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  • Ruminations – 26jun18 (updated 28jun18)

    Maxine Waters (D-CA) is a crook and certifiable idiot, and the best thing that has happened to Republicans in a long time – she’s a gift that keeps giving.  Her latest call for alt-Left hoodlums to physically confront, in public or at their residences, people who either work in the administration or are on record supporting Trump is indeed beyond the pale.  But the majority of American independents know that, and therefore GOP congress critters currently calling for her censure should just go through the obligatory motions to get their outrage on record, and keep the spotlight on her.

    ESG funds and bonds are the latest investment craze.  “Once a fringe concept, environmental-, social-, and governance-based investing has hit the mainstream.”  ‘G’ is the important component here because the profitability of all of these investments will depend heavily on the success of lobbying Congress and government bureaucracies to provide market mangling subsidies along with competition suppressing fees and regulations.  We recall that the good thing we celebrate about capitalism is that it will game the system, and the bad thing we hate about capitalism is that it will game the system. (more here)

    Hanlon’s Razor – never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.  And its earlier version by Napoleon – never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.  Good label to keep handy in these discussions.  And it cohabits comfortably with the Rebane Doctrine aphorism – government should be held guilty until proven innocent as the cause of all social problems.  And these pages have also enquired mightily into whether the leftist elites are either evil or just stupid.  In that, perhaps Hanlon’s Razor is the most generous when assessing progressive public policies.

    ‘Why Women Don’t Code’ is an excellent piece by Univ of Washington professor Stuart Reges.  He presents some excellent history on this issue, and even more interesting research that bears on the relative proportions of men and women in STEM careers – especially computer science. (H/T to reader and correspondent)

    [27jun18 update] Milan Vodicka PhD is one of Nevada County’s stalwart leftwing ideologues and a local leading intellectual light.  In today’s (26jun18) Union he again shares his caliber of thinking, extensive knowledge of history, penetrating insights of current events, and unbiased ideological perspectives in ‘Fascist USA? Concentration camps? For kids?’ (sic).  The man continues to present himself as an auto-attributed straight arrow, ever maintaining himself “above the fray” while assuring us that the “arbiter of my take on everything is the truth and truth only, validated by proof”, which proof we presume will be provided in one of his subsequent columns.  Fortunately, we have met Dr Vodicka before in these pages, and readers can review some of his vitae here.

    SummerFest 2018, the annual musical gala presented by Music in the Mountains, continues tomorrow night at our fairgrounds.  This year’s series includes four outdoor concerts on the fairground’s Great Lawn.  More here on the entire series.  Bring your lawn chairs and munchies (adult libations purveyed within easy stumbling distance), and enjoy an evening with friends under the big pines.  Did I mention that kids get in free?

    [28jun18 update]  Physicians vs gun-owners.  These remarkable stats pass our desks from time-to-time – they’re worth keeping in mind as the gulf between us grows, so pay attention.  Annual deaths from physician mistakes is around a constant 120,000 (accidental deaths from the overall medical industry is over double that) as reported by the Dept of Health and Human Services.  There are 700,000 physicians in the US, therefore the accidental death rate at the hands of a physician is 0.171 deaths/physician/year.  More than 80,000,000 Americans own guns, and the total number of annual accidental gun deaths is around 1,500.  This calculates to 0.0000188 accidental deaths/gun-owner/year.  Ergo, on average you are about 9,000 (= 0.171/0.0000188) times as likely to die accidentally at the hands of physician than you are at the hands of a gun-owner.

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  • Sandbox – 25jun18

    [Here's the next batch of fresh sand.  I find it interesting how the intersection of what interests me and RR's commenters goes up and down.  It appears that the interests of our most voluble readers pretty much track the news cycle, often leaving unattended more fundamental and systemic events/trends that impact our lives and country.  Because I have always walked a path less tread, for me this variance is noteworthy but not a consternation, since RR has always been a record of my observations and interpretations from the last great century of Man.  In sum, I think of my weblog as a letter to my family and the future which, of course, includes the contents of its comment streams.  gjr]

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  • The Diaspora of Dumbth in America

    A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

    George Rebane

    Nothing in recent memory highlights the dumbing of the American mind like today’s hysteria about separating kids from adults (parents or coyotes) who criminally enter the United States.  Led by the Left, our news media, both lamestream and conservative, have now started supporting the narrative that such separation from illegal alien adults taken into custody is something new, unique, inhuman, permanently damaging, and not the American way.  In reality nothing could be further from the truth.  America has never jailed kids with adults in whose custody they were at the time of incarceration.  We have always separated the kids and put them into appropriate care institutions until they could be reunited with parents, relatives, or placed with other legal guardians.

