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  • Norm Sauer replies to Rich Howell

    [Mr Sauer submitted the following response to Mr Howell’s 11mar17 critique of Mr Sauer’s Union column on renewing America’s public education system.  My own response to Mr Howell is found here.  gjr]

    Norm Sauer

    Rich Howell, a retired union member educator, attacked my column “Making Education Great” wherein I demonstrated by factual examples Democrat senators showing more concern for powerful teachers’ unions than poor minority children’s education in vetting Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education.

    Mrs. DeVos founded the American Federation for Children advocating all children, and especially minorities, are entitled to the same educational opportunities as their betters through school choice.  Democrat Senator Cory Hooker voted against Mrs. DeVos as Education Secretary, but in 2012 at a pro- American Federation for Children event publicly proclaimed, “I cannot . . . ever stand against a parent having options.  I am going to fight for. . choice.”

    Howell’s piece argues: “It is not poverty, per se, that makes inner city schools inferior . . . statistics for the past century (show) that achievement scores follow socioeconomic lines.”  Continuing illogically, he accuses Republicans aren’t supportive of education for all.  So, why his criticism of Mrs. DeVos and 70% of Americans who favor good educational choices for all our children?

    Rational minds boggle that Democrats like Hooker and Howell immorally support powerful teachers unions and continuation of our ghettos’ failing schools to lock minority children into poverty. 

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  • Mr Boardman’s Apples and Oranges

    George Rebane

    GeorgeBoardman“Did you know that the moon is 1/49 the size of the earth, even though it is further away?” was a memorable entry in an early issue of Mad Magazine many years ago.  I was reminded of it when reading George Boardman’s regular column in the 13mar17 Union this morning (here).  For readers unfamiliar, Mr Boardman is a left-of-center commentator, a public persona possessing some progressive propensities, one of our community’s prominent observers of the human condition, a gentleman, and a favorite local columnist of mine.

    His contribution today makes a mighty attempt to show how conservatives – led hereabouts by Congressman LaMalfa – have an incoherent, even hypocritical, ideology when it comes to wealth redistribution through food stamps.  The Mad Magazine simile launches his piece with, “Some people have portrayed Rep. Doug LaMalfa as a heartless ogre for campaigning to reduce the number of people eligible for food stamps, even though 12 percent of the families in his district fall below the poverty line. … Other people suggest LaMalfa’s a hypocrite for taking food out of the mouths of people while his family farm collected almost $5.3 million in rice and wheat subsidies from 1995 through 2013.”

    Given the widespread abuse of the federal food stamp program, one would think that a prudent reduction of the number of food stamp recipients, as sought by LaMalfa, would be a laudable and proper effort for our MoC.  But the real question is what does LaMalfa’s seeking to refine the eligibility of food stamp recipients have to do with a particular level of poverty in his district?  And then the gratuitous charge, later unabashedly contradicted, of “taking food out of the mouths of people” is somehow connected with LaMalfa’s qualification for receiving federal farm subsidies.  (My opposition to corporate subsidies, including agricultural, is a matter of record.)

    As Mr Boardman later makes clear, Congressman LaMalfa seeks only to restrict the use of food stamps by the poor and destitute so as to obtain the maximum amount of wholesome and nutritious food items possible.  However, even that is a sin according to our intrepid critic of conservatives as he quotes another progressive MoC – “You can’t deny (food stamp recipients) their freedoms to make choices without violating their pursuit of happiness.”  And this brings us to the crux of the matter that now transcends food stamps.

    I have yet to meet a progressive who can parse the nuances of welfare in a liberal democracy like ours used to be.  The progressive holds firmly to the belief that those who pay the piper have no more right to call the tune than those who merely listen.  Specifically, that people have the equal right to pursue their happiness no matter whether they themselves or someone else underwrites their pursuit.  Unfortunately, that is not the way the world works, nor is it the way that our Founders fashioned the workings of our democratic republic.  Gifts from others come with a purpose, and almost always with some proviso as to how the gift is to be used.  And that is doubly so if such ‘gifts’ from the giver are extracted at the point of a gun.

