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Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. Matthew 1:23
George Rebane
A merry and joyous Christmas wish from the Rebanes to all who read these pages – God’s annual promise reissued. And to that we add the fervent hope that your new year will be healthy and fulfilling.
George Rebane
By all accounts according to the progressives’ definition I am an islamophobe. My apprehension of Islam’s colonization and eventual conquest of the west has been well documented in these pages. The ill-read and uneducated leftwingers have taken such apprehensions to be the outrageous screeds of a minority back country white knuckledraggers. It is hard to tell whether progressives ignore the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or are just so narrowly exposed to the world that they only witness such attitudes in their tight little neck of the woods. Base stupidity should also not be ruled out as giving rise to their attacks on islamophobia.
Last night Fox News interviewed former Air Force psychologist Dr James Mitchell who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after 9/11. He has studied Islam’s jihad and jihadis and explains his findings in his most recent book Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terroists Trying To Destroy America. KSM's hubris on how Islam will conquer the west corroborates point by point the arguments that I and others have offered over the past years. And according to the jihadist, the gateway to Islam's ultimate victory is through the west's blind adherence to political correctness which renders effective defense impossible. KSM appropriately attributes to Allah his spreading this mind-numbing ideology across the west. The short summary of his book is that he corroborates every aspect of RR’s documented position on Islam, its intents, and plans to achieve them.
A correspondent and RR reader sent me the link to FN’s interview with Dr Mitchell. As a first person account of official interviews with KSM, the ‘mastermind of 9/11’, and other Islamists, it is definitely worth your time to see this short video.
[Dr Anna Haynes appears to have done a revamp of NC Voices. It's humorous composition and structure viz Right and Left are stronger than ever – actually it admits to no leftwing content even though the site literally overflows with it under headings like 'General', 'Climate/H2O', 'Pelline', 'Personal Growth', … . And now the off page 'Right Wing' column has its listed posts per blog reduced to the last three. Oh well, even though it's nice to still be listed, I'm having a hard time understanding why Dr Haynes even tolerates our presence at all since without us all of her content can be represented as the heartfelt outpourings of a politically correct, consistent, and harmonious middle. gjr]
Feedback is the virtue that turns democracy with all its vices, into the least-worst political system. (And) feedback is turning the incalculable Trump into a tractable, potentially successful president. Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
George Rebane
The latest Muslim terrorist attacks in European cities continue to change the cultural landscape of western civilization. Ground level attacks in public spaces by fellow pedestrians or vehicular terrorists are becoming the new norm for Islamists. Western governments, including our own, have not made much progress in preventing such attacks or limiting their carnage after the attack is launched. During our tour of several central European cities last May we saw that ‘best practices’ still consisted of police and militia with submachine guns patrolling amongst the civilians on streets, squares, and parks popular with both tourists and local citizenry (pictured below). From a technical and economic standpoint, that kind of a solution is both very expensive and demonstrably ineffective.
It seems to me that today’s technology offers a better way to perform large area surveillance and terror suppression in urban areas. To outline the concept for such a Large Area Surveillance and Suppression (LASS) system, think of the thousands of security cameras which already record our every movement once we leave our homes. A better surveillance network of remotely directed cameras with appropriate optics (e.g. including night vision) and co-axial infrared laser designators can be mounted on appropriate rooftops surrounding the defended public space. These cameras are remoted to central command and control centers in the city. Their image outputs are monitored there both manually and by AI algorithms trained to do certain kinds of detection, classification, and tracking of both individuals and vehicles. When a potentially threatening pedestrian becomes a ‘person of interest’ he is designated with the IR laser and tracked until his behavior either lowers his threat level or until he is neutralized.
