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  • Predictions Derby – 5mar15

    George Rebane

    Prob_Prediction_150405

    (more…)

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  • Nevada County Economic Development

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary that was broadcast on 4 March 2015.]

    The rural counties of America are in economic doldrums.  Whatever recovery that is enjoyed in the populated urban areas is not trickling down very fast to the less populated counties located in our mountains and deserts.  Today the economies of these communities, that formerly included mining and timber industries along with robust farming and ranching enterprises, are suffering.  Moreover, the damage to these regions has come not only from the national economic malaise, but is impacted even more by the relentless march of irrational environmental zealotry.

    The regional sovereignty that these counties had in their own affairs is no more.  In the nation’s statehouses the representatives of the populous urban centers rule, and they rule with little understanding or appreciation of the unique lifestyles and requirements for commerce and wealth creation in the less populated areas.  No state is more afflicted with this syndrome than California.

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  • Rebane Doctrine: Resident Illegal Aliens

    George Rebane

    This may herald the start of a series of doctrinaire posts that outline the application of my Conservetarian Credo to specific public policy conundra.  To date these have been marbled into a more difficult to search series of RR commentaries.  Here is my policy for how to handle the grossly misnamed ‘illegal immigration’ issue that today vexes our federal and state governments.  Its hoped for resolution would relieve a cohort of the 11M long-resident illegal aliens in the country, perhaps limited to those whose children were born here and have subsequently been granted US citizenship.

    1. Congress shall legislate a path to legal residency that takes into account the alien’s history of illegal ingress, conduct while here as a fugitive, and their US citizen offspring.  This path will be at least five years of probationary duration during which the alien will be required to become proficient in English and demonstrate a knowledge of American civics equivalent to that required of legal immigrants on the path to citizenship. 

    2. Before the legal residency provisions of the law take effect, the law will require that the Mexican-American border will have been sealed to a demonstrated and sustainable configuration that permits a maximum illegal ingress rate of less than 5,000 aliens per year.

    3. The new law will require the voluntary registration of illegals who apply for dispensation under its provisions within a time window certain of no more than six months in duration.  Upon registration, the illegal alien will immediately be given the right to work and pay taxes, as any other legal resident of the US, for the duration of his probationary period.  Congress shall include other provisions that may involve the receipt of government benefits and performance of resident obligations as they see fit.

    4. All illegals who are granted legal residency in perpetuum under this law will renounce now and forever their rights, ability, and intention of becoming citizens of the United States, and therefore voting in any of its elections.

    5. All illegal aliens not qualifying under this law and conforming to it during their probationary period will remain in their status as illegal aliens to be pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the immigration and criminal laws of the United States.

    6. This law will include a proviso clearly stating that henceforth offspring of illegal aliens and legal visitors born in the United States will no longer automatically become American citizens, but will be subject to the provisions of the federal immigration law.

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  • Sandbox – 1mar15

    [New month – March already!! – deserves a new sandbox.  Upcoming happenings include Netanyahu's speech to Congress Tuesday, and the progress of demonstrations in Russia protesting Nemtsov's death and Putin's response.  In the meanwhile Islamists continue to gleefully acquire new territories and people, in the US our chief of intelligence warns of the highest danger from Islamic terror, while Obama's embalmed SecState assures us and the west that we have never been safer.  In Teheran they are laughing their asses off, while here our polarized poles are finding ever more reasons why the twain shall never meet.  The last great century in full swing.  gjr]

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  • The Robots in Our Future

    George Rebane

    Has everyone been noticing that the news and commentaries have suddenly become inundated with stories of robots, new golden ages of man and machine, dystopias in which humans are redundant, and things bespeaking generally of the Singularity?  Also there is a new slate of AI cum robot movies about to be released that examine alternative futures (more here).  In my ongoing correspondences – yes, there is life beyond RR – a couple of these threads have been alive on-and-off for months.  They generally relate to the related harbingers of change and social disparity much discussed here, and recently expounded well in Tyler Cowen's Average is Over (2013), George Gilder's Knowledge and Power (2013), and Charles Murray's Coming Apart (2012),  As I opined to my correspondents,  ‘My strong belief is that if you cannot follow the arguments in those three essays, then you literally have no clue about what has been going on in America, and less where the country is going.’