    We all know that every dollar dispensed by the state comes with a user’s manual.  It was ever thus, and the progressives’ desire to selectively abrogate such restrictions in order to curry a compliant and grateful voter is the prime cause of the social rot in our inner cities and rural hinterlands.

    Finally, Mr Boardman almost understands conservatives when he writes “conservatives have particular scorn for programs like food stamps, which they view as populated by freeloaders who are too lazy to work, and they see as another means of getting people to rely on a government check.”  To buttress this blanket assessment, he quotes my observation that liberals want to “promote raw democracy through increasing the size of compliant, ignorant, and powerless electorates (e.g. through … expanded wealth transfers …)”

    For the record, the above was drawn from my comment on the liberals’ desire to extend the voting franchise to all residents including illegal aliens which reads, “(We) recall that for years RR has called out such culture killing, vote buying practices here and elsewhere. The Left’s two-fisted approach to global autocracy is 1) grow governments of elite central planners by promoting fraudulent societal needs (e.g. ‘climate change’), and 2) promote raw democracy through increasing the size of compliant, ignorant, and powerless electorates (e.g. through politicized education, expanded wealth transfers, and now franchising non-citizen migrants). … The Left can do nothing save repeat their strong denials in the face of overwhelming evidence. But as Lenin has shown, that works.”

    In citing me, Mr Boardman totally miscommunicates my clear and oft-repeated position on the necessity of national wealth redistribution as we approach the Singularity, and as AI, along with globally competing labor, continues to grow America’s pool of the systemically unemployed.  If nothing else, I do wish that the gentleman would append a future codicil to make that clear.

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  • The Wikileaks Conundrum Resolved

    George Rebane

    Bankable stereotypes:  Government regulators are imperious, hubristic, and unbelievably ignorant in proportion to the power they wield.

    Recently friends and colleagues have asked for my takes on the Wikileaks phenomenon, especially as it applies to its release of classified information and data that our government claims will compromise our national security.  The problems such an outlet presents to governments, important personages, and corporations are complex and hard to parse in order to attempt an assessment before even beginning to consider any feasible/practical solutions.

    Here I want to focus on the recent release of 8K+ pages of CIA documents detailing the tools and some methods the CIA uses to capture every (written and spoken) communication within the US and those crossing its borders.  Andrew Napolitano has detailed these activities and their legal bases, a process that has been active since 2006.

    Before going further it’s important to understand that ‘wiretapping’ involves two major tasks – data collection/storage and monitoring.  The former can and is overwhelmingly automated, the latter is mostly automated but ultimately involves human assessment.  So for our purposes we can presume that our federal government intelligence community has over ten years of collected data on everything from emails, financial transactions, through telephone conversations.

    So here is what we know about the latest CIA leaks –

    1. Someone provided Wikileaks with the CIA documents. There is no evidence that Wikileaks has ever used its own employees or agents to obtain documents from their source (legal owner, or legal third party repository).  Wikileaks is the recipient and discretionary disseminator of such documents and/or the info/data contained in them.
    2. The latest CIA document tranche, labeled “Vault 7” by Wikileaks, was either 1) hacked remotely or 2) obtained by someone on the ‘inside’. Each means has its up and downsides.  The CIA is acting as if it was an inside job. (more here)
    3. We do know the CIA documents from Vault 7 Wikileaks has made available to the world – the ‘public tranche’. We don’t know whether/if Wikileaks has provided more information in confidence to third parties from the unknown ‘comprehensive tranche’ (more here).  Wikileaks claims that the comprehensive tranche is almost 100 times bigger than the public tranche and contains yet to be released computer codes related to the CIA hacking and monitoring tools named in the public tranche.
    4. We must presume that ALL the world’s bad actors have downloaded and are studying at least the public tranche of CIA documents – it would be imprudent to think and act otherwise. All of these governments and agencies have various capabilities to obtain, monitor, and place information on the internet.
    5. We presume the verity of the public tranche since the CIA and feds 1) have not discredited any of the released contents, and 2) continue to behave as if the release has done serious damage to their capability to surreptitiously capture and monitor the above described communications.