The networked surveillance subsystem is integrated with a neutralization subsystem that consists of multiple weapon stations which can project both deadly and disabling force. Among the inventory of such stations would be remotely operated sniper rifles, 20mm cannon (to rapidly disable rogue vehicles), and various kinds of non-lethal projectiles, riot gases, and visibility denying smoke. These remotely operated LASS weapon stations would be located so that their overlapping fields of fire completely cover the defended area. LASS would, of course, be integrated and coordinated with existing ground level patrols which are then comprised of much lower staffing levels, and rely on mobile fast response units (e.g. SWAT and EMR) that deploy once LASS has either identified and/or engaged the bad guy(s). (That more concrete and steel barriers will be erected to impede high speed vehicular mayhem in pedestrian areas is a given.)
In any event, the idea here is to field a system that uses the latest technology to surveil and suppress large areas of pedestrian traffic in a cost effective manner. Such a LASS would have the ability to detect, concurrently screen and track tens of people who might pose a risk, while minimizing both the security headcount on the ground and the deadly effects (both intended and collateral) of an attack by a timely and precise engagement that avoids horizon plane suppression fires. To determine the exact system design and parameters would require some noodling. But I believe the LASS concept is worth a detailed look because what is there now does not work well, and there is no evidence that we will do anything else to limit the number of radicalized ragheads among us. Welcome to another step back for western civilization.
(Spoiler Alert: This ought to loosen some more progressive histrionics. And perhaps some creative alternative solutions to minimize terrorism by, say, removing/covering all visible Christian symbols in our land and having women wear hijabs. If that is not enough, then revoking all females’ drivers licenses and launch public stoning of those accused of LGBTQ… persuasions can be tried next.)
[22dec16 update] Given the usual anti-gun, anti-2ndAmend comments for which the above post is progressives’ dog whistle, I thought it relevant to highlight the figure that one of our commenters below again draws our attention – the powerful message it conveys has already been featured in these pages.
George Rebane
Voice from behind the curtain – ‘Pay no attention to the correlation.’
[update] A reader has pointed out that the above crime map is inaccurate and cites and article in the 16nov16 WaPo (here) that claims to present better data in the map below. The article’s conclusion is italicized.
The violent crime map shows clusters of counties with high rates in South Carolina, Florida, the Memphis area and New Mexico. Several of the clusters are in rural areas where a small number of crimes may generate a relatively high crime rate because there are few people living there. … The latest data available is from 2014. Reported crime rates for some large cities have gone up over the past two years. … The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data generates the county-level crime summaries from FBI data that is reported by police agencies. In rural areas, a county may have one police agency. But large urban counties may have several cities with their own police departments, as well as county-wide agencies. And statewide police agencies may also handle reported crimes. The NACJD adjusts the data for agencies that only report for part of the year and distributes incidents from statewide agencies to local counties by population.
With this conclusion and upon closer examination of the WaPo map, I will let my opening statement stand.
Nevada County Voices has dropped RR from its community website listings. Since its inception RR has enjoyed coverage by having its recent posts listed and linked in the site’s ‘Right Wing’ column. The reason for the change is not apparent, especially since RR has always lauded this informative site edited by Dr Anna Haynes. To be frank, the site and its editor are definitely of the Left persuasion – for example, there is no equivalent listing of ‘Left Wing’ sites. Apparently all the remainder of the listed sites have no ideological slant or bias that is apparent to Dr Haynes. Perhaps the removal of RR is part and parcel of the local Left’s perennial call to silence my public voice and involvement as part of their overall crusade to deny opposing opinions and viewpoints a place in the community forum. In any case it was fun while it lasted, and we will continue featuring Nevada County Voices in the Our Links panel on the right. [update] Oops! My tears flowed too soon; RR has been reinstated in its usual slot. Now the only nit I have left to pick is my envy of fellow blogger Mr Todd Juvinall (Sierra Dragon’s Breath) who enjoys having the last ten of his posts being listed while the rest of us are limited to five max. Oh well, Anna always did like Todd the best.
