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  • Ruminations – 23may14 (updated 30may14)

    George Rebane

    TT2014winners

    TechTest2014 examinees were feted at its annual Survivors’ Breakfast at Tofanelli’s this morning.  The pictured six top scorers – David Bernadett, Lars Montagnaro, Patric Wells, Grant Clove, Sean Anderson, Alex Vobiril – received their scholarship checks that ranged in amounts from $6,000 to $300.  Attending also were junior year students taking the test for practice, and an especially large contingent of parents.  All test takers told us of their current plans for STEM careers, and received their obligatory TT2014 t-shirts with leftovers going to parents and SESF staff.  SESF director Mike McDaniel again served as MC, and Executive Director Russ Steele distributed the filthy lucre to the well-deserving and grateful recipients.  (Go to sesfoundation.org to check out the test they so ably ‘survived’.)

    VA healthcare illuminates the future of Obamacare.  The latest scandal has promised to be the yet smelliest of this administration’s scandals.  It has even scared Democrats who have remained scandal-proof to date.  But not all is well, the Big Government blinders are still firmly in place for our collectivist cadres who view this as just another minor aberration and growing pain that needs only a tweak here and there.  For them all programs are still running hot, true, and normal headed for a world in which criticizing the state will soon be a hate crime.  (more here)

    ‘Secrecy Cloaks Oil Trains’ reports the 23may14 WSJ.  The perverse policies banning the building of new oil/gas pipelines have required orders of magnitude increase in the number of large oil trains rumbling through towns and metropolitan areas across America.  For obvious political and security reasons the movement of these trains is kept secret.  This is scaring hell out of local fire departments and emergency first responders who have no idea when to increase their readiness for the exploding holocausts which such trains have already caused.  Big Government again demonstrates the evil outcomes of its policies given birth through corruption and/or ineptitude.  (more here)

    The increasing pain that afflicts America is felt in thousands of small communities across the land, communities filled with people who still try to work for a living, and those who remember what the country was like not so long ago.  Here’s a typical cri de coeur from a small Michigan town on the shore of Lake Huron.

    TawasCityNevada County’s ‘invisible’ barriers to commerce and property lifted their head higher than usual in the latest of expensive lawsuits in which the county is the defendant through ineptitude and corruption denied.  Invisible? By that I mean invisible to our bigger government loving progressive neighbors.  The law suit involves the building of a cell phone tower on a Lake Wildwood ridgeline the permit for which continues to be “improperly denied” according the court.  Reported in the 23may14 Union (here), this is just a small stanza in the county’s Lyric of the Litigious Left that affects all residents.  As a productive alternative, the county could fund a full court press in bringing wide area broadband to the region for a fraction of the cost that it is paying for defense lawyers.

    [update]  While hundreds of thousands of central valley acres parch and orchards are dying, the government is releasing massive ‘pulse flows’ of fresh water from California reservoirs into the Pacific Ocean so fish can have a proper water temperature as they swim to the ocean.  This is beyond butt stupid (I would even call it criminal) policy and enthusiastically implemented by the country’s environmental know-nothings with the full backing of the government gun.  Congressman Tom McClintock explains the matter in a piece titled ‘California Drains Reservoirs in the Middle of a Drought’ appearing in the 24may14 WSJ.  And progressives have no idea why we think big government is necessarily evil, and bigger government even more so.

    [30may14 update]  Years ago I should have started an ‘I told you so’ category.  Socialist French President Hollande’s current plan to roll back France’s income tax rates in order to increase government revenues would be a prime contender in that category.  Candidate Hollande, in typical populist fashion, promised to his country’s sheeple to soak those filthy rich of their excess cash by raising the top tax rate to 75% for all earnings above €1M.  The budget analysts dutifully projected the appropriate revenue increases into their treasury, and everyone sat back to wait for the new monies to start pouring in (because as every collectivist knows, income tax rates don’t affect the propensity to earn income).  Bummer!  Revenues fell by one third in the affected categories, and foreign investments plunged by almost 80%.  After quickly wiping egg off his face, Hollande is now rolling back taxes, and with great relief is watching revenues start to go back up again – ‘Now what did I do with that damn Laffer curve?’  I will wager that the sumbich hasn’t learned anything from this, and will start raising taxes one mo’ time when France’s next financial tit gets in a wringer.  For socialists it was ever thus – look no further than right here in California.

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  • Nate Beason at NC Rotary today (updated)

    George Rebane

    Nevada County Supervisor Nate Beason, who represents District #1, will be the speaker at the Nevada City Rotary Club luncheon today at noon in the National Hotel.  Guests and visitors are welcome.  I don’t know exactly what Nate will be discussing, but you can be sure his talk will be interesting and relevant to county affairs and current happenings.

