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  • How well do we predict? (updated 10feb16)

    George Rebane

    In the months leading up to this election year these pages have recorded a lot of predictions, some more vehement than others.  Predicting, estimating, forecasting, …, all of them are hard and involve some level of risk depending how well these efforts are carried out.  We spend almost every waking moment taking some kind of peek into the future, and depending on how certain we are of what we see there, we take an action which may involve some kind of hedging if we’re not too confident about what we see.

    I’ve always been interested in how well we can prognosticate.  Recently nobelist Daniel Kahneman of Kahneman/Tversky fame wrote what instantly became a very famous essay – Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) – on the findings of research into things such as prediction, estimation, risk aversion, reasoning and so on.  Bottom line – research to date has shown that humans are mostly not very good predictors, and they don’t always do the reasonable things.  Yet we do have a brain bone that has allowed us to survive over the millennia and evolve our thinking capacity to some pretty commendable levels.  After all, we did discover relativity, sequence the human genome, put a man on the Moon, and are about to devise an AI that may make us second class citizens on our own planet.

    So how well can we predict?  Here I propose a fun experiment on the topic that invites RR readers to go on record and compete with each other predicting anything they want and, hopefully, get someone else interested enough to also render their prediction.  I offer an easy, intuitive, and enjoyable way to do this using the MAB distribution which asks you to specify four numbers that characterize your prediction.  The method is spelled out in a previous post ‘Predicting with Expressed Beliefs – a formal approach’.

    Since this is election season, say you want to predict what percent of the Democrat vote Bernie Sanders will get in this Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.  Today that percentage is a random variable, but next Wednesday it will be known and no longer random.  All such future values are random variables, and the best we can do to express them is to characterize our belief in the value of the variable is to describe what is called its probability distribution.  And as the above referenced post details, this can be done by simply writing down your subjective belief in terms of the Low (L) and High (H) values which bound the range of Bernie’s percentage, the most likely percentage (M) Bernie will get, and your confidence (C) – zero to one – that Bernie’s actual percentage will be in the neighborhood of your best guess or most likely value.  In short, your prediction will be a 4-tuple that might look something like – [L, H, M, C] = [51%, 60%, 54%, 0.7].

    (more…)

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  • Predicting with Expressed Beliefs – a formal approach

    George Rebane

    We’ll start by skipping the famous Yogism about predicting.  But living life successfully requires us to constantly predict the future – events that may or not happen in a time yet to come.  It’s necessary to do that because we have to prepare for various futures by deciding what actions to take right now, or at least before the predicted event occurs.  Most of our predictions are about whether a certain thing will happen or not, whether it will happen before a given time or not, or which one of, say, five possible things will come true.  In short, very discrete things, things or events that can be characterized by a ‘yes’ or ‘no’.  Then there are predictions that aren’t discrete and cover a range of values that are the anticipated outcome.  Things like how many marbles are in a big jar, when will Billy get home from work, how much rain will the coming storm bring, what will our house sell for, a candidate’s poll number after the debate, the closing value of the Dow Industrials at week’s end, this year’s GDP, and so forth.

    A little thought shows that all the CURRENT answers to such questions or unknown values are really what the techies call random variables.  But for each such random variable or r.v., all of us have a hunch or belief about how well we can characterize our ignorance about the actual outcome or value realized in the future.

    For discrete (random) events we often characterize the chance that something will come to pass as, say, ‘one out of three’ or state your odds such as ‘three to one it’ll rain tomorrow’.  If we really don’t have a clue as to the outcome, we’ll use the old coin flip 50-50 analogy.  For continuous r.v.s most people will state the smallest range of values that for them encompass all or almost all the possibilities.  They’ll use phrases like ‘Tomorrow’s high temperature will be somewhere in the 45 to 55F range’ or ‘The fourth quarter GDP growth will be in the 1.5 to 2.0% range.’

    However, when pressed or thought about some more, almost everyone is able to pick a value somewhere in their stated range which they believe will be at or near the most likely value that comes to pass.  And they can also tell you how confident they are about choosing that most likely or best guess value by using words like ‘pretty sure’, ’50-50 it’ll be somewhere near there’, ‘it’s just a wild hunch’, ‘I’d be surprised if it’s not close to that’, and so on.

    Well, it turns out that you can usefully summarize your belief in such a future value by just stating your intuition in four numbers – the low/high of the range (L and H), the best guess or most likely value within that range (M), and you confidence (C) in the best guess.  C values will range between zero and one – low C values for little confidence and higher values expressing more confidence.  These four values or the 4-tuple – [L, H, M, C] – expressing your belief defines a very useful and powerful measure of probability that can be combined with other such measures to judge, say, who’s prediction is best or what level of risk is represented by such a ‘state of knowledge’.