    In assessing the role of Mr Assange and Wikileaks in this latest release, and such previous releases, it is important to distinguish between the party or parties that purloined the Vault 7 materials and those, mainly Wikileaks, who made possible their public dispersal.  From my perch as a patriotic American, the criminals who originally stole the information and data are traitors, and their crime has definitely compromised to a TBD level our national security.  They should be pursued, caught, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

    To judge Wikileaks role we must first ask ourselves – As American citizens are we entitled to know how competent our intelligence agencies are in keeping the nation’s secrets when such mishandled secrets are already in the hands and known by our enemies, or should we continue in a state of blissful ignorance, trusting in the presumed yet non-existent capabilities of our intelligence agencies to secure their classified materials?  In short, since our government agencies derive their power from and act under the watchful eye of our elected representatives, should American voters be the only ones affected (aided/punished) by such treasonous acts and incompetencies who are then to remain deprived of that information?

    My answers to these questions are a resounding YES and NO respectively.

    Given the above understanding and analysis, I view the activities of Assange and Wikileaks as those of an amoral conduit and welcome messenger informing me about important things which bear on my wellbeing, and which are already known to my enemies.  Therefore I take all these self-righteous huffings and puffings by the lamestream media and our government as nothing but an attempted smoke screen to hide their own failures to correctly discharge the commissions under which they were formed and operate.  Shooting the messenger is the last refuge of the incompetent.

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  • Scattershots – 11mar2017 (updated 14mar17)

    Of all the Trump conundra, "for now, only one thing remains certain: the candidate whom the Republican establishment most disliked has the greatest potential in a generation to stop the progressive project and enact the agendas that the Republican establishment most wants. And that paradox has become a source of both great wonderment—and fear." Victor Davis Hanson

    George Rebane

    A “retired educator” Mr Rich Howell contributed ‘Failures of Education’ to the 11mar17 Union which the newspaper printed right below Mr Sauer’s piece (here) on the op-ed page.  Howell loses no time in taking Sauer to task opining that "unwittingly, Mr. Sauer makes a different case for the failures of education than he intends.  Had we, as educators, done better when Mr. Sauer was in school, he would have documented his "facts" and separated them from his biases.”  Apparently Howell is responding to Sauer’s 7feb17 commentary ‘The Democrats are blocking the way to make education great’ (here).

    I strongly recommend reading Mr Howell and keeping in mind his introductory admonition to consider his contribution as that from a former educator who still claims some considerable residue as a domain expert in the field.  That the man is in fact a deficiently launched and sadly closeted intellect becomes clear as one penetrates the brambles of his prose while trying to apprehend his logic which is more elusive to pursue than Carroll’s ever-late White Rabbit.  The man is apparently unaware that commentaries are formatted with an intermingling of ‘facts’ and opinions.  They are not like news reports, and most certainly not like academic papers where indeed facts are cited, but in neither case are they separated from the authors opinions (“biases”).

    As an example of Howell’s logic consider, “It is not poverty, per se, that makes inner city schools inferior. Anyone who has paid any attention at all to educational statistics for the past century knows that achievement scores follow socioeconomic lines.”  It is amazing that he destroys the thesis of his first sentence with the one that immediately follows, and then blithely goes on to demonstrate that his professional labors took place in world that did nothing to contribute to our country’s deplorable placement on the world’s academic achievement scale.  There is much more wonderment in the man’s contribution wherein he neither recognizes nor ‘separates’ his own biases from the very doubtful and unattributed ‘facts’ that are marbled into his screed.  I’m sure Mr Sauer will have a thing or two to say in his own defense.  In the meantime, please read and rejoice that Mr Howell is retired.