    Today the insane notion has spread across the land, a diaspora of the belief that somehow illegal aliens who criminally enter our country deserve special treatment that is not now and never has been afforded American citizens.  Our laws, and especially border security laws, have always called for equal separation of alien children brought illegally and surreptitiously into the country by criminal adults who have been arrested and taken into custody.  Here’s a letter in the 25jun18 WSJ from a defense attorney that reinforces what I introduced on these pages in ‘Separating kids from parents’.

    Regarding your editorial “The GOP’s Immigration Meltdown” (June 19): I am a criminal defense attorney and can say with confidence that hundreds, if not thousands, of parents and their minor children are separated in this country every day by the criminal justice system. What was happening at our southern border is routine.

    It is not uncommon for criminal defendants to bring their minor children to court with them for bail hearings, revocation of bail hearings, revocation of probation hearings and sentencing hearings. Perhaps they think that the presence of their children will influence the judge. It has been my experience that it will not.

    If a criminal defendant is denied bail, has his bail revoked (as Paul Manafort recently experienced), has his probation revoked or is sentenced to prison, he will be taken into custody and, by definition, separated from his children (the children don’t accompany the defendant to prison). If a family member or other guardian isn’t present to take the children, the children will be taken by a state agency that is charged with caring for children who have no adult to care for them.

    Illegally entering the U.S. is, by definition, a crime. If the parent is taken into custody by law enforcement for the crime of illegally entering the U.S., that parent will be separated from his minor children, just as any other criminal defendant in the examples above.

    As an attorney, I don’t understand the current outrage. Parents have been separated, are being separated and will continue to be separated from their minor children by the criminal justice system. Why should there be an exception for noncitizens who have been arrested for the crime of illegally entering the U.S.? As far as I know, there is no exception for any other crime.

    Ivars Lacis, Peachtree City, Ga.

    The diaspora of this anti-American insanity was further expanded on and put into the context of an ongoing broader leftwing agenda in ‘The Existential Abrogation of Sovereignty’.  What I want to emphasize here is that more centrist and conservative media outlets have fallen in line, putting out news items about separating kids that do nothing to dispel the lies that 1) the whole policy was started by Trump, and 2) that such separations are unique to entering illegal aliens, who have been converted simply into “immigrants” no longer adorned with even the mildly clarifying modifiers of ‘undocumented’ or ‘illegal’.

    And the under-educated of the land are lapping it up with manufactured visions of such huddled masses, as in days of yore, gathered at the foot of the Statue of Liberty demanding to be allowed entry simply because they and their neighbors have lost their native countries to criminals and corruptions.  All this time the alt-Left Democrats are also telling Americans what a horrible land the United States is, and no one has the ability to see the disconnect between that argument and the existential confusion at our borders where more than 1,000 illegals daily risk life and limb to enter.

    The unexamined bottom line in the public forum, and now the proclaimed policy of the Democratic Party is that America should welcome one and all from across the world who illegally cross our borders with the complaint that they want, nay, demand a better economic future.  Promoting such open borders and automatic amnesty is the surest way for us to lose our national sovereignty and speed up our departure from the America that for the last two centuries has served as the gold standard of governance.

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  • The Old-age Dependency Train Wreck

    George Rebane

    The baby boomer retirement tsunami is in full swing, and the number of working age Americans whose efforts will support the rapidly growing population of retireds is shrinking at an alarming rate.  Some significant verbiage expanding on the problem is available in ‘A Generation of Americans Is Entering Old Age the Least Prepared in Decades’.  Given what we know today, the following charts tell the quantitative side of the story.

    OldAgeDependency2
    But what really struck me is the graphic below showing the entire country’s aging ratio (more here).  The arithmetically and geographically astute will note that in Nevada County during the last seven years we have gone from almost one-in-three seniors (above 64) to about one-in-two residents of working age (18-64).  This is more than a 50% increase in this ratio, the impact of which is really not appreciated by our local political leaders in the sense that we don’t know how much cash the retirees are importing into our community versus how much of our local services they depend on to live their lives – i.e. how much cash are they pulling out.

    OldAgeDependencyThis data again gives lie to the local loony lefties who frequently celebrate the myth that Nevada County with its population in stasis is turning younger (the hordes with LA and SF values replace exiting younger middle class workers), and that the older generation hereabouts is on its way out.  As shown above, the reality is the other way around, as I have vainly attempted to educate the ineducable by explaining to them the workings of ingress and egress rates.  Actually, our exiting ‘native’ middle class workers are being replaced with a constant influx of people with LA and SF values who have soiled their previous nests and promise the same here.  But at the same time our remaining workforce of baby boomers is aging and now replace, at an ever greater rate, the oldsters who are either escaping socialist California for greener pastures or the great beyond.