    (BTW, should you want to evaluate the import of any such works, just make note of their predictive power, both achieved and how they enable you to successfully anticipate what comes next.  This is also an especially quick way to judge ideologically based public policies that are always launched with strong predictions about their future benefits.  Back to robots.)

    A correspondent pointed to the review of The Robots are Coming, the new book by John Lanchester reviewed in the London Review of Books.  In perusing Lanchester’s utopian vision of the coming society of man and machines, I was more than a bit miffed at how short-sighted (ignorant?) most of these writings are.  In my contribution to the exchange I launched into what for me is now becoming a familiar rant (edited for inclusion here) –

    The problem with these technology-lite writers (besides being collectivists) is that they conceive of such smart AIs as coming to create a stable human/robot society.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  When machines reach near-human intelligence and can walk the streets with us, it will be but a short skip and a jump from the Singularity, after which all the rules will change to what we know not.  Lanchester’s contemplated reign of Pax Homo et Machina is a naïve wet dream, and doubly so as it also envisions a world with some centrally planned society having “alternative forms of ownership” that prescribe humans living in a la-la land of contemplative and creative bliss while robots clean our toilets and go to work as our proxies.  Light thinking on steroids.

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  • Scattershots – 25feb15 (updated 26feb15)

    George Rebane

    FCC to make the Internet into another plodding government regulated utility.  If tomorrow’s vote goes as expected by the progressive Left, the rapidly innovative years of the World Wide Web will be over for all Americans.  The liberals’ dream of so-called ‘net neutrality’ will be achieved, sold to the true believers with the promotion of five prominent myths –

    1. The internet has always been neutral;

    2. Net Neutrality regulations are the only way to preserve an open internet;

    3. Net Neutrality regulations improve broadband competition;

    4. All prioritized network services are harmful to users;

    5. Net Neutrality rules will make broadband cheaper and internet services like Netflix faster.

    For anyone with even a smidgeon of knowledge about how the internet works and what motivates businesses, these pretensions are laughable.  Unfortunately, the truth on all counts is exactly the opposite, but the entire initiative for additional government takeover is based on the tried and true Saul Alinsky rules (q.v.).  The Mercatus Center at George Mason University gives a short and clear refutation of the matter here.

    Productivity_JobsRobots will ultimately take your job, and give no guarantee to create another one that you can or are willing to do.  That realization is even reaching the high towers of learning at government funded MIT Artificial Intelligence Labs.  There a conclave of the country’s leading AI and robotics researchers meet monthly to discuss such matters.  Heretofore, they and other such groups have been regularly issuing the pabulum that ‘not to worry, technology’s advance will create at least as many new jobs as the old ones it makes redundant.’  Well, that considerable bit of fiction hasn’t proved to be true in the recent past, and will continue to contribute to systemic unemployment with every passing year.  But RR readers have known that for a long time now.

    However, the advances in job eliminations are now proceeding at such a pace that it’s hard to keep putting out these agenda-driven dreams for public consumption, especially from those working in the field who still want to look at themselves in the mirror without blushing – “Experts rethink belief that tech always lifts employment as machines take on skills once thought uniquely human”.  The truth, as reported here, is that the mid-level jobs are disappearing most rapidly.  This leaves behind low-end jobs and more high-end jobs, but netting out to fewer jobs for humans as productivity continues to grow as shown in the nearby figure.  (more here)

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  • ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ (updated 26feb15)

    George Rebane

    “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” (Politico, 18feb15)

    Mayor Giuliani’s recent remarks about President Obama’s character and values has caused a national kerfuffle on the Sunday talk shows that to me seems more than a bit silly.  The Mayor said that he didn’t believe Obama loved America in the way most Americans do because of his upbringing and the society in which he traveled.  He was brought up by parents and grandparents who were socialists and communists, and who evinced little love for our country.  And as an adult Obama was constantly exposed to and worked with people of similar sentiments (“God damn America!”, Rev Wright).  So his honor pulled that together as a picture that described the man in the attempt to explain away his unfortunate pronouncements and disastrous policies.

