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[Time to revisit the national education scene with the just published critique Common Core by Nicholas Tampio (review here), and also enjoy the comedy of ‘Doomsday Climate Scenarios Are a Joke’ by Oren Cass (more here). Of course we can also re-circle the Trump and Stormy imbroglio a few more times. gjr]
George Rebane
There’s more to be said about President Trump’s anticipated meeting with NK’s Ugly Fat Kid (aka Kim Jong Un), the murderous dictator who today runs the world’s largest forced labor camp in the world. That Trump got the UFK off the dime and issue an invitation is laudable in itself, and has really miffed all the professional diplomats who for over more than half century have gotten nowhere with that workers’ paradise. Actually, it’s been even less of an accomplishment than that; the pros have gotten us into a situation where today the UFK’s about to get a deliverable nuclear weapon that can reach the continental US.
The big deal now in preparing for the meeting is how do we make sure that Trump doesn’t wind up circling that Bamboozle Barn one more time. Trump’s unorthodox and straightforward approach should work for him in this regard. The conduct of the meeting should be on an announced no-bullshit basis. Everyone knows that America (and others?) want to have the UFK give up his nukes program, and that should be as a precondition for whatever else we are willing to give in return. Rebane Doctrine calls for such negotiations to be done on an open declaration of interests basis (cf the Harvard Negotiation Project).
Our interests are known to the world, but the UFK’s not so much – in fact, he really can’t openly declare them for fear of getting a bullet through the back of his head or worse. (Recall he fed an entire family of a feared high-level muktimuck to hungry dogs in an arena where the rest of the NK leadership was forced to watch.) The UFK knows that he is the most despised human being on earth today, and he’s got a tiger by the tail. He’s finally run into a US leader who may actually launch an attack of black helicopters preceded by a massive fleet of stealthies taking out his SAM installations, followed by a squadron of C-17s dropping MOABs on the artillery positions overlooking Seoul. In any event, he won’t survive such a scenario because then he will more than likely fall in a quick coup led by his generals who will have nothing to lose and everything to gain with his sudden departure. And that kind of thinking defines the UFK’s interests – his own and his family’s survival.
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People want to have their soul in the game. In that sense, decentralization and fragmentation, aside form stabilizing the system, improves people's connection to their labor. N. Taleb
George Rebane
‘Trump’s Hoover Temptation’ appears to be real and, to me, scary. The only thing that would keep the world from spiraling into another Smoot-Hawley abyss is that today countries have many ad hoc trade relationships with each other such as the new TPP from which the US withdrew. But we’re still the economic gorilla on this planet, so it’s hard to tell what will really happen. My own hope is that Trump has the guts to replace Gary Cohn with some equivalent anti-tariff voices like Kudlow, Laffer, or Graham. The Dems, of course, are cheering on Trump’s tariffs, hoping that they will cause enough economic chaos to dent the GOP’s chances in November. For today's Dems it's always party above country.
[The corruption of the FBI is detailed by former federal prosecutor and US attorney Joseph Digenova in the feb2018 issue of Imprimis. Entitled ‘The Politicization of the FBI’, this summary of the 2016-17 ongoings with the Clinton and Trump campaigns is the most clear, concise, and complete recounting I have read. It totally corroborates the arguments presented and debated here during the indicated period. I strongly urge you to read it. H/T also to a prominent RR commenter for beating me to the punch in his alerting our readers to this piece. gjr]
George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 7 March 2018.]
California is a mess. There is not enough time in this short commentary to describe all the ways in which our state has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, but I will attempt to summarize some of the more visible areas. And the scariest thing for our future is that most Californians don’t have a clue about the dire straits of our state. California has been effectively under one party control for so long that in this election year most people have forgotten there are alternatives.
Let me start by pointing out some facts that you may have missed because our media has also been flying in tight formation with the architects of our multiple maladies, and they aren’t about to point a finger at all the things that have gone wrong on their watch. Because if you do find out, then you’ll start asking all kinds of questions, and pretty soon you’ll vote the bums out of office. Then where would they be?
If you cannot see the irony in having a gun ban enforced by men with guns, then you fail to understand why the Second Amendment was written in the first place.
George Rebane
The NYT publishes another exhibit of yellow journalism with an article (here) that leaves the naïve reader convinced that ‘assault rifles’, like the Parkland massacre kind, fire special bullets that cause “ghastly” wounds not experienced with normal hunting rifles. They show X-rays of 223 bullets smashing bones and quote surgeons unfamiliar with war wounds being astounded by what a high velocity bullet does to meat and bone. The truth of the matter is that regular civilian hunting rifles at calibers above 223 (5.56mm) firing higher velocity, more massive, soft-nosed bullets (banned in warfare) do much more damage than the AR-15 civilian versions firing the standard full metal jacketed bullets. All this is lost in the NYT article, the main purpose of which is to promote the removal of AR-15 style rifles from civilian hands. The reader unfamiliar with firearms is totally bamboozled by this latest dose of bullcrap from the now totally propagandized Gray Lady.