RoboVote – a new tool for capturing group preferences and making group decisions. For years I have designed, purveyed, and used customized decision support systems, especially the kind that help extract useful information from groups of people engaged in some common pursuit. Recently a team of AI researchers at Harvard released RoboVote (more here and here), a free AI-based, online tool to aid in performing such functions in an optimal manner. I am recommending its consideration to organizations to which I belong. Take a look at it and you will want to do the same.
[update] The WSJ reports “U.S. Factories Are Working Again; Factory Workers, Not So Much. Donald Trump plans to reignite industrial job growth, but many low-skilled former factory workers are frozen out.” As has been reported here for years, the return of manufacturing to the US does not mean that an equivalent (to previous years) jobs will be returning. Does no one understand the serious nature of growing systemic unemployment with the acceleration of technology? Why is this always a surprise and a recent discovery by some maven or other?
[19dec16 update] Today’s Union informs us that we now have a permanent group of local progressives organized to become the perennial protesters of the Republican controlled (but liberal bureaucratized) federal government. They call themselves ‘Resistance U.S.’, formed to “promote progressive values and ideas”, and appear visibly uninformed about our Constitution and what happened last month. For example, as a local embodiment of Moonbeam’s Minions, they seek to “Restore Democracy”, a form of government on these shores that never was and wisely was never intended. We will revisit their demonstrations from time to time as they successfully illustrate what divides us. (more here)
[21dec16 update]
George Rebane
This evening the latest report from Fox News on the Michigan recount just came in, and I’m sad to say that progressives have been right all along that requiring voter IDs diminishes the minority voice and vote. The latest piece of evidence comes in from Detroit, a solid minority leftwing city under Democrat rule forever. It again turns out, as in many such elections in urban ghettos, that voter IDs would have lowered that city’s black vote and diminished the voice of another minority community. The data supporting that conclusion is beyond compelling.
You see, the just completed recount unequivocally showed that Detroit had tallied more votes than the number of its resident voters. If Michigan had instituted a voter ID law, then all those extra votes would never have been counted, and the aspirations of those African-American folks would have been suppressed more than ever.
Facts are facts, and RR hereby admits the error of its ways in claiming that blacks would get more votes in jurisdictions where you had to document your eligibility to vote, and that you had not voted anywhere previously. That said, we will now gather our wits, reflect on our error, and henceforth do our best to soldier on.
[As the predictable was predicted, the world’s bad guys are having their last 'way' with our globally recognized weak and incompetent outgoing president. Brazenly taking our submersible was just the most recent case of incoming international insults. Few note that the Chinese didn’t even need to steal the ‘drone’, for stealing means to take something surreptitiously so as to deny the owner an opportunity to defend his property. Here the Chinese just took the damn thing in front of our eyes while giving us the finger with an ‘Up yours!’, knowing that we neither could nor would defend our property. These same moves are intended to also set up tests for President Trump in order to quickly reveal what kind of leader America has now elected. gjr]
George Rebane
The Russian Hacking Pot keeps on bubbling without any clear resolution in sight. Our Left laments Hillary’s loss, and is now relieved to have found a deep dark reason for it – Russia colluded with Trump to hack her illegal server and the DNC, put the damning emails in the public domain through Wikileaks, and thereby suck away enough votes to give Trump an electoral landslide. Moreover, no matter how badly the emails reflected on the doings of Hillary and the DNC, since Russia is accused of ‘stealing’ them, their content should not have been allowed to become a factor in the election. And Trump did a dastardly deed by encouraging us all to consider what was in the emails.
In the olden days it was the journalists job to dig up, cite, and publicize bad stuff on public figures; not any more. Today journalists must consider how the bad stuff came to light before they report it to the public, since now they have a higher calling given that almost all of them are leftwing agenda driven. Or should they?
All agree that countries should not seek to affect the outcome of other countries’ elections. All with 3-digit IQs know that countries have practiced such interventions since forever to serve their national interests. And in this case Russia is accused of doing that by revealing truth about the parties involved in the election. But who are the accusers?