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 6feb16 (updated 9feb16)

    George Rebane

    Our ongoing theme on the nation’s economic stagnation – Depression2 – led by California is abetted by Linda Erdmann’s piece – ‘Fleeing the Golden State’ – in the 6feb16 Union print edition and a couple of cogent ZeroHedge links (here and here) sent by Russ Steele on the dissimulation that Team Obama and his progressives are spreading about the great state of the nation’s economy.  (See also the 9feb16 Sandbox.)

    Catch & Release illegal aliens has been Obama administration’s reinstated sub-rosa policy of border control. The existence of this great National Lie was communicated to Congress in testimony by a Border Patrol executive that illustrates how every one of Obama’s cabinet secretaries promotes perfidy in covering up what their departments are really doing (more here).  HSA’s Jeh Johnson’s ongoing lies about our borders being more secure is based on the reported reduced number of arrests made of illegal entrants. However, the Border Patrol explained that they have been working under orders to release all illegals caught at the border who declare they have been in the country since 2014 and are not criminals – no further vetting of such claims are allowed, the individual is simply released on his own recognizance and told to appear at a future immigration hearing.  Hence arrests are down, no one shows up at their appointed hearing, and the borders remain open to all who remember the magic ‘Get out of Jail’ mantra.

    ‘$100 Trillion Up in Smoke’ trumpets the usually sensible financial pundit John Mauldin about the recent drop in the price of crude.  Such pronouncements join with headlines like ‘Investors dump tech stocks’.  Nothing could be further from a more sober understanding of what’s going on.  Markets price things at the margin – i.e. the money exchanged during the last buy/sell event.  Current market price never implies that you can buy nor will anyone sell the whole inventory at that figure.  For example, had you the money, you could not buy all of the world’s above ground crude oil at the current $31.00 a barrel.  If you tried, the price would immediately sky rocket.  In the same hysterical vein investors did not dump tech stocks because the stocks were simply bought by other investors, not by potted plants nor were they flushed down the toilet by their previous.  It’s best to pay attention and not get caught up in misleading one liners.

    [update] More on Obama’s strangling our liberties and economy, and California’s secure place as America’s least free state in terms of personal liberties and business freedoms (more here).  McKee’s cartoon says it best.

    [9feb16 update]  Bolshevik Bernie is cranking up his class warfare rhetoric which is easy to compare to the rhetoric heard on the streets of Moscow in 1917.  And it is lapped up enthusiastically by the new class of certifiably mindless millennials who have no idea what they will be voting for this year.  They might consider what socialismo has brought to Venezuela in their lifetime (with empty store shelves and citizens driven to destitution but kept in line by government guns).  Their little heads have been carefully kept empty in America’s universities finds the National Association of Scholars after surveying the humanities reading requirements at 350 colleges (more here).  Also explains a lot about the political leanings of many high tech executives in Silicon Valley.

    EconomiicAnchors

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  • Reinette on Voting

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

    George Rebane

    ReinetteSenumFor those new to Nevada County our Ms Reinette Senum (pictured) needs a bit of an introduction. She is the former mayor of Nevada City and a local liberal activist who has promoted many collectivist causes hereabouts.  I have worked with her and have always found her to be very energetic and good-hearted.  Her enthusiasm may at times be short-lived, but while she has the bit in her teeth about some project she will then be at it 24/7 until it either gets done or a better project comes along.  It is not always easy (at least for me) to follow the threads of her thinking, but her good nature and polished public persona more than make up for such trifles with local audiences.

    As a member of our newspaper’s editorial board, Reinette wrote a column – ‘Youth should not let Grandma and Grandpa determine their future’ – in a recent (3feb16) Union that made two strong points in her heartfelt plea to encourage young people to vote in this election.  The first was explicit and advised the young not to listen to their older relatives about matters that impact the upcoming elections.  The second was implicit in the message that you should vote whether or not you know anything about the candidates or issues.  Nowhere did the good lady advise her young audience – which today has plumbed new depths of dumbth – to study up on the things on which they will cast their ballots.  The message was ‘Get your butt into that voting booth and you can do no wrong – never mind your head, just follow your heart!’  More specifically –

    Do you realize it’s your grandparents who are still driving the car? Do you realize that if you don’t speak up and do something (aka vote) then the car will never go in the direction you desire and deserve?