Respected ecologist Robert May (The Perfect Bet, 2018) showed that tightly connected, large complex systems are not stable. (That’s why they don’t exist in nature.) His corollary was that the larger the ecoosyctem, the less stable it is. Question – can anyone connect the dots for what this says about a centrally planned, comprehensively administered, large socio-economic system? While always welcome, progressives may be excused from participating in this little exercise.
Over the years RR commenters have divided themselves into two more or less distinct groups with how they support their debate arguments. There are those who cite sources that present data which can be factually checked, and those who present sources that contain nothing more than restatements of their own fact-free allegations, thereby claiming that two sources of identical allegations are all that’s needed to confirm the verity alleged. For the former, I draw your attention to commenters who cite colleges that now include leftwing propaganda subjects in their STEM curricula in support of the thesis that our institutions of higher education have been compromised along many dimensions of pedagogy. These citations appeared in the recent Sandbox and repeated here and here.
Trump’s tariffs are an economic policy screw-up. I know I’ve said this before, but it really irks me that he is now materially denting his presidency beyond whatever sins he has committed in his Twitter account. Team Trump should know better than most, that you get less of whatever you tax more. Higher taxes have never increased the supply of anything, and here Trump is attempting to increase America’s supply of jobs. No one in his administration can explain why seeking to guarantee (not increase) the existence of 140,000 metals sector jobs will not jeopardize and reduce some of the 6.5M collateral jobs that depend on the current low prices of metals available to American manufacturers. The bottom line here is that Trump’s tariffs will not bring more jobs to the steel and aluminum industries which are going balls out to automate and make better quality, cheaper metals at higher volumes. An example of all this is seen in how a small steel mill in Austria (that global steel producing powerhouse) is able to stay competitive. Hasn’t anyone in the WH studied comparative advantage, after all, they’re supposed to be Republican capitalists? (more here)
Our George Boardman writes in the 5mar18 Union on gun control (here), and properly argues that existing gun laws should be enforced before we go willy-nilly into making another batch that ratchet us toward gun confiscation. But then he can’t let well enough alone, and goes off the rails with a proposal to jail the victims of theft when their guns are stolen and subsequently used in crimes (which he correctly points out is the prime source of criminals’ guns). Imagine if we took the Boardman Principle and applied it to automobiles, prescription medicines, household chemicals, plastic bags, sharp cutlery and tools, and who knows what else that could be stolen and criminally used. In America storing something in one’s house (the owner’s vaunted ‘castle’ according to English common law) should be sacrosanct on its face, no matter how it is therein secured. Your house is already supposed to be a secure facility against thievery and robbery; we establish and support local constabularies to make it so, and their failure to accomplish this should not be cause to also criminalize the victim. Government’s reach into the home to dictate further how things in there should be disposed has already put us on a slippery slope on the return road to serfdom. Mr Boardman seeks to don the mantle of reason with his helpful nostrums to surreptitiously decrease our rights to property ownership. The Left has never accepted that you own something only to the degree that you can dispose of it as you will.
[8mar18 update] NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten reports on another big government screw-up that is kicking our private parts from over 50 years ago. In his 'The Curious History of Chain Migration' he takes us on a short trip on memory lane to illustrate "a classic case of unintended consequences".
[The lamestream is now reduced to reporting on every Russian who ever had anything to do with US, or who traveled to America and in some way dealt with Trump or let his shadow fall on a Trump property. What does that say to the work product of special prosecutor Mueller after all these months? And we are still being informed that Russia has meddled in our elections, and will likely do so again – as if we just fell off the pumpkin wagon, or was it they who were so unfortunate? gjr]
George Rebane
Everyone now knows how the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School became very visible gun control and confiscation advocates after the massacre at their school which also highlighted massive government failures, cowardice, and LE incompetence. The students were able to organize themselves into several functional and mobile teams that confronted the media, legislatures, and selected politicians all the way to the White House. It was an amazing feat for young people with no previous knowledge of the involved intricacies required to pull off such media-wise and nationally prominent activism. Or did they really organize ‘themselves’??
They did not. And it’s another giant piece of evidence that the lamestream media is composed of legions of yellow journalists. A little bit of questioning would instantly have revealed that the students became the convenient and compliant pawns of several professional progressive propaganda organizations, politicians, and liberal media outlets, that leaped into action, apparently while the 17 murder victims’ bodies were still warm. Among these were The Miami Herald, Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Women’s March, Michael Bloomberg, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, American Federation of Teachers, Broward County’s teacher’s union, … (even the usually astute WSJ fell for it). This included immediate and huge donations from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney, which should have tipped off anyone paying attention that there were bigger movers and shakers involved than just a bunch of kids suddenly being on site and on message just as if the pros had organized the whole thing. Well, it turns out that they did.
