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  • Solar panels – the latest California calamity

    George Rebane

    California’s collectivist calamites just keep rolling in.  The latest in the works is the Great Solar Panel Sidestep – a new government mandated, contractor supported dance that will push low cost housing, now already out of reach, even further into the land of the bureaucratically impossible.  As observed from outside our state’s borders, “California is often where bad ideas spring to life these days, and they’re worth highlighting lest they catch on in saner precincts. Consider the state Energy Commission’s decision this week to mandate solar panels on all new homes. Meanwhile, Democrats bemoan the lack of affordable housing. Hmmm, maybe there’s a connection?”

    But his latest really takes the cake – you can run the numbers yourself, but here’s the back of the envelope version of the California Energy Commission's mandate for all new homes.  Start with the “average cost of a rooftop solar panel system today is $18,840, which amortized at a 5.5% interest rate over 30 years is $107 a month.”  Add to that an average of about $400 annually for government inspections, cleaning and maintaining the system, to get a total monthly cost of $140, or $1,680 annually.  The advertised benefit is $80 monthly off the already outrageous cost of California electricity, making the net negative out-of-pocket $720 annually.  An earlier smokescreen claimed that the initial cost would be recovered by such savings in 30 years.  Now the cat is out of the bag – this bamboozle costs a lot out the gate, and keeps costing forever (even if it last 30 years).  Given the low cost of energy in America, California’s solar energy only benefits leviathan and corporatism.

    Meanwhile, California housing costs average between $50K-$75K per unit more than in the rest of the country, and a government specified ‘affordable housing’ unit costs an unaffordable $332K.  Building low cost housing in California is prohibited by more laws and regulations than can be counted.  This is “why hundreds of thousands of middle-class Californians are fleeing. In 2016 Arizona welcomed twice as many Californian refugees as Mexican immigrants. California’s labor force last year expanded by a mere 1% compared with 2.2% in Nevada and Arizona. Sharing a border with California is a gift that keeps on giving.”  (more here)

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  • It’s ALL in the label (updated)

    "A rose/skunk by any other name would smell as sweet/foul", Wm Shakespeare expanded.

    George Rebane

    Watching the recent California gubernatorial candidates’ debate, it again became clear that the labels we both carefully, and sometimes carelessly, attach to important issues determine the direction and nature of the subsequent debate on and the final resolution of an issue.  For those who pay attention to public affairs, this was most apparent when the topic of ‘immigration’ came up.

    The clear line of division between the Right and Left involves the existential factors –

    1. The Left’s overarching public policies are ALL directed toward demonstrably achieving the world envisioned in the UN’s Agenda21 objectives.
    2. The Left cannot achieve this as long as the US remains a sovereign nation-state and a (the?) world hegemon that recognizes and still celebrates its origin as a western civilization.
    3. A cohesive national culture and secure borders are anathema to the A21 future. A fragmented and mutually wary (suspicious?) cultural tapestry is the required starting point to any “fundamental transformation of America”.
    4. Continually promoting the victimization narrative (through public education and the media) about America’s blacks and Hispanics forms the attained beach head for maintaining and expanding divisions of the aggrieved in our land.
    5. Most productive and conducive to achieving A21 goals is the simmering sentiment in Hispanic communities that embraces Reconquista (q.v.) – the reacquisition of lands lost by Mexico through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and their reformation under a new sovereign Hispanic government.
    6. Porous borders that invite the ingress of Hispanic illegal aliens is the ongoing near-term objective – ‘I don’t believe in borders.’, ‘I don’t believe in walls, I believe in bridges.’, … is today’s cry of Democrat politicians and activists.
    7. Border porosity is most strongly promoted in the Hispanic communities where purposely aggrieved people naturally practice tribalism, and invite/condone the growth of their cohorts with people who are ethnically and culturally similar. Reconquista’s oft-stated guiding principle is its ‘peaceful achievement’ through overwhelming numbers at the ballot box and in government bureaucracies – ‘We will outbreed you!’
    8. Porous borders are abetted under the imprimatur that the illegal entrants are today’s continuation of America’s historical open-door policies of legal immigration. Hence, it’s of paramount importance to rename the illegal aliens among us as the innocent cohort of ‘undocumented immigrants’, which has finally morphed into simply ‘immigrants’.
    9. To America’s growing population of the marginally educated, the Left’s use of ‘immigrants’ is purposely designed to confound the historically beneficial ingress of legal immigrants and the not-so-beneficial ingress of illegal entrants which subsequently meld into the unassimilated population of illegal aliens already established in the US.
    10. The Left’s public position is that how you got into the country doesn’t matter, especially if your native country was authoritarian, poor, and without human rights and economic prospects for its citizens (aka a “shithole country”).
    11. The Left fosters the illusion that our illegal aliens are equivalent to our legal immigrants in how they draw on public services, participate in our justice system, and contribute to our economy. To them immigration is NOT a two-party process that involves a mutual and formal agreement between the immigrant petitioning entry and the government welcoming such entry.  To them immigration is just whatever means are available to aliens to enter our country.  Illegal aliens and legal immigrants are all just ‘immigrants’ and so represented to the rest of Americans.  They all deserve equally to become franchised citizens, and until then they should have all the rights of franchised citizens, thereby making the latter distinction existentially moot.