    (more…)

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  • Democrats Waiting in the Wings (updated 4feb16)

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 3 February 2016.]

    Even before her Monday’s disaster in Iowa, Hillary’s campaign for the Democrat presidential nomination had become so fractured that the line of potential replacements was already forming. Uncle Joe Biden let it be known he will reliably carry the Donkey banner if and when tabbed by Obama. Add to that the growing stream of reports that billionaire and three-term NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg is testing whether his ten-year Oval Office dream is finally the now-or-never opportunity. And my personal favorite is Lizzy Warren, the socialist senator from Massachusetts who could easily out-socialist Ol’ Bernie himself.

    On the potential Bloomberg candidacy, the billionaire’s camp has leaked his intentions with more yet to come. Bottom line, he would run if Hillary blows a tire. Hillary has told him “not to worry” about that contingency. But the NYT already reported that Bloomberg is definitely leaning forward in the saddle and having described Hillary as a “flawed politician, shadowed by questions about her honesty and the continuing investigation into her email practices as secretary of state.”

    I believe that Hillary’s fate will be determined by what some people now call the ‘Comey vote’ – when the FBI director plops his stack of evidence on Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s desk. Lynch is a proven administration hack who faithfully carries on the legacy of her predecessor Eric Holder. Smart money is on Lynch ignoring the indictable evidence from Comey as Obama adds Hillary to the long list of presidential pardons now being assembled.

    All this has got to rankle at least some of the higher minded progressive elites who see their anointed one in the public forum as embarrassingly immune to what for the rest of us would be a life changing catastrophe. As an Army intelligence officer of a nuclear artillery battalion followed by over twenty years as a defense contractor developing highly classified combat systems, I held the highest Top Secret clearances. Had I or any of my colleagues treated classified materials as flippantly as did Hillary, we would have been behind bars immediately and would probably still be there today.

    To all this we add the findings of Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough, who is the most recent of knowledgeable officials and legislators to confirm Hillary’s sins. And with undiminished hubris, her blaming the entire email server scandal on Republican politicking highlights her growing desperation. The overwhelming evidence of criminality against Hillary in just this one of her several scandals should be damning enough to quickly shut down her campaign and get her off the streets. No leftwing politician since FDR days has enjoyed such fawning media coverage and an administration ready to go to the mattresses for her.

    Nevertheless, a growing cohort of national commentators, who know Director Comey as a straight shooter, believe there will be mass resignations from the FBI if Hillary’s crimes are not prosecuted. Couple that with her cliff hanger in Iowa, with worse expected in New Hampshire, and it is easy to see how all this will put the Democrat race into the quandary that Bloomberg now gleefully anticipates.

    It was not that many days ago that the nation’s progressives were happy dancing in the streets, citing Republican party’s costly catfight between its many establishment and populist candidates.   Then there was no concern about their unelectable socialist from Vermont, they knew that Hillary would be crowned in Philadelphia. That was before their unelectable socialist suddenly started rising in the polls, and Hillary started tacking noticeably even more leftward so as not to be outflanked by the old revolutionary in ascent.

    In the end, should Hillary somehow survive her untrustworthiness and scandals, the question then becomes how will she shed Bernie’s socialist stigma when it comes time to again convince enough people that she is really a faithful Obama 3.0.

    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.

    [4feb16 update] As often happens in these pages, RR’s perspective is soon picked up by major national media and blogs of the more conservative cast.  Now I’m not saying that they read RR, but I am saying that the themes discussed here are mostly in the mainstream of conservetarian thought across the country.  It takes the big guys a bit longer to ruminate on these ideas and check them with their editorial boards than it does moi and many of our astute readers.  With their opaque ideological blinders strapped on tight, it is inevitable that the local looney Left has no clue about what is really happening in the country or on Earth in general.  The notions advanced in the above commentary are an example of this.

    ScarySocialists

    This morning’s WSJ has a major essay by Democrat strategist and pollster Douglas Schoen who posits ‘Why Mike Bloomberg Can Win’. In there he points out how Mr Bloomberg may successfully carve out the major middle and take enough moderates from both ends to win the presidency.  And he may be capable of this as either a Democrat or as an Independent.  Schoen’s main point is that “record numbers of voters are independents who won’t be satisfied with Clinton, Trump, or Cruz”  (See also today’s Union cartoon above.)