This morning NPR did another Trump hit piece by interviewing two ‘intelligence journalists’ – a senior NPR reporter and an academic – who were asked why no one knows who in our federal government is blaming the Russians, and why has there been no evidence cited or presented to support the accusation. The ensuing discussion was again most revealing of the liberal mind.
It turns out that the best that can be done about supporting the report that our intelligence community has identified Russia as the guilty party is a surreptitious interview with a ‘highly placed intelligence official’ who is not authorized to reveal such information to the press. This unnamed ‘Deep Throat’ was characterized as a brave individual who risked his career and perhaps more in causing the unauthorized leak. The NPR journalist assured listeners that ethics did not permit her to reveal neither the leaker nor the evidence, but that she did her best to confirm what she had learned (no claim of confirmation, just best efforts), and therefore all should accept her reporting at face value because, after all, she is an ethical journalist.
Due to the recent history of journalistic malfeasance – aka incidents of lying and faking news – journalists are correctly held in low esteem by the news consuming public; actually their credibility is somewhere below that of politicians and lawyers. Nevertheless, stiff upper lip and all that, the country is being asked to accept on the word of journalists that not only that the Russians did it, but also the follow on impact of what was done.
Now I have to admit that this tack may be as effective as that plied on the issue of climate change. There are many dots between accepting that climate changes and that we should implement economy killing policies to reverse preventable catastrophic global warming. The American public today assumes that all those dots are naturally connected as soon as someone starts talking about being a ‘climate change denier/skeptic’ or ‘accepting the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists’ on the matter. In short there is no rational discussion of the issue simply because reasoning about it is beyond the ken of most people.
While the Russian hacking issue is not as complex, it nevertheless does include such arcane factors as ‘in the public domain’, ‘damning content’, ‘authenticity’, ‘journalistic standards’, ‘ethics’, ‘electoral impact’, ‘anonymous sources’, ‘US intelligence community’, … . These are perhaps simpler dots to connect, but there are still too many of them for most folks to handle. (This can be confirmed by some of the entries in the comment streams of recent RR posts.)
And finally to confuse the matter even more, we now have the surprising assertion by Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano (here) that it was US intelligence that hacked the Hillary and DNC emails, and released them to Wikileaks which has not revealed its source for the purloined bagatelles. In any event, the Left’s argument that involving those emails in the electoral campaign was akin to the purchase of blood diamonds is patently ludicrous.
[17dec16 update] The Hillary/DNC email affair is getting stinkier with President Obama’s contribution at his yesterday’s news conference. While the lamestream won’t touch the story of a former British diplomat claiming that 1) the emails were leaked not hacked, by 2) disaffected Clinton insiders, and the principal leaker was murdered last July in a mysterious early morning shooting where the motive was clearly not robbery. Check out this video for the whole story and make your own determination of its verity and the sound of silence from the media (which could at least make a very interesting story out of debunking this and other such reports).
George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 December 2016. The addendum contains graphics and links relevant to the arguments of the commentary.]
It is again time to take a look at how America’s future is shaping up with respect to the most important measure available – the academic performance of our young people. We’ve been hearing a lot about our youth lately; mostly about their seemingly brittle self-images that need constant reinforcement, mending, and support. Today a generation of young people have grown up who evince extreme sensitivity to recently discovered threats such as ‘micro-aggressions’ from which they now have to be shielded using new forms of prophylactic measures. Besides instituting heavy censorship of speech on the nation’s campuses, universities also provide their most fragile students ‘safe zones’ where occupants will not be exposed to any utterances that may leave a mark.
Tending such delicate student psyches is one thing, but you may be interested in another aspect of this generation that is at least as important – how are they doing in their studies? Are they coming out of our schools with cognitive skills and a body of knowledge that has prepared them for the real world of work? Are they ready for jobs that require world class performance so that America can successfully compete in the global markets for goods and services?