    The eleventh sitting for the annual TechTest will take place 9am-1pm on 1 April 2017 in the NUHS Science Lecture Hall.  I was informed this morning by the NUJHSD that someone in our community has started the nefarious rumor that TT2017 had been cancelled.  To correct this misinformation NUJHSD's Ms Barbara Ross, TT Academic Chair, did a considerable amount of phoning and emailing to the county’s high schools to debunk the rumor and set the record straight.  Over the years there has been a constant cry from our Left denigrating this merit scholarship exam as being ideologically incorrect, for no apparent reason other than that I am the test author and hold the annual seminars which precede the exam.  For the record the first of these seminars took place this morning at the test venue, and the second one will be held there next Saturday (18 March) from 10am to noon.  The ideological content of all past exams may be inspected at the SESF website (sesfoundation.org).  It takes some pretty sick puppies out there to attempt to deny STEM oriented kids an opportunity to earn scholarships through demonstrating their academic acumen.

    [12mar17 update]  New York scraps teacher literacy test, the bar is again lowered to guarantee that the state’s children will be taught from the bottom of the barrel (more here).  The NY Post pointedly asks (here) ‘Will New York open the door to teachers who can’t read?’.  The obvious answer imposed by the teachers unions is a resounding YES.  For the sake of diversity and to correct quota shortfalls, schools must now also employ the marginally literate, to be made up mostly of blacks and Hispanics.  As most adults and almost all parents know, those government employee unions have been the bane of public education for the last two generations, and have now ensconced legions of classroom teachers whose main talents consist of reliable voting behavior and timely payment of union dues.  However, such policy decisions are supported by their member minions (perversely called ‘educators’) across the country, including retired ones like our Mr Rich Howell above, who insure that the government at all levels remains the employer of last resort, demanding only that the successfully succored supplicants reliably vote for the Left’s agenda.  In short, the kids be damned, because the public schools must first serve a higher political purpose.

    [13mar17 update]  Re the House bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.

    1. Obamacare will collapse because its costs are soaring and its supplier base is diminishing due to the stifling market environment in which it must operate.
    2. 24M Americans will NOT “lose” healthcare by 2026. Some number like that may represent those who will not buy healthcare because they will no longer be forced to buy it.
    3. The price of healthcare under a more distributed market-driven law will go down just like that of any other product or service whose supply goes up while the costs of delivering it go down due to decreased regulations and increased competition. To argue otherwise is to ignore the economic history of the world.
    4. Given the abysmal record of both the OMB and the CBO, no one should allow their predictions to impact the making of public policy.

    [14mar17 update]  Socialism on parade.  Here is a video that compares the attitude of double dummy Americans speaking about socialism with what life is really like under socialism in Venezuela.  H/T to reader and correspondent.

    And now we’re all up in arms about Rep James King’s tweet in praise of Holland’s Geert Wilders, “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”  King was clearly talking about the threat to Europe’s cultures posed by hordes of unassimilating migrants, and as he repeatedly emphasized, not about rejecting assimilating immigrants of any race who come to share in our mores and values. (more here)  His drawing attention to such tautological sentiments, as borne out many times in history, was immediately and understandably pounced on by our ‘America last’ socialist contingent.  But what really illustrates our dissolution is the many chickenshit Republicans who leaped on the same bandwagon to denounce King.  What kind of rock ape do you have to be to deny that a country’s culture and demographics are the central drivers of a country’s destiny?

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  • The Progressive Swamp of Washington D.C.

    [This article was submitted by Norm Sauer, member of The Union Editorial Board, who shares his writings with RR from time to time.  This piece also appears as an op-ed column in the 11mar17 edition of the newspaper (here).  It is printed below as received.  gjr]

    Norm Sauer

    “The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters. . . He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates. . .  Resistance is left to the minority, and such as will not be convinced are crushed.” (Woodrow Wilson, 1890, ‘Leaders of Men’)

    Swamps stink from rot, and much is rotten in Washington D.C. 