    Some disquieting items that Schoen corroborates – “…Bernie Sanders is leading a lurch toward socialism, and Hillary Clinton is seeking to match if not exceed his leftist agenda.”, and “that 63% of Americans favored compromise, not confrontation, to achieve policy goals. A majority, 52%, wanted the government to do more problem-solving.”  And he concludes with –

    A Bloomberg candidacy would make no effort to kowtow to the religious right or labor unions. Mr. Bloomberg would not and has never made deals with special interests. Because he has always been able to finance his campaigns himself, his independence is indisputable.

    As this politically frenetic February wears on, the primary process will demonstrate to voters how divided and dysfunctional the nation has become. For Americans in the middle, a Mike Bloomberg candidacy will become more compelling by the day.

    Contrast this view of the nation, shared by RR, with what our far left believes. This is illustrated with a letter in this morning’s Union apparently from a writer peeking out of the pits of progressivism, or one having recently made landfall on this planet.

    Haven’t we had enough of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party Republican base and their ignorant, xenophobic, racist lies about what is wrong with the country? The country is doing fine and heading into boom times again; people are becoming more understanding and more tolerant of each other no matter what Fox News says.

    The freedoms we enjoy today haven’t changed and are just as secure as ever. These misfits in the Republican and Tea Party are just upset because of the fact that the president is black. They have created some delusional Orwellian fantasy in their heads, that they’ve ruminated on for so long, that they’ve actually come to believe it. Get over yourselves and your pseudo patriotism and join the rest of America as it glides into the future.

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  • Iowa Caucus – quick thoughts (updated)

    George Rebane

    The clear winners were Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio. Neither were projected to make much of a showing against the self-adorned leaders of their parties.  Ted Cruz’s nominal victory is going to have a tough time running a successful race on its evangelical legs.  Things became more clarified for The Donald as he experienced the bracing embrace of reality delivered by the real Iowa voters.

    The more interesting contest was between Bernie and Hillary. In my lifetime I have never heard a serious candidate, actually make that two serious candidates, for the American presidency sound like throwbacks from the depression era halcyon days of communism.  The Democrat voters are in a schism – the older ones giving a gimlet eye to Bernie the ‘political revolutionary’, and the younger millennials lapping up everything the old firebrand can deliver and asking for more.  That schism is not surprising since the millennials are found to be the most ignorant generation – especially in economics and finance - to date since the Great Society took over our schools.  These are the know-nothings to whom Sanders' socialist economics looks so appealing.  I reported the PriceWaterhouse study on this in the 25jan16 Ruminations.

    [update] There is some question on sample size in the comment stream.  Not to worry.  The 140,000 plus Iowa Republicans contained more sample size than any of the ongoing daily polls.  The only weakness of that sample is its evangelical skew, but that tilt will be repeated in most Republican leaning voting cohorts in the coming months.  Those same arguments will also be welcome on the receptive ears of many religious Hispanics and blacks.  The only Dems that will turn their tin ears to the message of liberty and personal responsibility will be the secular humanist white progressives.  The Dems’ ace in the hole will remain the dumbth of the large millennial horde; Hillary and Bernie and Liz and Joe have got to keep convincing these people that what they learned in school really works in the real world.

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  • Sandbox – 30jan16

    [Was interested in reading The Union’s editorial position on SoJ today (here).  The SoJ steering committee is preparing a response.  IMHO, it's important to keep in mind two items regarding the opposition to SoJ – 1) the opposition offers no alternative to the formation of North California (my preferred name) than the lame same ol’ same ol’ dictum that defines insanity, and 2) their material opposition is based on the stasist paradigm of human behavior so favored by collectivists.  The first is wrapped in the pabulum of “… we believe solving problems requires taking a seat at the table, not leaving it altogether.” which ignores that we have been denied a seat for decades and offers no alternative to continued compliance to the growing cohort of Sacramento progressives.  The second ignores the demonstrated benefits to an economy of lowered tax rates, fewer and less intrusive regulations, and a smaller government that has fewer things to sell to special interests.  Both are notions that the Left will never accept. gjr]

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  • AI masters Go – time to apply brakes? (updated 30jan16)

    George Rebane

    GoA couple of days ago Google’s parent Alphabet (actually its DeepMind division) announced that their AlphaGo deep-learned software system has mastered the ancient Chinese board game Go.  This is a very big deal during these pre-Singularity years and marks a milestone toward intellectual peerage with humans.  AlphaGo is not just a souped-up version of Deep Blue that defeated chess champion Kasparov.