    In any event, the only mitigation of this looming national social catastrophe is a vibrant and growing economy (aka capitalism, entrepreneurship, development), something that the globalist progressives with their grassroots echo chambers are dead set against, since such a state of affairs will work counter to their fervent belief in a big government command economy as the epitome of a social justice delivered.  Whatever your politics, from time to time it pays to review the data tracking this social dynamic.

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  • Ruminations – 22jun18 (updated 24jun18)

    George Rebane

    KrauthammerDr Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018).  This man was an intellectual staple in our house for at least twenty years, and his most recent stint on Fox News brought him to our dinner table on an almost daily basis.  His towering intellect, expansive knowledge base, exquisite reasoning, and gentle, often self-effacing humor made him a welcome extension of the media family in our home, and also millions of other homes fortunate enough to have discovered him.  The way he sat (wheelchair bound) in a dignified upright as he delivered his on-air soliloquies, always with a twinkle in his eye and with a dry bon mot, slyly intertwined for the attentive listener, that confirmed his well-earned sobriquet as ‘The Bonze’ to all of us grasshoppers.  He lived a blessed life of courage and wisdom, and the hole he now leaves in many lives across the land will eventually fill, but very slowly.  RIP.

    ‘City of London Will Be Powered By 100% Renewable Energy Starting in October 2018’ – this little bowl of bullpoop was put out by the Good News Network (H/T to reader).  Actually, the whole city will not be blessed by this technological miracle as reported by the City of London Corporation (here).  But the part that will is going to draw its electricity from some solar panels on buildings, and (seat belts please) buying only “renewable energy already on the market” drawn from the grid that is, of course, polluted with all that dirty power from fossil fuels.  But not to worry, their green accountants will know how to sort out the good from the bad electricity, and buy only the good stuff.  There was no report of what the marginal cost would be for all this clean energy.

    Speaking of global warming, it was 1988 when James Hansen, NASA scientist, told Congress that earth was going to hell in a handcart according to his general circulation models.  Looking back, we ask, ‘Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?’.  The answer, explained all over the web (and here), to those who would listen and could understand, is ‘not very well at all’.  Bottom line, it is nowhere near as warm as predicted by Hansen and the IPCC, and Earth will not be the hyped hothouse by mid- or end-of-century, and we still don’t know exactly all the gazintas and how they interact so as to produce a reliable camzata temperature number on which to base reasonable public policy. (more here) But that, of course, makes no never mind to the True Believers who worship consensus science.

     [23jun18 update]  My position here has grown to ascribe the lamestream media as definitely anti-American (see definition here) in the way that they purposely fabricate lies into their ‘normal’ coverage of the news (e.g. here), and the way they self-censor reporting salient news items that contradict their anti-Trump and long-playing anti-American narrative (e.g. here).

    [24jun18 update]  Just watched former HS Secretary Jeh Johnson on FN admit that there is no immediate or short-term solution beyond Trump’s zero-tolerance to stop the illegal alien border violations and taking the illegals into custody, a policy that was initially enabled by a Democrat legislation way back when.  Of the 12K separated kids now in question, only 2K are separated from their illegal entrant parent(s) and placed with relatives in America.  The other 10K arrived with non-family coyotes and need to be housed somewhere before their disposition is determined.  Sec Johnson had no better solution than what is going on now.  This clears the demagoguery that the sleazebag Dems and their local lackeys are blowing for political gain, lying to Americans that Trump created the problem which he could now solve with a stroke of the pen.  Today Feinstein is floating a bill that in preventing separation, would encourage human trafficking, invite unlimited migration from the south, and promote the continuation of open borders and amnesty to the illegal aliens who successfully crawled under the fence.

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  • The Existential Abrogation of Sovereignty

    George Rebane

    Across this land we are debating the wrong thing.  There is no contention about separating kids from parents.  No one want to do that gratuitously.  But as a society, we do it when we must.  And we do it daily with American kids by the thousands when their parents are jailed or otherwise detained through legal proceedings.  We have done that for decades and today we keep hundreds of thousands of American kids in foster care separate from their parents.  But just focusing on the kids is not my point here.

    America’s Left has found a new casus belli to attack the foundations of our republic.  Their goal, as stated here many times, is nothing less than the abrogation of America’s sovereignty as a nation-state (cf. Agenda21).  Let me start with some fundamental tenets of governance that I assign to Rebane Doctrine (continuing to collect these under this label and efficiently refer to them drives the local Left nuts; another benefit).