    One can make the case for the importance of correct/accurate labels that cover other issues such as ‘climate change’ nee ‘global warming’, which functionally the Left argues and treats as preventable manmade global warming.  One can make a long list of such propagandized mislabeling of issues, proposed legislation, and laws on the books that is the stock in trade of those dedicated to deception.

    [update] We live "in the rotting carcass of an once great state" – the case for this is summarized succinctly in this YouTube video brought to our attention by a regular reader and commenter.

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  • Sandbox – 10may18

    [We kinda skipped over the initiative to let California's illegal aliens hold seats on state boards and commissions.  And none of the Left have answered the concern about what will become of America if everyone who presents themselves at our border, and declares that their own country is not fit to live in, is granted asylum.  And this especially since they will be standing in either Canada or Mexico, neither of which threatens them harm.  The Left's position is understandable – 'who cares, let 'em in because that will speed up the fundamental transformation of America.'  Did you note that none of the Dem governor candidates would even consider this in their promotion of open borders?  gjr]

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  • California’s Common Core Catastrophe

    George Rebane

    In these pages we have long lamented California’s adoption of the Common Core curriculum standards, especially in the teaching of math in K-12.  H/T to longtime RR reader and discussant Greg Goodknight, who points us to an important just-published essay on Common Core performance in California since the standards were adopted in 2010 and fully implemented in 2014-15.  The piece – ‘California’s Common Core Mistake’ – written by W. Evers and Z. Wurman of the Hoover Institution contains a crisp summary of the educational catastrophe that CC has bestowed on California and the nation in preparing our young people to enter STEM careers so demanded by the AI-driven shift in required workforce skills.

    The whole mess started with California having the widely acknowledged highest math teaching standards in the nation throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  The keystone of it all was preparing the maximum number of the state’s public school students to take Algebra1 in the 8th grade.  Evers and Wurman present copious charts and graphs of the data showing the progress of California students before CC, and then the disaster that befell when the curriculum was dumbed down after CC mandated postponing Algebra1 until the 9th grade.  And who was hit the hardest by this curricular retreat? – the poor and minorities, of course.

    A cynical but totally rational explanation for this Left-promoted, government induced travesty is that the CC curriculum will surreptitiously yet reliably stifle the growth of a more numerate and critically thinking electorate, which then will be more compatible, susceptible, and compliant to the socialist nostrums that now and eternally will gush out of our one-party Sacramento in a steady stream.

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  • Scattershots – 9may18 (updated)

    George Rebane

    When I speak of the notion that ‘the Left is evil’, I am not talking about some outlier faction representing a minuscule fraction of that population.  Invoking that notion for me requires showing that a large fraction, which includes the Left’s thought leaders and intellects, is practicing a given evil policy.  Here is an example today rampant on the nation’s campuses.