    The number of possible moves in Go is trans-astronomically bigger than those in chess for which the next good move can be discovered by generating an expanding search tree of possible future move sequences.  In Go such search trees are literally not possible to either construct or ‘grow’ in any useful manner.  The alternative approach is to mimic the human brain in its ability to assess the current situation through abstracting board patterns, and then derive the best move by evolving more possible future patterns from alternate courses of action.  That in essence is what we do when we play Go, and more importantly, attack myriads of other problems in our daily round.  (more here and here)

    Alphabet intends to productize and promote various versions of AlphaGo into a number of markets which require high levels of performance within large data and complex image environments.  For example, most experts foresee that skilled and experienced physicians and medical practitioners who interpret diagnostic imagery (MRI, CAT, X-ray, sonograms, …) will quickly be surpassed by the new machines.  Similar results are expected in fields such as finance, genomics, athletics, complex design, decision making and planning, and so on.  The portents here are that large cadres of very highly educated and experienced workers will become increasingly redundant as customers demand state-of-art performance at lowest cost, and companies compete to satisfy such demands.

    Given the recent turn of our socio-political expectations, it will not be long until some politicians will argue that it is a human right for everyone to obtain such ‘best practices’ goods and services.  But before we go sailing off into that future fraught with unknowns, there are other voices rising to be heard.  The 28jan16 WSJ reports that an emerging cadre of ‘experts’ is now considering how to put the brakes on AI developments.

    The advance, published in the journal Nature, impressed artificial-intelligence experts and revived a debate about whether limits should be placed on computer programs that gain humanlike abilities to learn by themselves.

    In any event,  DeepMind CEO Demis Hannabis is “thinking very carefully about how to ethically use and responsibly deploy” the technology. When DeepMind was acquired in 2014, its founders required Google to agree not to use the technology for military purposes. Google has created an ethics committee to ensure such benefits “accrue to the many, not the few,” he added.

    I urge you to evaluate these sentiments in light of the countless enterprises worldwide which are developing, advancing, and racing to market the latest concepts in AI.  Putting on the brakes?! – talk about pissing into the wind.

    [30jan16 update] Robots will devastate third world jobs; robots will replace most white collar jobs; robots will do all future manufacturing; robotic vehicles will replace all transport jobs; … .  The Financial Times reports that “The Rise of the Robots Threatens the Poor”; and studies from prestigious universities are now coming in telling us that the robotic “revolution could leave up to 35% of all workers in the UK, and 47% of those in the US, at risk of being displaced by technology over the next 20 years, according to Oxford University research”.  (also google ‘robots, job loss’)

    RR has been a little alarm bell for the last decade relating news and prognostications in these pre-Singularity years about the growth of systemic unemployment due to accelerating technology. Now finally there emerge some louder voices repeating this message, but still not getting it quite right.  Meanwhile, the socialists among us are proposing policies which will guarantee a future world of tyranny much as foreseen by Orwell in the 1940s – recall that tyranny is the most stable form of governance against which ‘democracy by the dumb’ doesn’t stand a chance.  And technology-augmented tyranny is a rock stable slam dunk.

    I believe the probability is close to one (certainty) that today we are irredeemably beyond the tipping point. There remain few approaches – e.g. the Non-Profit Service Corporation schema – to implement the required redistribution of wealth which may preserve the Bastiat Triangle of Rights.  However, all of them require an overwhelmingly educated and enlightened citizenry to pull off.  Instead, we are overrun with collectivists and central planners whose interests lie in fomenting class warfare between various manufactured cohorts of ignorant yet compliant voters with scant intellectual assets to figure out where they are being led.  (Today we remain in a government induced Depression2 with a hokey unemployment numbers and GDP growth rates last seen during Depression1.  See also PriceWaterhouse study on millennials.)

    A delayed advent of Singularity that could give rise to a transhuman world is looking less like the saving grace that it once did.

     

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  • ‘Pelline Protocol’ – exposed again (updated 29jan16)

    [Our friends Nancy and Eddie Garcia have been founders and leaders of several organizations favored by Nevada County conservatives, among them the NC Tea Party and the State of Jefferson movement. This week the local SoJ supporters assembled to celebrate having gathered well over 5,000 signatures to petition the Board of Supervisors to put on the June ballot a resolution that will let the county’s voters express their opinions about the formation of SoJ (or ‘North California’) which has been much discussed in these pages (see also).  These signatures are being filed with county clerk as I type.