    1. A nation-state is first and foremost sovereign only to the extent that it can determine and control the access of goods and people to its territory. Secure and non-porous borders through which ingress, including immigration, and egress are effectively controlled is an existential measure of its sovereignty.
    2. Anti-American – a person who opposes American sovereignty 1) as an idea through impugnation, and/or 2) existentially by actively working to reduce/eliminate such sovereignty.
    3. Anti-American sedition – activities intended to radically and/or rapidly change the existing character, make-up, and/or established order of America through extra-legal means.

    Today the media is full of reports and interviews with progressive politicians unabashedly promoting open borders without (yet) daring to say it in those words.  What they volubly promote instead is a 1) catch, 2) keep the families together, and 3) then release policy for illegal aliens caught after surreptitiously crossing the border.  They are to be released on the basis of 1) having purposely violated US laws, and 2) on the fiction that all illegal aliens have a prima facie legitimate case for seeking asylum.

    What gives lie to all this, and is known to our anti-American politicians is that only about 3% of the illegal entrants return for their asylum court hearings which would legitimize their stay in the US.  The other 97% know they have no leg to stand on, and that they would be taken into custody and deported were they to present themselves.  Their only hope for staying here is to remain a fugitive long enough until our anti-American Left (presuming the existence of a pro-American Left) can muster enough public opinion to force the federal government to designate them as the next ‘DACAs’ or ‘Dreamers’ or … in sufficient numbers so as to make their en masse deportation no longer feasible.  And voila! We have yet another new tranche of Democrat voters who have no love or understanding of the country into which they have infused.  Their loyalty is only to the globalist progressive cause and its visible political and opinion leaders who are bent on taking us to that new future.

    (more…)

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  • Our Declining IQ Numbers

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 20 June 2018.]

    Listeners to these commentaries over the years have heard me report on the advance of America’s national dumbth – a term coined by the late Steve Allen to describe the overall state of our understanding, interests, and intellectual acumen.  The reasons for this have been many, but mainly due to the de-emphasis of rigorous academics in our public schools over the last fifty years or so.  In any event, I was surprised to receive from a correspondent news of recent studies on the decline of IQs reported by our National Academy of Sciences, and other similar organizations in the developed world.

    Ongoing longterm studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland, and Estonia all corroborate the “downward trend” observed here in America.  First, let’s be clear that what we are talking about is not how much people know – people’s so-called knowledge base, which, of course, has also been declining over the same period.  But IQ is a prime measure of a person’s ability to process data, acquire knowledge, and make decisions.  This human attribute is critical to a society, especially technologically advanced societies, in that it directly impacts people’s ability to participate in our rapidly changing job markets.

    During most of the last century our IQ scores were found to be increasing, something that came to be called the Flynn Effect by psychologists and people who keep track of such things.  IQ scores for men kept increasing until about 1975, and then something unexpected happened.  Continued testing showed that IQ scores started steadily decreasing among men born after 1975.

    Detailed analysis showed that the decline was not due to a “long-believed theory known as the dysgenic fertility theory, which states that unintelligent people have more children, leading to a ‘dumbing down’ of society.”  No, research shows that the dumbing down was identified as caused by “environmental factors (which) could range from nutrition, changes in the educational system, less reading and more time spent online, (and) to changes in the media environment.” (more here, here, and here)

    Others have acknowledged that we may also need to adapt IQ testing and “other traditional methods of measuring intelligence”, since times have changed and today “people are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media” which indicate that “educational methods need to adapt to such changes.”  But the bottom line is still that, in the aggregate and compared to their older generations, today younger people cannot do and/or readily learn to do the things that need to be done to operate a civil society.

    These observations across a broad swath of developed western countries should sound an alarm that something has gone wrong with the way we as parents raise kids, and then how we as a society educate them to become the next generation of a productive, competitive, and advancing civilization.  However, there is also a danger that these warnings will be ignored or actually denigrated by political factions for reasons ideological that dictate a more homogenous world.

    One political vulnerability of such research is that it continues to corroborate the longstanding differences in IQ based on race, showing that the mean IQ scores of Asians rank highest, followed by Caucasians, with the Negroid scores being significantly lower.  The American Psychological Association acknowledges these rankings despite “the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic.”  (more here)

    Finally, a strong corollary of all this is the increase of mental illness among young people in developed countries.  Alarming fractions of our youth are now regularly diagnosed and medicated for clinical depression and behavioral problems. (more here and here)  Statistics on the need for remedial education and teen suicide rates all tell different parts of the same story.  Among things like our public education system, we may also want to reexamine and change the way that well-to-do parents are today required to monitor and restrict our children’s activities, and how among the poorer strata, where broken families abound, kids are turned loose to find their own way on the meanest streets in town.