    During the Q&A I plan to ask my supervisor about his stance and performance on the Board of Supervisors that serves to minimize the regulatory burden on the county.  As I pointed out in my last KVMR commentary, America is now known internationally as the ‘Regulation Nation’, and California is the world’s most enthusiastic regulatory poster child.  Nevada County – small, rural, politically confused, and mostly voiceless – sits at the end of the regulatory funnel, being subjected to the worst of the worst of what comes out Washington and Sacramento.

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 20may14 (updated 22may14)

    George Rebane

    ChineseHackersThe Red Chinese and their People’s Liberation Army are hacking American corporations for designs, trade secrets, and business plans – imagine that.  Well, our AG Eric Holder did just that recently, and decided it was time to put his foot down and fight crime wherever it was found.  He actually indicted five PLA officers for being bad guys and put their names on the FBI’s most wanted list for “economic espionage and trade secret theft”.  I understand it’s bad for your blood pressure to hold back impending massive guffaws, so I didn’t even try.  And I’m sure that the Chinese leadership in Beijing share similar concerns for their own health.

    You’d think that everyone knows that cyberwar is now a constant in international relations, and most certainly between large hegemons and would be hegemons like Russia, China, and the US.  Making a hissy fit of it reminds one of the scene in ‘Casablanca’ where the French police inspector (Claude Rains) is ‘shocked, simply shocked’ that there is gambling in Rick’s (Humphrey Bogart) night club as lackey (Peter Lorre Marcel Dalio) comes up to hand the good inspector his night’s winnings.  In any case, we should be on the lookout for pictures of NSA hackers going up in Chinese post offices – well maybe not, since they are less given to nonsense in their command and control governance.  (more here)

    The Union’s 20may14 print edition published Greg Goodknight’s extended piece – ‘It’s time to do the math’ – on Nevada County schools, their rankings, and performance on standardized tests.  I couldn’t find the article in their online edition.  It is available in their paywalled images of their print edition here.  (see Greg’s submittal to The Union in the 22may14 update below).  The well-researched piece is worth a read, especially given the upcoming election for school superintendent and the debate about Common Core that has been the subject of several pieces on RR (search ‘Common Core’) for which Mr Goodknight has provided extensive comments.

    (more…)

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  • Administrivia – 19may2014

    George Rebane

    TypePad has been down all day working to recover from another denial of service attack.  My apologies for the shared frustration.  TypePad uses Twitter to aprise those interested in its status when such outages occur.

    https://twitter.com/typepad

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  • Regulations are off-budget taxation

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 May 2014.]

    We just heard about another manufacturer leaving Nevada County and California, heading for Texas.  KACO New Energy is a ‘green’ company that makes solar panel electronics.  Their move will relieve them of the double whammy of manufacturing here in a mountainous backwater that is also located in arguably the most business destructive state in the Union.  In the meantime the torrent of lies out of Sacramento and Washington hyping our economy grows by the day.

    The latest job report is a farce when considered in light of the record reduction in the country’s workforce, now down to 62.8%.  If you remember your fractions from grade school, and apparently most people in the country don’t, then you know that any such quantity can be increased by making the denominator shrink.  And that’s where we put the number of people who work, including those who still believe they can find a job.  Any number of dubious new jobs you stick in the numerator will then improve the unemployment rate.

    But what really puts a drag on the country’s economy is the heavy burden of regulations that in reality are an off-budget tax, a tax which the nebbishes voting for big government never think about.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute publishes a yearly update on regulations titled ‘Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State’.  In it the authors point out again and again the several ways government raises monies it wants to spend – direct taxation, borrowing that increases the national debt, printing money out of thin air, and indirect taxation through its ever growing regulatory labyrinth.

    The latter is the invisible tax that is neither seen nor debated.  Nevertheless its effects are still felt, but even then they are misconstrued by Main Street.  In that way elected politicians duck responsibility for their centrally planned programs, shifting any blame quietly onto the federal government’s bureaus and agencies.  Wrap your mind around this – in 2013 compliance with federal regulations cost Americans over $1.8T.  The federal government’s outlays of over $3.5T now account for 31% of the country’s economy, and that is before the full costs of Obamacare kick in.  Add to that the states’ and local governments’ share, and all layers of government account for almost half the spending that makes up our GDP.  What we need to keep in mind is that these monies come as a drag on the productive sectors of our economy – private sector workers and business people doing their best to generate the wealth, attempting to keep the whole thing above water.

    Our regulatory compliance costs total more than the entire GDPs of countries like Canada and Australia.  We have to hire legions of lawyers to continually study, interpret, and argue both sides of cases arising from the 80,000 pages in the federal register that contain over 87,000 rules – unfortunately I don’t have time to go into the equivalent amounts of additional state and local regulations.  The federal regulatory burden alone amounts to almost $15,000 per household annually.  To provide some perspective, this eats up 23% of the average household’s income, and 29% of its spendable budget.  CEI reports that for the average American household the regulatory costs exceed “every item in the household budget except housing – more than healthcare, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services, and savings.”

