease.

    But that’s not all.  Using a multi-target toxin drug they named MuTaTo, AEBi reports that “Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, (the process) will last … a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market.” (more here)

    So there you have it – the next promise of a real earth-shaker that will save the 1 in 5 men and the 1 in 6 women who will develop cancer during their lifetimes.  MuTaTo will then go into clinical testing and the usual bureaucratic obstacle course.  You can read more about it with the links posted on my website.  But overall and so far, what’s not to like about such uplifting news?

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

     

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  • Plan to Re-elect Trump

    George Rebane

    The Republicans have an opportunity to implement a surefire plan to get their candidate re-elected in 2020, given that the Dems will run everyone and their cousin who understands how to spend OPM (that’s Other People’s Money for you independents and mid-roaders).  And OPM is also the active ingredient of this ingenious plan.

    • The RNC launches the ‘Fund a Socialist’ website that lists the current Dem presidential candidates, their website URLs, and the money they currently have in their election war chests.
    • Trump supporters review the list on a regular basis, and, according to their lights, send a couple of the most egregiously leftwing radical and poorly funded candidates $5 each.
    • Trump supporters repeat step #2 every month as the list inevitably prunes itself. This automatically strengthens the surviving radicals.

    Say, a couple of million or so Trump supporters sign up for this plan and carry it out as long as the list still contains viable and voluble radicals, the loonier the better, or until the Democratic National Convention.  The total cost for each participant will be about $200 give or take, and it would be money no better spent.  That would shove about $400M plus into the shorts of second tier candidates seeking to out-left each other.  Sweet.

    Such inflows of small contributions to those hopeful socialists will keep the maximum number of them energized and fighting for slots in the upcoming debates, running in primaries, hogging air time, and doing everything they can to disrupt the orderly machine of Democrat elites trying to field an electable candidate.  And all of these no-names coming out of the woodwork will be convinced by their millions of small donations that they really are riding the top of the new socialist tsunami sweeping the country.

    AOC&Bernie

    Obvious priorities are Sen Bernie and Congresswoman AOC.  Republicans must make sure that these two never lack for funds to make their message heard across the land.  That’s important because some wiser heads in the DNC are already talking about running some more electable center-leftists against them in the primaries. 😉

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  • Journalism continues to falter

    George Rebane

    Journalism is a lost trade (art?), attested to by the justifiably low esteem journalists are held in by the reading public.  Jacob Gallagher attempts to make this point in his ‘Journalism Is Faltering but ‘Content’ Is Thriving’, and in the process makes a self-referential blooper.  His main thesis is that content – like editorials, movies, TV shows, commentaries, …, the stuff for which you access media – will survive in spite of the palpable deterioration of the journalistic wrappers in which they are delivered.  For proof, one need only to read a newspaper or listen to a news program (yes, even Fox News) to see the loose logic relating propositions and the liberties taken with language – today no one seems to know the structure of an unambiguously communicating grammar or the definition of the words used. 

    (Even RR’s comment streams contain the lamentations of some readers who eschew the semantic compactness of what to them are ‘big words’, especially in previously unencountered sequences.  As reflected in the longitudinal studies on literacy available at the National Center for Educational Statistics, most of our fellow citizens would like to avoid complex concepts, instead demand simple thoughts in simple sentences, and not even too many of those strung together, thank you very much.)

    And then Gallagher steps in it by claiming that “the concept of ‘content’ rose alongside social media, beginning with the launch of Facebook in 2004.”  Well no.  The man shows the deficit in his journalistic acumen, no doubt due to his inexperience and/or recently attempted education.  In fact, the notion of content was already mature at the birth of interactive multi-media products (remember PC controlled laser-disc players?) in the early 1980s, when we were developing content (the ‘payload’) ensconced in metadata along with new and delightful UIs (user interfaces or ‘wrappers’).  For broadcasts, the metric of Content Factor was also born, measuring the time fraction of content divided by the advertised duration or time slot length of the show.  (Today CFs for most entertainment programs on commercial TV are in the 0.55 to 0.75 range.)

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  • Sandbox – 28jan19

    [… and I would also draw your kind attention to the 28jan19 update of the last Ruminations.  gjr]

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  • The Real Issue That Divides Us (updated 27jan19)

    George Rebane

    Conservetarians believe in global diversity and national cohesion; progressives believe in global conformity and national diversity.  The former resists global autocracy, the latter sustains global autocracy.