    But true to form, the Union’s coverage of this week’s SoJ activities has drawn the predictably ignorant ire of our fulminating far-left FUE. His off-the-mark comments prompted Nancy Garcia to submit the following response.  To RR readers I recommend the following simple exercise – try to follow the FUE’s logic that led to his very unfounded and uncouth epithet.  gjr]

    Nancy Garcia

    Imagine my surprise when I read Jeff Pelline’s statement on the State of Jefferson public comments in Tuesday’s Board of Supervisor’s meeting. He notes “This part chaps me the most: a new state where we would be guaranteed a voice in the decisions that shape our lives and the future of our children.  What does Eddie Garcia know about my child?  What an ass.”   Obviously, he totally misses the point that parents would have more freedom to shape their own children’s future.  Mr. Pelline’s child would be his own obligation.

    I also find it comical, at best, that Mr. Pelline, who revels in pointing out every little one letter error in The Union, did not even correctly identify the author of the statement. I truly resent his calling my wonderful husband of fifty-four years an “ass.” Eddie Garcia did not make that statement – I did.  If you have any journalistic integrity, it is important to get your facts right.

    I might also direct Mr. Pelline’s attention to a dictionary where he can check the word “civility.” It was the manner in which we used to conduct respectful discussions even when we did not agree.  If we live by the “Pelline Protocol” we will never cure the deep divide that is the curse preventing progress.

    [29jan16 update]  Thank you all for your enlightening and humorous comments on Mr. Fue. As a relative “newbie” here, I am still learning.

    One more comment on the constant refrain that we cannot survive financially without the money that comes from the state. If we are such a drain on the already financially floundering government, they surely will be happy for us to remove the burden from their back by separating from the state.  So far, we have not heard a single government official stand up and applaud our resolve. What does that tell us?

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  • The Pope and the Raghead (updated 28jan16)

    George Rebane

    RouhaniFrancis2016

    A few years back when first I had a chance to see the bragsheet on Pope Francis, I voiced some concerns about his political naiveté. The man seemed to have avoided any education in economics, finance, governance, and what social mechanisms actually generate the wealth that he’s so keen on redistributing.  His speeches and writings give ample evidence of that.  Today he is giggling it up with one of the world’s big killers and leading promoters/sponsors of theocratic Islamism through global terror.

    Someone should tell the guy with the white beany what President Rouhani of the Islamic Republic of Iran has done, is doing today, and planning for us tomorrow now that we’ve shoved tens of billions of dollars in his shorts and removed economic sanctions to pump up Iran’s anti-western economy. They should slip in a news article or two about Islam’s killing of Christians in their lands, and maybe even inform His Holiness about Islam’s well publicized plans for the infidels of Christendom.

    I was hoping that the meeting may have generated some more serious photo-ops to reflect equivalent discussions with the reprobate raghead.

    [28jan16 update]­ I call your attention to this morning’s (28jan16) WSJ column ‘The Humbling of the West’ by deputy editorial editor and national columnist Daniel Henninger.  He echoes not only my above sentiments but also the years’ long interpretation in these pages of the growing war between civilizations.  What the informed reader should continue to find remarkable is the narrow field of focus that the Left brings to bear on Islam’s and particularly the Islamists’ advance in the world.

    WestsShame

    These benighted people, welcomed and well-represented in RR comment streams, continue to show their breathless ignorance of geo-strategic events. They draw great comfort from repeating their well-learned and baseless mantras about the equivalence of Christianity and Islam in their world views, scriptural dictates, existential practices, and the minds of their respective ‘moderates’.  In the latter one needs only observe the silence of Islam’s sheeple in response to the daily (hourly?) atrocities their brethren carry out.  The west is betting the ranch that these Muslims will quietly follow whichever ayatollah can muster enough fanatical guns and knives to enforce their compliance.  The Mideast overflows with examples of such transforming governance that Obama has unleashed on an already cowering Europe.

    Rouhani has every reason to smile as he accepts the obeisances of Europe.  Through his mind echoes Lenin’s famous ‘these capitalists will gladly sell us the very rope with which we will hang them.’

    Henninger points out the lengths to which European civic, religious, and business leaders are going to kowtow during the Iranian president’s triumphal progress through lands which have for a millennium been Islam’s prime target for conquest (actually two millennia if you consider what the Persians have had in their sights). The above photo from Henninger’s piece gives stark evidence of the west’s self-depredation, showing classic western art in the form of nude statuary in the Vatican that has been covered so as not to offend the raghead of ragheads during his tour of the museum.  Misplaced humility apparently knows no depth in the progressive western mind as it welcomes its self-declared colonists cum conquerors.

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