    Among the several types of thought police colleges have now instituted to detect and corral wrong thinking by students, the Bias Response Teams (BRTs) on many campuses today are perhaps the most prevalent and insidious.  These outfits are set up to surreptitiously monitor students’ speech “and to encourage others to report if they have been the target or witness of a bias incident.”  To identify a bias incident, BRTs apply the gold standard that states "the most important indication of bias is your own feelings”.  What happens then varies, but all such BRT ‘investigations’ of bias and subsequent recommendations to administration, which often invoke draconian retributions, are nothing but unabashed violations of the students’ First Amendment rights. (more here)

    National Propaganda Radio took the lead this morning in fashioning a narrative to counter Trump’s latest foreign policy success in getting the fat kid to release three American hostages he’s held for the last few years.  They’re coming home with SecState Pompeo returning from his second trip there to set up the upcoming summit, another first for our President.  NPR spun the story as a potential disaster in the making since it wasn’t clear to them whether Trump had prepared any response to the fat kid’s presumed demand for some quid pro quo.  And Trump’s lack of preparation (according to their mavens) will torpedo the talks.  The desperation of the Left in these whole cloth fabrications has become a reliable source of political humor for at least half the country.

    That AI creates or destroys jobs debate is getting pretty lame.  Of course, the advent of more AI is destroying jobs in BOTH the number of job types and the absolute number of jobs, each employing one full-time-equivalent (FTE) human.  But there is a contingent of elites out there whose message is ‘Not to worry, AI will continue to create more jobs.’  That message is beyond vague, and overwhelmingly misleading.  The 30apr18 WSJ’s special section on AI featured ‘Seven Jobs Robots Will Create – or Expand’ containing the list of job types to be created/expanded.  It was meant to be a comforting article for the great unwashed and discomfited.  All the jobs listed 1) required workers on the high end of the IQ scale, and 2) in toto would require many times fewer FTE workers than those losing their jobs to AI.  Sooner or later this bamboozle will be known to all.

    The Dems are doing their best to apply double, triple, quadruple standards manufactured on the spot to suit their attempt to torpedo another Trump nomination – currently of Gina Haspel as the new CIA director.  The lady was undercover for 30+ years laying her ass on the line for our country, in a position that had nothing to do with making policy, and the liberal lamebrains are insinuating that she was the mother of waterboarding.  The progressives are putting her through a kabuki dance – ‘torture doesn’t work’ – trying to trip her up about the future use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques.  She is holding up well, promising to uphold the moral high ground of the law and not to torture captives for information.  Most of the country hopes that when push comes to shove, our intelligence agencies will do whatever straddling of the line is necessary to get timely information from enemy hostiles when national security or American lives are on the line.  If our enemies ever become convinced that the US will not squeeze, say, the raghead leaders that we capture, we will be in deep pucky.

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  • Sandbox – 4may2018

    [Well, I guess the big question du jour is whose bygone trysts are the most damning – a previous president's, verified and while in office; or the current president's, alleged and before he took office.  The French are laughing their butts off that the puritan Americans, especially the secular humanist progressives, are making such a fuss over it, to the point of impeachability.  gjr]

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  • Criminal Uses of Drones & AI

    George Rebane

    It didn’t take long for criminals and terrorists to start using affordable, commercially available drones for surveillance and even weaponized munitions delivery platforms on the battlefield.  Terrorists routinely launch their own eyes in the sky when being attacked by the militaries of countries seeking to destroy them.  In the US drones have already been used by prepared criminals to actively harass the FBI during a hostage situation.  And there’s more to come.

    With affordable face recognition AI, authorities are anxious about the launch of assassination drones in built-up areas to search out and then kill a designated human target either with a firearm or explosive.  Drug smugglers are using ever more sophisticated drone platforms to monitor and catalog border security procedures and process so as to pick the proper times and places to bring in the drug payloads.  Smaller deliveries of high value narcotics are already handled by drones from Mexico.

    Our military and law enforcement are playing catch up with counter-systems and delays caused first by the usual calcified bureaucratic assessments of ‘oh, they’ll never be able to do that’ to R&D and procurement red tape that doesn’t allow the good guys to invent and test as fast as can the terrorists and criminals.  Of course, all that government can field against the bad guys is the same stuff that they can field against law abiding citizens to keep the rest of us on our mandated straight and ever-narrowing paths.  As someone once said, ‘There is no free lunch.’  And that goes double for advanced technology.  Stand by for ram.  (more here and here)

     

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  • The 21st Century Progressive Dating Game (updated 9may18)

    Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.  Mark Twain

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 May 2018.]

    For millennia females in all cultures were shielded by their families.  Marriages were arranged for commercial or political benefit, love was optional and came later if at all.  Extra marital trysts and affairs were di rigeur at all levels of society.  Females were treated as chattel, to be kept on the shelf in a perfect condition for display until a desirable customer came along.