    President Trump during his campaign promised to clear the swamp, and the odor of fear evidenced by the left’s delay, delegitimize, and intelligence trip wires leaked anonymously from the progressive Obama administration are adding to the stink.  The Wilson progressive Democrats’ goal is to crush Trump.

    Fighting back, President Trump this weekend called out President Obama’s reported police state tactics of wiretapping the Trump Tower and campaign personnel during his campaign for the presidency.

    The Obama White House and mainstream media outlets immediately denied Trump’s wiretapping accusation.  President Trump has asked the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate Obama’s wiretapping.

    What was reported to date?

    1. Obama wire tapped various individuals in the U. S. media, such as Fox News reporter James Rosen and members of the Associated Press in 2013, and in 2014 reporter Sharyl Attkisson, whose computer was hacked by spyware proprietary to a government agency.
    2. In June 2016 an FBI request was filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisors. The request was denied. (The Guardian)
    3. In October 2016 two unnamed counter-intelligence sources confirmed the FBI sought and was granted a FISA warrant for permission to examine the activities of U. S. persons in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia. (Heatstreet)
    4. January 2017, two sources advise the FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Trump. (McClatchy)
    5. The FBI and other agencies accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing based on wiretapped communications provided to the White House. (NY Times)
    6. “In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections. (NY Times)
    7. In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election—and about possible contacts with associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump—across the government. (NY Times)
    8. Flynn is said to have talked to Russians about sanctions before Trump took office? (NY Times, source?)
    9. On January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day, the NY Times in an article co-authored by Michael S. Schmidt, reported that wiretaps of people on the Trump team were passed to the Obama White House. The same Michael S. Schmidt reported in the NY Times on March 4, 2017, that “Trump, offering no evidence, says Obama tapped his phones.” (What?)
    10. On Sunday, March 5, 2017, Obama’s national intelligence chief, James Clapper, denied the existence of any FISA warrants and said Trump’s claims were false.

    Sound confusing?  Consider the following:

    President Trump should not be underestimated.  He has called Obama’s bluff with his tweet this weekend forcing Obama to put up or shut up about FISA warrants and wire taps.  No matter what the evidence shows Obama loses. 

    If there is a Russian connection with Trump, then Obama engaged in illegal wiretapping for partisan political purposes against an American citizen, and Obama has some serious explaining to do.  Can he say he didn’t know what was going on concerning six intelligence agencies wiretapping candidate Trump and his campaign personnel?

    On the other hand, what if there were no FISA warrants or wire taps.  If so, Obama-connected minions released false information to a complicit media which abandoned all journalistic principles and are nothing but propaganda whores.

    So, it is either a conspiracy by the Obama administration to abuse executive power and illegally target an American citizen, or it is a conspiracy by the media and the radical progressive Democratic Party to tear down the lawfully elected President of the United States and crush him and his administration.

    Either way, this promises to be one of the biggest political stories since Watergate, and probably bigger. Stay tuned, but hold your nose because the stink is going to get worse.

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  • Hatred Institutionalized

    George Rebane

    That our country has passed the tipping point from a democratic republic has been maintained and recorded in these pages for some years now.  Since the election of Donald Trump as our 45th president there has been a sea change in the national regression.  Never before have major national institutions turned so virulently against a sitting president and dedicated themselves to the destruction of his administration.  The only benefit that this assault has delivered for the rest of the country is that it has unambiguously revealed the agenda, means, methods, and memberships of the country’s agencies and institutions devoted to bringing about the global collective that was the early dream of the 19th century progressives cum communists.

    (more…)

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  • AI Will Change Everything

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 March 2017.]

    For those who have been paying attention, you know that AI or artificial intelligence will change everything.  And the word here you want to wrap your head around is ‘everything’.  I’m a lifelong professional computer systems geek who has earned his bones in pushing back the AI frontier and building smart systems; those are systems that have various forms of AI, also known as machine intelligence, imbedded in them.  Over the last 50 years AI has traveled a rocky road, now and then delivering some real pyrotechnics to catch everyone’s attention, and then falling short on promises.