David Hines asks, 'Why Did It Take Two Weeks To Discover Parkland Students’ Astroturfing?' H/T to a sharp-eyed reader.
[update] Ever hear of Obama's PROMISE program in schools where undisciplined students were managed under federal guidelines that promoted the schools internal handling of cases that should have involved the police. The whole program is based on the tenet prescribed in the PROMISE manual – “This approach focuses on the situation as being the problem rather than the individual being the problem.” You can get the whole snootful on this feel-good progressive program (here) that also nurtures development of school shooters like Nikolas Cruz.
George Rebane
We have covered a lot of left/right asymmetric reporting on RR. Calling such journalism ‘asymmetric’ perhaps substitutes a kinder word for what today has come to be called ‘fake news’. One area that has institutionalized fake news is the way our lamestream media report the ‘science’ of climate change. Starting with the leftwing leading lights like the New York Times, we are now getting reports from former reporters for the Gray Lady that the topics it covers has to support what is internally called ‘the narrative’. All reporters are automatically tuned in to that editorial invisible hand, for which they then create the conforming copy to sustain the narrative.
The most recent, from the legion of examples, involves research by climate physicists Peter Cox, Mark Williamson, and Chris Huntington of Exeter University and the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology. Their work first and foremost admits to the uncertainties involved in predicting climate parameters such as temperature, but also significantly narrows the range of predicted temperature increase, most noticeably removing the possibility of the upper hysterical values of +4.5C and above from consideration and making increases greater than +3.4C highly improbable. Their report has been buried by the lamestream climate science reporters. WSJ’s Holman Jenkins reports more on this here.
The Cox et al study again confirms that the best kept secret about climate science is that this domain of knowledge has not progressed very much – “This 40-year lack of progress is no less embarrassing for being thoroughly unreported in the mainstream press.” A litmus test for advancing science in any domain is that its continuously refined theoretical models generate results with ever smaller uncertainty bounds. This has not happened for general circulation models used for long-range climate forecasting. One reason is that the GCMs incorporate various specific climate and weather processes, most of which are poorly understood and therefore continue contributing to the error of the overall outputs.
As I have reported for years, the earth’s CO2 cycle remains, as confirmed in a recent commentary in the prestigious Nature, “an intractable problem”. For example, no one can answer the basic question “By how much will Earth’s average surface temperature go up if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled?” All we know is that the GCMs have gotten it wrong using historical data. And no one in the lamestream mentions this because it doesn’t fit their narrative, which is to support ‘fundamentally transformative’ changes not only in public policies but also in the fundamental forms and structures of governance. (I again refer you to Agenda21.)
But the skewed ideas about climate change is just one of many areas where the lamestream and their blindered consumers dispense a constant stream of errors and lies. The stats on the political leanings of the nation’s broadcast, print, and online newsrooms has been extremely well documented in multiple studies. And the claim that no matter a journalist’s personal ideology, their professional work product comes out fair and balanced. Nobelist Kahneman and Tversky (q.v.) gave lie to this bullshit decades ago, and it is regularly reinforced by academics and students of decision-making like in Annie Duke’s recent Thinking in Bets (2018). The bottom line here is that confirmation bias is and has been endemic in humans. In simpler times this kind of thinking had a survival value; in more complex times it also leads to narrative-directed reporting.
One can reasonably argue that the impact of this asymmetry affects leftwingers much more than those of the Right. The leftist reader’s confirmation bias is continuously supported by the lamestream, and a negligible fraction of these bother to find out what appears in the more conservative outlets (this is also confirmed by the displayed one-sided knowledge of RR’s leftwing commenters). The rightwing readers have no choice but to be bathed in lamestream reporting because of its sheer preponderance. These readers must go to relatively few outlets that have a different and usually more complete slant on what is going on. Why more complete? Because they also have to report on the output that forms the overwhelming coverage to which their own news consumers have been exposed. The lamestream’s coverage clearly indicates that they have no such concerns about their audiences.
We conclude this observation with yet another current omission in the lamestream media about school shootings and gun control that does not fit the obligatory narrative. I refer you to the study by Dr James Alan Fox, professor of criminology, law, and public policy at Northeastern University. The study contradicts that school shootings are on the rise, and one of its main findings is that “the number of students killed in schools today is one-fourth what it was in the early 1990s – a somewhat surprising fact given the 24/7 media hysteria surrounding atrocities like Parkland.” (more here) In short, there is not an epidemic of school shootings when compared to historical data. Now how many liberals would run across a report like that?