    In the west, the female perquisites of love and, therefore, choice began to emerge during the Renaissance in the 1400s, and blossomed during the French Enlightenment (ca 1740).  Although almost all proper marriages were still arranged, or at a minimum still required the blessing of the prospective bride’s closest senior male relative or appointed male guardian.  As the years passed, requiring the male imprimatur became totally optional in the most developed nations during the 20th century in the aftermath of the Great War.  This signaled the liberation of both partners, giving each gender the freedom to go through a semi-formal game of ‘pick and choose’, during which a number of prospective partners were given the ‘try before you buy’ treatment.  The dating game was on between boys and girls of all ages.

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 30apr18 (updated 1may18)

    Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.  Winston Churchill

    George Rebane

    George Boardman, our favorite left-leaning columnist and reader, writes a solid piece (here) in the 30apr18 Union on the effects of taxation on pot in California and our county.  He even brings up the Laffer Curve (gasp!) to illustrate how higher tax rates lower govt revenues and give rise to black markets.  As memorialized by countless citations, comments, and even vituperation in these pages, a sacrosanct tenet of progressive economic theory is that tax rates affect neither production nor consumption.  Do we have here an epiphany in the making?

    The Left is now all agog about how we can and should regulate AI – in its development and uses.  The 30apr18 WSJ interviews three “AI experts” on the matter (here) who are really policy lawyers and demonstrate little understanding of AI as they counsel little to a lot of needed regulations.  No one considers that we really need no additional regulation of productized AI because they are at best decision support systems always operating under a responsible human agent for whom all existing laws apply.  It is the human who has the power to employ AI as a tool, and then be responsible for its employment under existing laws.  Things can change later when the AIs become sentient and then sapient.  (See also the post of my recent Union column on this topic.)

    California’s progressive socialism has produced the state with the largest income inequality in the Union, and it’s on the rise as more and more middle-class wage earners are pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere.  Joel Kotkin assembles some of this alarming data (H/T to reader) to give perspective to the Left’s claim that California is the model for tomorrow’s America.  “Today, domestic net out-migration, even after declining in the early years of the recession, has more than doubled between 2013 and 2016. Even worse, according to a recent UC Berkeley study, over a quarter of Californians are considering a move, half of them out of the state, with the strongest proclivity found among people under the age of 50. And contrary to some progressive commentary, those leaving are not necessarily old or losers; according to IRS data, out-migrant households had a higher average income than those households that stayed, or of households that moved in to the state.” (more here)

    What level of neurological deficits must a person have to still believe that Mueller's year-plus investigation has turned up the slightest evidence of Trump/Russia collusion that, if it exists, would have been leaked months ago?  Why would that lot of liberal lawyers allow their fellow Dems to look like idiots as they repeatedly squawk evidence-free allegations on the media as 'proof' of Trump's guilt? (more here)

    [1may18 update]  The Mueller gauge is still on EMPTY, as the latest spate of leaks confirms.  The list of ‘questions for Trump’ first leaked to the NYT, is an embarrassing fishing expedition that seeks nothing beyond the President’s recollections of his own thoughts about this and that, guesses at what other people might have been thinking, opinions about their pre-campaign activities, notions of the meanings of this or that concept or legal construct, … .  In short, the man has found no definitive actions or occurrences involving the Trump campaign that would support the now tidal wave of lamestream allegations serving as desperate proxies for no evidence of a conspiracy with Russia to influence the 2016 election.  When this is pointed out, all the leftwing choir is able to retort can be set to Lerner and Loewe’s ‘Just you wait ‘Enry ‘Iggins’, just you wait!’

    California’s school kids have been had by the unionized public school teachers and leftwing politicians, as noted here for years.  The progressives who have created this disaster refuse to even acknowledge it, guaranteeing that the future will be no better, and probably worse, than the past.  Today 65% of our 8th graders are NOT PROFICIENT in reading, and 67% of them are NOT PROFICIENT in math.  This places CA 36th nationwide in reading and math, and that itself is another disaster story – with stats like that, how did we place so high, and still have 14 states scoring lower.  Oi weh!  (H/T to reader and more here)

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  • Sandbox – 27apr18

    [A great place to continue the discussion of America's horses.  Last man standing wins.  gjr]

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58 comments on Solar panels – the latest California calamity