Sadly, in the aggregate we must answer that question with an unequivocal NO. In the last week the results of PISA, a global measure of student performance for policy makers were released. PISA or Program for International Student Assessment is a battery of tests given to thousands of 15-year-olds across the world. The most recent results are reported (here) in the current issue of The Economist, an internationally recognized, prestigious, and left-leaning weekly news magazine.
There we find that the US ranks 31st out of the world’s 72 most developed countries, right below Russia and Spain. Not only that, but America’s scores are trending downward. This corroborates the findings that our under-30 generation in the workforce, the so-called Millennials, are the most narrow-minded, self-absorbed, and ignorant our country has produced in the modern era. For additional data and details that underpin this finding, please read the critically acclaimed national bestseller by Professor Mark Bauerlein of Emory University titled The Dumbest Generation.
To find policy solutions for this massive failure of our union-dominated school system, don’t leap to the usual remedy our education industry promotes that perennially calls for spending more money to teach our young. The PISA data for policy makers disputes that in the strongest terms. The top three countries in the ratings are Singapore, Japan, and Estonia. Estonia spends less than half as much as Singapore per student, and only a little more than half of what the United States spends.
The clear drivers of excellence are the nation’s quality of teachers and its culture, or how education and the educated are regarded by the country’s population. Our teachers unions assure that education attracts and retains teachers from the academically stunted, and our politically correct culture promotes an egalitarianism in which educational achievement is discounted or even purposefully ignored.
An educated citizenry is America’s greatest assurance for not only improving our quality of life, but also, as our Founders stressed, for maintaining America as a beacon of freedom and progress. I urge listeners to contact their elected representatives about how our young people stack up against global competition. The education of our youth should not be a partisan issue.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with supporting graphics and relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] The graphics below are germane to the points made above. Additional graphics are found in the referenced Economist article. The news magazine also makes the point that teachers unions are the prime impediments to testing and qualifying classroom teachers. Part of the problem of ameliorated interest in our educational system are articles like the recent one by science writer (with unavailable credentials) Christopher Mims in the 11dec16 WSJ titled ‘Automation Can Actually Create More Jobs’. We have encountered him before in these pages (here) making similarly strange arguments about accelerating technology and employment.
More about PISA is available from OECD (here) and our federal National Center for Educational Statistics (here), which also publishes results of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy for the US (here) that we often reference.
Finally, columnist Thomas Elias reported (here) the fate of California’s high school exit exams which are due to return in 2018. Their utility in the greater scheme of things is TBD since they will be geared to measure the performance of students who will then be commonly cored by the new Common Core curriculum.
[15dec16 update] In the comment stream below a reader cited an important outtake (here) from MSNBC featuring a NYT column that finally admits to leftwing hypocrisy, especially as it is practiced in our universities. It’s worth a look, and especially by the local leftwing loonies who consider any citation of millennials’ intellectual deficits as being some sort of lese majeste toward political correctness. However, their ability to absorb enlightenment is sufficiently limited so as to counsel against any such hope.
George Rebane
Disagreeing with a progressive's view on an issue automatically identifies your 'hatred' of the cause, principles, values, ethics, and/or people involved.
More kudos for Mr George Boardman for his excellent apologetics about the recently passed Measure B school bond issue that appears in today’s (12dec16) Union (here). I will believe that the monies will actually be spent for deferred maintenance when I see it. All that aside, if I don’t watch it, these pages may get a bad reputation for so many celebratory reports about our favorite left-leaning columnist. It’s time for him to write something that will allow us to reestablish a more balanced view (aka really piss off all of us knuckle draggers) of his political perspectives. Oh well – my duty as I see it.
Gold hits a ten month low, again surprising those vaunted analysts who predicted its price would soar after Trump’s victory (more here). The Chinese, with millennia of on/off hard times behind them, are buying the stuff to add to their families’ stashes. (Chinese buy 30% of the world's marketable gold.) My own feelings about owning gold is that it should be hoarded simply as an insurance policy against any of several scenarios which will instantly increase its value and allow it resume its historical functions as money regardless of how governments will manipulate their fiat versions of it. For the average retail investor, gold should not be a speculative investment to trade on anticipated price changes. I leave you with the perennial exit question about gold – if gold is such a ‘barbarous relic’, why do all governments continue sub rosa to buy it, store it, and use it to settle accounts?