    Those days are over.  During the last 20 or so years AI has quietly shed the hype and grown up, delivering real functionality in a range of systems and applications too wide to detail here.  But rest assured, your day’s labors benefit in untold ways from AI, starting with your smart phone, making big advances in healthcare, satisfying your transportation needs, managing your wealth, and keeping you employed in a hundred, mostly invisible, ways.

    Regular listeners to these commentaries know we are living in the pre-Singularity years during which machine intelligences are catching up and surpassing human intelligence in task after task.  Most of us think nothing of asking our smartphone to dial a number, send a text message, or quickly answer any of a myriad of questions.  Today many of us already have intelligent assistants in our homes supplied by companies like Amazon and Google that respond to the spoken word to deliver information, entertainment, and control certain gizmos in our house.

    For example, in our home we have Amazon’s Alexa ‘who’ is always listening and ready to do our bidding on a rapidly growing repertoire of commands and questions.  ‘She’ listens for her name, which is her wake-up word.  So now, we and several of our friends with Alexas, have to call her something else like ‘Judy’ when referring to ‘her’, else she will immediately join the conversation and try to make sense of it with unexpected results ranging from funny to annoying.  One of the ‘benefits’ of all these listening devices, like your phone, smart TV, house assistant, and even your computer, is that the government can now listen in on your conversations whenever they want.  Just yesterday the world heard more details on how that is accomplished.  How’s that for ‘1984’ already up and running in your living room?

    Industry experts who develop and track the progress of AI advise us that “in a few years everyone will be using speech recognition.  It will feel natural.  You’ll soon forget what it was like before you could talk to computers.”  The WSJ recently interviewed Andrew Ng of China’s Baidu and Neil Jacobstein of the Singularity University (here).  They are among those who agree that today’s advent of AI is like that of electrification 100 years ago, the arrival of which changed every single industry in the land.  We are now “in the phase where AI will (again) change pretty much every major industry.”

    But nothing comes for free.  Over the next 10 to 15 years we will have a transition where machines will be able to displace humans in almost every routine job available in industrialized countries.  Neil Jacobstein, who studies things like the ratio of jobs created vs jobs destroyed, tells us that “at least in the short term” that ratio could be “unfavorable”.  And according to my lights you can bet the ranch that that ratio will become even more unfavorable in the long term.

    Finally, the left-leaning Brookings Institution did a study (here) on ‘work and social policy in the age of artificial intelligence’ that predictably concluded, “Progressive tax regimes that fund effective education, income support, health and housing programs will become more important in a future where many are working fewer hours for less pay. Policymakers need to acknowledge that dwindling work in the era of AI may look entirely different from the past. Deploying efforts to prepare for that future will go a long way to mitigating the potentially far-reaching impacts of automation on millions of workers around the world.”  And it has already done that for 90M of America’s workers no longer in the workforce.

    So pay attention and be prepared, the smart machines are already here, more are coming in droves.  And sadly, there are no “effective education” programs that will enable the less intelligent among us to learn skills to earn enough for a good quality of life.  Any feasible solution will require fewer people and more wealth redistribution.

    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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  • Sandbox – 8mar17

    [Does anyone remember the last time that the Congressional Budget Office, or for that matter the WH’s Office of Management and Budget, got any projection, estimate, or prediction right?  And by ‘right’ I mean literally ‘close enough for government work’.  Now people are hyperventilating that Trumpcare may go forward without anyone knowing its vaunted ‘CBO score’.  As a comparison consider how Obamacare went forward also without its CBO score.  And when it finally came, the information turned out somewhere between fraudulent to totally useless.  The CBO then whined that the ACA was way too complex and too poorly laid out to do a proper scoring job.  My own politically unrealistic druther would be to just stand back and let Ocare crash and burn under the full and continuous glare of cameras and klieglights.  The current Repub replacement will generate more heat than light, besides becoming the much welcomed new narrative of the Left – ‘Obamacare would have worked given time (the notorious Gruber on NPR this morning), but now they destroyed it and replaced it with Trumpcare that has all these (insert litany here) problems.  We need to go back and set up a single payer system like all those EU countries have.’  And how do you refute any of this?  For the inquiring mind: healthcare will become ‘affordable’ only when the regulatory barriers for delivering it and its medications are drastically lowered, while concurrently addressing the entitlements gorilla.  Overarching solution – make the economy roar, else NOTHING will work.  gjr]