    Nationally prominent commentator and executive WSJ editor Gerald Seib recently wrote ‘The Wall Marks a Deep Cultural Divide’ (in the 21jan19 WSJ) a piece describing attributes which divide America that focused on “character differences”.  In his piece Seib said, “One question asked whether immigration adds to the character and strength of America by increasing its diversity and bringing in new talent, or detracts from American character by putting burdens on government services and creating language barriers”, and then cited the disparate responses of the Trump and resist-Trump supporters.

    While I agreed with Seib’s subsequent analysis, I felt that he did not reach deep enough to a more basic, revelatory, and explanatory level (in the sense of being able to reliably predict derivative attitudes and behaviors).

    I emailed Mr Seib a brief explanation of my critique: Mr Seib – Our divide goes much deeper than can be discovered with pabulum questions about “American character”.  If these surveys were structured and administered so as to discover what kind of future world order Americans would like to see the US being a part of (i.e. Westphalian sovereign nation-states vs a peerage of jurisdictional fiefs of a global government), then the answers would be more revealing (and reliably predictive) as to the respondents’ attitudes about border security, immigration policy, cultural diversity, paths to citizenship of illegal aliens, etc, since all these are dependent on how people value culturally cohesive (vs fragmented) nations, and whether/how such a community of nations should continue to organize the world’s peoples.

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 25jan19 (updated 29jan19)

    George Rebane

    Our very own Paul Emery is producing the new Dalrymple MacAlpin musical ‘Make Believe’ that premiers tonight at the Nevada Theater (more here).  Paul is arguably our county’s most prolific producer of both theatrical dramas and musicals, and also musical entertainment events at various venues in our community.  The former hippie cum community icon is also a walking teddy-bear, garnering hugs from ladies on Broad Street every hundred feet or so, and from diverse restaurant patrons when we’re having our regular lunches.  Jo Ann and I will be in the audience tomorrow night to enjoy his latest theatrical enterprise.

    The 25jan19 Union ran an Other Voices column by a Mr Joe Keeble who demonstrably has bad luck when he tries to think.  In his contribution to now normative Trump bashing (a good day to do it given the Roger Stone indictment) the gentleman confuses levels with rates (the popular progressive pastime of ‘derivative diving’), and also duns the harvesting of low hanging fruit just because more of it is harder to get.  He applies all this cognitive cogitation to current border security and 'illegal immigration' happenings, real and imagined.  People with fully functioning logics can enjoy his distracted diatribe ‘Proud to be a criminal’ here.

    [27jan19 update]  Pelosi ascendant.  President Trump lost big time to the Dems led by Nancy, proving again that elections have consequences.  And I don’t see where this will end since there is nothing in the current state of affairs that would induce the Dems to negotiate in any better faith during the next three weeks than what they have been doing.  They’ve already bagged the political benefit from the Dreamers, and now are focused on keeping the border as porous as possible as more migrant caravans head north.  Can someone explain how this latest decline in American sovereignty will be halted, or are we now finally on the socialist slippery slope?

    [28jan19 update]  Our favorite liberal Union columnist and RR reader, George Boardman, recognizes VDH’s recent assessment of California’s decline (here), and then puts up mighty counter arguments that then auto-destruct in his closing paragraphs (here).  Expanding on whether and how California is being taken down is itself worthy of extended debate.

    Governor Newsom (apropos the above) is continuing, some say accelerating, CA along the path to an inevitable socialistic abyss.  So argues T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, in his very persuasive ‘Another California Tax Grab’.  Rodgers also points out that no more silicon wafers are manufactured in Silicon Valley – way too expensive, which motivated him along with all the other chip manufacturers to locate out of state.  Comparing his data with Mr Boardman’s arguments is instructive.

    America’s cybersecurity war with the world’s bad guys is not going very well.  One of my WashDC spies pointed to some scary reading that made my toes curl the wrong way.  The basic message from a Pentagon assessment report is that our enemies are countering our security measures faster than we can counter their penetrating attacks – and the situation is not getting better.  The big problem is that we don’t have enough tech talent to build and man our cybersecurity barricades.  (more here)

    ‘UAE Slowly Loosening Constraints on Religious Freedom’ reports the 28jan19 WSJ.  Heartening piece about some commendable progress in Islam – credit where credit is due, but the road ahead to the 21st century is still long and filled with chuckholes.

    [29jan19 update]  Trump ascendant with the Dems' core galloping leftward.  "The energy in the Democratic Party is entirely on the left, and as Hillary Clinton discovered, the nominating process is going to drive the Democratic candidates to get as nutty as necessary to please the new generation of radical bigots."  Newt Gingrich

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19 comments on Scattershots – 4feb19 (updated 7feb19)