Safe spaces are different for the Left and Right. For the Left, a safe space is a location in which its occupants are not exposed to ideas with which they disagree. For the Right, a safe space is a location from which they can freely exercise their First Amendment rights. This is a seminal difference that the liberal mind has no ability to master as witnessed by their snarky reports of conservative students also seeking a safe space on campus from which they may be safe from physical attack and administrative retribution. To the liberal, these are equivalent safe spaces that justify what the campus 'snowflakes' have been provided. The interested reader can review many other such logical tours de force in posts assembled in our Liberal Mind category.
[14dec16 update] The double dummies at CALPERS finally admit that “a 7.5% annual return is no longer realistic.” As long reported in these pages, anyone with even a modest appreciation of our nation’s economy knew that years ago. The 14dec16 WSJ reports (here) that, “Top officers of the largest U.S. pension fund want to lower their investment targets, a move that would trigger more pain for cash-strapped cities across California and set an increasingly cautious tone for those who manage retirement assets around the country.” Exit question – how come these “top officers” are not looking for work in less demanding fields? Or are they already working in such a less demanding field?
The feds are incompetent at almost everything they attempt – fundamental tenet of Rebane Doctrine and recurring RR theme. More proof rolled in tonight with the report that the federal IT tit is in the wringer re fighting cyber crime and hacking. It seems that NO ONE in the federal government has been smart enough to keep its IT systems anywhere close to current. The fed’s systems are so badly dated that today IT budgets go almost entirely to putting bandaids on old systems to keep them from crashing; there’s nothing left over to even consider upgrades. And maybe that’s a blessing in disguise – what institutions have the worst reputation in the ability to upgrade their systems?
Progressives continue examining the wrong end of their alimentary canals re the CIA and Russian hacking of DNC and Clinton emails. Some of them – abetted by their incontrovertible lamestream sources – even claim that the CIA recently reported their conclusion that it was the Russians who were the guilty parties. Nothing could be further from the truth. The last testimony and report to Congress from the intelligence community was on 17 November in which Director of National Intelligence (America’s intelligence boss) James Clapper states on video that his agencies are “unclear” as to the source that supplied Wikileaks those pesky leaked emails. Now don’t expect CNN, MSNBC, … and other sterling leftwing sources to air such old news in the face of today’s third party reports about CIA beliefs.
How about all that undeniable climate science that our Left and the feds constantly cite to push their agenda for collapsing the economy in order prevent manmade global warming? Before the progressive age undeniable science was presented openly by undeniable scientists. Today these undeniable scientists cannot be identified along with their undeniable published literature. Team Obama says it’s all a big secret – ‘Trust us, we know who these scientists are and what they believe, but we can’t tell you their names or what makes them believe, other than it’s a lot of overwhelming evidence. Now doesn’t that answer all your questions?’
[15dec16 update] Master sci-fi author and Hugo award winner Liu Cixin has written a masterpiece in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (wonderfully translated by Ken Liu). The Three Body Problem is the 400-page ‘hard science fiction’ epic that launches the trilogy. It is a page turner that makes my sessions on the treadmill go really fast – I’m about two thirds through the first volume. As a Lucky Strike Extra the reader is introduced to China's perspective about the world along with some of the realism of China’s horrific Cultural Revolution (ca 1970) in which over 100 million Chinese died, and which class warfare atrocity has been largely buried by the lamestream and western progressives among us as they continue to wage their own class warfare. While it is a bit heavy (and happily so) on the science and technology side, the story of our first encounter with ETI is wordsmithed well enough to engage and educate intelligent readers from a wide range of backgrounds. I recommend it to you.