    The lamestream, of course, went ballistic and even pulled in some mainstream Republicans to assure everyone that they never ever talk about personalities, but only the person’s policies.  Not only that, but it now appears that the politically correct way to deport oneself when discussing other people is to limit yourself to what they did or were supposed to have done.  To delve into what possibly made them do it has become a no-no.

    Well, that’s not the way it was, and truth be told, is not even now.  But you have to be careful when you start trying to dig under a politician’s policies to discover what made him do it then, what he is doing now, and importantly, what he might do in the future with issues yet to be resolved.  Such studies, of course, have been the sum and stuff of analyzing the world's leaders and prominent people since age immemorial.  Humans are by their nature critters who seek to understand and organize their environment by constantly attributing cause – ‘why did he do it?’, ‘why might he do that next?’.  Nowhere is that endeavor more prevalent than in politics, and to hear politicians seriously deny that they ever abstract or talk about someone’s underlying personal traits confirms that when a politician’s mouth is open, he’s most likely lying.

    So today, to point out that Obama’s murky past included heavy doses of anti-Americanism in his younger years is held by the Left as being out-of-bounds, prejudicial, and racist.  Today we should only judge him by his public policies, period.  Of course, that was not the case in the treatment of Bush2, Clinton, and other American leaders.  Tomes have been written over the centuries dissecting the personal lives, character, foibles, and values of prominent people to understand and explain their behavior.  Today the CIA and other security services develop and maintain extensive personality profiles on just about everyone in the public eye so that they can explain why they are doing what they do, and can predict what they may do in the future.  It would be utter foolishness not to devise such personality models of important people.  So why can we not explain to others the conclusions we have drawn about what in our opinion makes someone tick?

    [26feb15 update]  Listening to comments by Ron Fournier of the National Journal on Fox this afternoon piqued an inquiry of our readership.  Fournier’s dissertation on Obama’s latest charitably labeled missteps jibed with much of what is reported these days.  Many of these missteps have been purposive policies and actions which the overwhelming fraction of Americans would agree have hurt our country.  But Fournier, like every other reporter and commentator today, since Giuliani’s famous statement, has hastened to add the obligatory political correctness that he wasn’t calling Obama unpatriotic.  No, no, no.

    Well, I have not been accused of being politically correct, nor do I want to stand so accused in the future.  So I would ask Fournier, and more importantly the more conservative commentators on Fox (e.g. Krauthammer, Riley, Hayes, …), to present evidence that Obama is in fact a patriotic American.  Make two columns on a sheet of paper and title them ‘Unpatriotic Acts’ and ‘Patriotic Acts’.  The column of Unpatriotic Acts has been overfilled for some time now.  The question is – what would these politically correct commentators put in the other column to give evidence of Obama’s patriotism and give balance to the lists?

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  • Predictions Derby – 22feb15

    George Rebane

    Evolution chases environment.

    The last go around was Predictions Derby – 12feb15.

    Prob_Prediction_150221

    Chris Christie – Opens his PAC to raise funds for potential candidacy.  L =3, meaning that the probability he would do this now for a future announcement of candidacy is three times as high as the probability he would do it and then decide not to run.  This raises his prob of running from 0.500 to 0.750.

    Jeb Bush – announces that Paul Wolfowitz, James Baker, and Tom Ridge will become his foreign policy advisory team, given that he’s a bit weak in that area, and that they would agree to have throw in with him in this capacity implies that the likelihood of this evidence supporting a future announcement to run is L = 5.  This raises his prob of running from 0.948 to 0.989.

    Hillary Clinton – has had some bad press about the contributions to the Clinton Family Foundation from foreign donors that everyone except her and some diehard progressives consider as a conflict of interest (aka corruption).  After denials, the Foundation has announced a new policy for accepting donations that is supposed to solve this problem.  This just adds to the list of demerits that will impugn her candidacy should she announce.  This evidence weighs against her candidacy, and I give it the likelihood of L = 0.9 that reduces her probability of running from 0.808 to 0.791.

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  • America’s Dunkirk Foreign Policy

    George Rebane

    The only thing effectively led from behind is a retreat, for in that direction you are already properly positioned to lead.