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  • No Plausible Means in the Lamestream’s Inflated Russian Bubble

    George Rebane

    This morning NPR again alerted the nation to the manufactured Russian threat, still very much a work in process.  They devoted the major segment of their Morning Edition to “reviewing” Russia’s impact on last year’s election by interviewing two ‘experts’ who turned out to be another pair of pot boiling reporters.

    We were again breezily informed of the “general agreement” that Russia was the hacker even though “no direct evidence” has yet surfaced to support that.  But the general conclusion spoonfed the listener was that there is indeed something to the “allegation of collusion” between the Trump campaign and whatever nefarious acts by the Russians that NPR was busily constructing in your imagination.  Again, the “no evidence yet” from “ongoing investigations” was the quick codicil wedged into the spray of incidental and immaterial “what we know” items.

    The whole affair was another professional hit job that concluded with the Flynn-Sessions ‘double tap’, as if those immaterial conversations really did serve to enable and coordinate the now popularly acknowledged Russian attack on our democratic system.  Here we glossed over the fact that no evidence whatsoever exists to condemn AG Sessions in any wrongdoing during his very routine contacts with the Russian ambassador (lamestream’s “spy master”), or mention that the tapped Flynn telecons contained nothing that could be considered culpable.

    The only way that the Trump administration can be convicted in this continental kangaroo court is if the rules of evidence can been reduced to the requirement for a preponderance of allegations, innuendo, and emotions.  However, to date that appears to be more than sufficient, given the agenda of the leftwing lamestream and their Democrat handlers in the federal government.  But here’s what everyone continues to miss.

    There can be no reasonable discussion, let alone accusations, of Russia impacting America’s election until some plausible means are at least identified by which they could have accomplished anything to materially affect the election’s outcome.  And this is what no one (apparently including RR readers) in the land seems to grasp.  Without plausible means the whole affair is moot.

    As an example, consider Bugsy Jones paroled from prison with the proviso that he not wander more than a mile from his designated residence without permission.  Bugsy’s longtime protagonist Mugsy wants him back in prison and concocts a story of how Bugsy violated his parole – he accuses Bugsy of having circumnavigated the moon last Wednesday night, a trip taking him more than a mile from home.  As evidence Mugsy points to the science fiction paperbacks that Bugsy has been seen reading and from which he must have gotten the idea.  In this case we can be fairly certain that the parole board will dismiss Mugsy’s allegations on their face for the obvious reason that Bugsy had no plausible means by which he could have accomplished the forbidden circumnavigation.

    And yet, no one seems to be able to either identify, let alone connect the same dots in the ongoing Russian imbroglio.  I know why the Left does not want to bring up the question of ‘plausible means’, but I have no idea why no one on the Right (save possibly Limbaugh) has introduced this overwhelmingly important factor into the national debate about Trump’s supposed love of Russia and Hillary’s disastrous defeat at the polls.

    Postscript: To really understand this baseless and fraudulent attack on Trump we need to recall the national yawn that China’s bought and paid for love affair with President Clinton elicited in 1996.  All governments do their best to influence the internal affairs of other governments when the opportunity exists and it serves their national interests.  The educated know it was ever thus.  Holman Jenkins reprises President Clinton’s role (here) in how the Democrats accepted more than $2M from China to support his and fellow Democrats’ re-elections.  