    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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  • Separating kids from parents

    George Rebane

    Now that the just released IG report about Russian collusion and Hillary’s emails took the wind out of Democrats’ sail, their next bag of hot air is blowing across the land from a timely pivot to blaming the Trump administration for separating illegal alien kids snuck over the border by their illegal alien parents who are now criminals according to longstanding US law.

    When you are caught sneaking across our border with your kid(s), you are not an “immigrant” – now no longer adorned even by the politically permuting adjectives ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented’.  You are simply an apprehended illegal alien fugitive.  That you broke our laws does not entitle you to an automatic smorgasbord of benefits and special treatment.

    Having your offspring in tow does not suddenly make you exempt from the laws that prescribe how our native criminal parents are dealt with when they are taken into custody.  We don’t put their children in jail with them, and we don’t give adults a ‘get out of jail free’ card just because they have children.  What we do is take their kids and put them into appropriate foster care until their parents’ legal situation is resolved according applicable laws.  On any given day there are almost a half million children in foster care across America, and the turnover in that population is high.  Here is a summary of data on that from the Dept of HHS, ‘The AFCARS Report’.

    Today, as part and parcel of the spread of national dumbth, progressives (and even some light thinking conservatives) are hyperventilating about Trump having invented a new policy for ripping children from the loving arms of parents who really did nothing wrong other than leave their shithole country, illegally transit other benign countries, and sneak across our border to live the American dream.  All they want is asylum, jobs and/or US govt checks, and amnesty.  What’s so bad with that?

    The details of the applicable laws, the history of their enforcement, and the current situation is more complex than can be explained to attention-deficit audiences with other things on their minds.  All that they need to hear from lamestream outlets is that Trump is “cruel and immoral” and doing something never done before to jailed people, be they American citizens or illegal aliens.  Such reporting should keep the leftwing’s 'Resist Trump' pot boiling.

    For a more measured and complete analysis of what’s really going on here, I recommend reading Rich Lowry’s ‘The Truth About Separating Kid’.

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  • ‘A copernican answers Fermi’ (updated 21nov18)

    “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – A.C. Clarke’s Third Law

    George Rebane

    Last month we were encamped with two other couples at Hat Creek in northern California.  It was a delightful trip – the weather was fine, the food, drink, and the friends superb.  Actually, we’re all experienced “road warriors” having traveled much with each other over the last years.  This was our second trip to the Hat Creek RV Park which is located far away from cities and towns in the middle of a broad and very ancient volcanic caldera with walls reaching up several hundred feet.  Hat Creek is a quiet place with few people, but because it is located in a bowl, it is also quiet in the electromagnetic (EM) sense which is important to radio astronomers and people searching the galaxy for evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI).

    ATAdish_2018For that reason, the Hat Creek caldera is home to the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) that was built for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute to support their ETI search program.  We men, of course, had to go visit the observatory since it was only about 1.5 miles from the RV park.  We drove over, went into the facility, talked to the staff, walked into the array of dishes, saw the data gathering and control equipment, and watched the obligatory video extolling the virtues of the radio observatory and its mission.  Then we took a lot of pictures, one of which you see here is a close up of one of dishes.

    We were told that the ATA currently serves the radio astronomy needs of both the SETI Institute located in Menlo Park, and the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto.  The array signal feeds go directly to those locations for further analysis, and from there the surveillance directions for the array are transmitted.

    After returning from our visit, my little feverish mind started recalling all the things I’ve been reading and thinking over the years about ETIs and the galaxy with multitudes of post-Singularity super-intelligences.  And the constant points that I always had to revisit was Drake’s formula for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, and Fermi’s ‘Where are they?’ or ‘Where is everybody?’

    Physicist Enrico Fermi’s question is even more poignant today than it was over sixty years ago when he first posed it to John von Neumann.  Because to date we have spent a lot of money and brainpower pointing sensitive radio telescopes at the sky, and we have heard nothing but radio noise – no sign of intelligent transmissions.  So, is there really anybody out there, or are we really alone?  What can explain the silence?

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 17jun18

    [Apologies again for that last sandbox getting a bit long of tooth.  Here's some fresh sand in which to continue those ever engaging discussions about the local scene – as we are told, 'All politics is local' (but let's not get carried away). ;-)  gjr]

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