    In concert with President Obama’s just ended sideshow on “violent extremism” that once more diverts attention from our true enemy, John Kerry writes (here) that the solution to the global assault is really a jobs program for disaffected Muslim youth.  In the process the whole purpose is to convince America’s gruberized that “a more prosperous and safer future requires us to recognize that violent extremism can't be justified by resorting to religion.  No legitimate religious interpretation teaches adherents to commit unspeakable atrocities, such as razing villages or turning children into suicide bombers.  These are the heinous acts of individuals who distort religion to serve their criminal and barbaric cause.”

    This is about as good a testament to hopeless denialism as can be fashioned.  In reality, the violent extremists (aka ragheads) are undeniably the most sincere, dedicated, and committed of faithful hordes that have ever gathered to spread and enforce their vision of Man serving God’s will.  The grievously useless idiots in Washington and elsewhere actually do believe that people will travel long distances to suffer privation, bleed, and give their lives for some gratuitous “criminal and barbaric cause”!  They also believe that such people will be persuaded to put down their weapons by some government jobs program in the Middle East.  Were that to be true, we would be witness to an historical shift in human nature, instead of a reprise and continuation of the war between Islam and the world of infidels it seeks to conquer and convert.

    Islam divides the world into the ummah – the global community of Muslims – and infidels – the non-believers who must eventually either accept Allah or be dispatched.  As part of their missionary zeal, the Quran permits and encourages the use of taqiyya if it will advance Islam.  In the face of this our leaders are telling us that it is they who are the final word in interpreting the teachings of Muslim scripture and attendant historical commentaries like the Hadith and the more recent and widely influential writings of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966).  Today the rekindling of Islam’s war on the west has been and continues to be preached throughout Islam by prominent clerics with followings in the millions.

    Yet we in our capitals loudly deny the deep religious and spiritual influence that fundamental Islam has on bringing more and more young Muslims and converts to an epiphany that gives meaning to their lives and sets their course of action.  Designating these young men and women who enthusiastically place themselves in danger, suffer hardships, and willingly give their lives as common criminals and thugs is the height of contemporary western hubris and dangerous ignorance.

    When Islamists amass into forces numbering in the tens of thousands (more?), who then conquer, hold and administer territories the size of sovereign nation-states on multiple continents, whose call attracts more tens of thousands from across the world while offering no riches but only relevance and deliverance, then history and reason dictate that they no longer can be labeled criminals and thugs to be dealt with the tools and institutions that our civil society has traditionally mobilized against such enemies.

    We will be successful in countering fundamental Islam only when we recognize and respect its adherents in our midst and on the battlefield as a zealous and courageous people, completely dedicated to the teachings of their prophet and god, and willing to give their all in attaining the cosmic goal in which they believe and to which they are charged.  To deny the power of fundamental Islam and do less than that is to yield our principles, traditions, and values to a social order that to us is beyond words reprehensible and atrocious.

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  • Governments’ Wall-to-wall Insanity

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary aired on 18 February 2015.]

    It’s again hard to know where to start.  At the federal level the administration is tying itself in knots as report after report comes in of Islamic terrorists operating on multiple continents while becoming more united and coordinated.   Our leadership has no idea from what it is supposed to protect America and its allies.  Three European capitals suffer attacks from indigenous Muslims, and now ISIS operates freely on the shores of Tripoli, and demonstrates its reach with a video of its mass execution of 21 Egyptians for the capital crime of being Christians.

    Everyone from the Danish prime minister to the pope regales against the jihadi organizations that are united in the global goal of Islamic supremacy.  Yes, even liberal commentators have started to identify the similarity between Nazi Germany’s goal of imposing racial supremacy to the Islamists’ goal of religious supremacy.  And in the White House we are going through contortions wordsmithing daily pronouncements that describe events without ever mentioning their Muslim perpetrators and Christian or Jewish victims.  According to our leaders we are at war with a tactic called terror that is being randomly practiced by unidentified criminal elements.  All the while the world laughs at us and then sadly shakes its head.  January 2017 cannot come quickly enough.

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