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  • A Sea Change at MIM

    George Rebane

    Last night Jo Ann and I attended an all-Beethoven concert at the Amaral Center.  It was the launch concert of a new series put on by Music in the Mountains that featured the Sacramento Philharmonic and violin virtuoso Chee-Yun Kim.  Those who arrived early got to hear MIM Artistic Director Pete Nowlen detail the five concerts of the series spread over the coming twelve months.

    The Amaral was set up as usual for such concerts with a large foyer/reception area with tables and chairs featuring two refreshment services – one for coffee, cookies, and other delights for the more innocent palates; the other offering flagons of sterner stuff for those seeking to make their pre-concert tete-a-tetes a bit more free flowing.  When the lights flashed and we all ambled to our seats, the hall was pretty much filled with a noticeable sprinkling of younger families with children (hope springs eternal) there to enjoy an evening of world class music right here in River City.  And that, dear reader, is the real news about this season.

    MIM has negotiated an agreement with the SacPhil, joined by internationally recognized soloists, to become a regular part of Nevada County’s classical music scene, and I’m told this is a very rare arrangement in our land for communities of our size to attract and feature such a high quality of music performance.  Kudos go out to MIM’s Executive Director Dr Mieko Hatano and Artistic Director Mr Pete Nowlen for designing the season and making it all happen.

    Last night’s performance opened with Beethoven’s 4th Symphony (B-flat minor, Op 60) written in 1806.  The orchestra was conducted by Maestro (Maestra?) Michelle Merrill who did an outstanding job bringing out the best that SacPhil can deliver, and showed the ease with which the orchestra could produce the unbelievably rich sounds of the various instruments and execute the complexities that Beethoven poured into the work often referred to as the composer’s “symphonic ideal”.

    After the intermission we were treated to Beethoven’s D-major Violin Concerto (Op 61, 1805).  Frankly I have never paid that much attention to this violin concerto when delivered on some audio medium.  I always thought of it as basic Beethoven and let its strains fade into an inconsequential musical wallpaper as I went about my other work.  Well, after a patience demanding sans soloist intro by the orchestra, that philistinian attitude was dashed when Ms Kim put bow to the strings of her “Ex Strauss” Stradivarius (Cremona, 1708).  Seeing that virtuoso violinist live on stage bring out what I never thought a violin could do was indeed a most enjoyable and almost startling eye/ear opener which also gave me an added appreciation of Ludwig’s genius.  The most startling revelation came when Chee-Yun Kim teased out with utmost precision and tonal control the conclusion of an arpeggio that must have ended under a generous handful of pianissimos, and yet we heard every note.

    After a well-deserved standing ovation and a number of curtain calls Ms Kim played a virtuosic arrangement of the Beatles' ‘Yesterday’ that contained beautiful new harmonies and also sounded as if the melody line was accompanied by another violin.  We were enthralled.

    OK, enough gushing, now it’s time to tell you what’s ahead in this year’s MIM classical subscription series.  On 2-3 June 2017 the MIM Festival Chorus performs a collection of choral works at Peace Lutheran that includes one of my very favorites, Morton Lauridsen’s ‘Dirat-on’.

    On 13 October 2017 the SacPhil returns to perform Brahms Symphony No. 1 and Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 at the Amaral Center.

    Our holiday (nee Christmas) concert at the Amaral Center on 9-10 December 2017 features the MIM Orchestra and Festival Chorus delivering a festive mix of carols, classics, and more.

    Then please prepare yourself for the unhacked Russian spectacular on 26 January 2018 at the Amaral Center that features Glinka’s ‘Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture’, Mussorsgky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, and, seatbelts fastened please, Rachmaninoff’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 3’.

    Further details about the performances and how to subscribe to the entire series can be found on the MIM website.

    OK, that’s about all I can muster about my favorite brand of music, cool sounds that have been around for much longer than the forgettable tunes that pour over us by the thousands, and then are quickly replaced by the ever more titillations du jour.  We must remember that something is classical when it endures with time.  There must be a reason, you’d think.

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