    Small businesses suffer most.  That is the sector that creates and maintains most of the jobs that keep this country afloat.  But small businesses are hit particularly hard by regulatory costs and pay more per employee, averaging over $10,000 annually, than do the big corporations that average less than $8,000 per employee.

    In Washington and the state houses politicians get credit for spending that buys votes.  But since they are able to dodge the true costs of their giveaways, they have no motivation to stop passing laws, each of which pumps out another seventy plus regulations that drain money from the private sector.  In the end it is we who are dumb enough to reelect these people again and again.  So which regulation happy politicians are you voting for in this election year?

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on georgerebane.com 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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  • 36,000 illegal alien criminals released in 2013 (updated 15may14)

    George Rebane

    Under Obama administration orders the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau released over 36,000 illegal alien criminals (who were convicted of over 87,000 criminal acts, see ICE data below) onto American streets last year while they were awaiting deportation.  ICE did this in addition to the 68,000 similar releases it reported earlier.  These blatant violations of federal laws were done simply to appease Hispanic pressure groups and assure the future election of Democrats.  No lamestream outlet will report this for reasons long outlined in these pages.  These data were compiled and published by the independent Center for Immigration Studies.

    This latest release compounds the argument that, through their insularity and criminality, illegal aliens are in fact a net burden on our country, and not only the beneficial source of low cost labor touted by our vociferous backers of nations without borders (another of the insidious Agenda21 objectives for their brave new world).  As we add this to the list of the administration’s imbecilities and illegalities, the question that becomes ever more prominent is ‘when will the threshold for impeachment be reached?’ – in short, given his record over the past five years, what more does Barack Hussein Obama have to do before middle roaders finally get the picture that this man and his assembled team have a radically different future in mind for what used to be the United States of America?

    IllegalAlien2013convictions

    [15may14 update]  The Dept of Agriculture, not to be outdone by the Dept of Education, the EPA, and many other peace loving federal agencies, has issued a solicitation to buy 40 cal submachine guns with 30 round magazines (more here).  This will no doubt warm the cockles of progressive hearts everywhere, since now even a department that used to be mostly concerned with telling farmers what they can/not grow is ready to handle the odd plowboy who might insist on going above his allotted acres of soybeans.  And we all know that farmers are big on the Second Amendment, so you can’t be too careful when you pull up to the old farmhouse for a little confab – better pack some serious heat.  No one should be surprised if future visits to the countryside by the DoA will involve MRAPs and a few extra helmeted thugs just to make sure that the peace will be kept and regulations followed.  After all, the folks in the hinterlands today are getting a bit feisty, and full employment by any means is now national policy.

    Then again, there are those illegal alien criminals – at least a 100,000 of them now released back onto the streets by Obama’s ICE.  And some of these Hispanics have been known to be agricultural workers, so God knows where in his daily round a bureaucrat may run into some foreign desperado going unhinged when he sees a federale coming.  On second thought, submachine guns make all the sense in the world.  Where can I get mine? 

     

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  • Scattershots – 12may14 (updated 14may14)

    George Rebane

    Associated Press again puts the ‘lame’ into lamestream media in its ‘A look at all that Benghazi stands for’.  In this extended article the leftwing news organization presents its summary of the Benghazi Bamboozle, news developments that it has studiously ignored or minimized since the 2012 terrorist attack took place.  But even a casual read of the piece exposes the immense holes in the perfidious timeline that have been thinly papered over.  The piece is a blatant whitewash of the administration that needs to be put out there now that the House is assembling a select committee to finally dig out the facts behind the cover-up that Team Obama has been carefully constructing for the last two years.  AP’s power through such reportage is that the Left and information-lite hordes are seldom exposed to news from the conservative or Right side.

    NewMarxismAnd speaking of asymmetric communications, the recent spate of college commencement cancellations of politically incorrect speaker invitees highlights the now established truth that our formerly liberal free-thinking academia has become the most illiberal forum for free speech and thought.  The nation’s colleges and universities in the aggregate are little more than leftwing propaganda outlets, especially in their humanities departments, firmly on the road to reinventing Marxism (more here) as the foundation of choice for a socially just world, equalizing wealth and income, creating a sustainable earth free of AGW, and preventing the heartbreak of psoriasis.  For an excellent view of how the Left one-sidedly attempts to silence the Right, take a look ‘The Closing of the Collegiate Mind’ by Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, who makes the case in the 12may14 WSJ that “opponents of free speech have chalked up many campus victories lately as ideological conformity marches on.” 

    In the same vein Nevada County’s local leftwing brain trust continues to call for the silencing of conservative voices in our local newspapers and on local airwaves (RR readers know that I too am a burr under their blankets and a longtime yet proud target of such wailing).  Our designated reader just emailed me the latest blast from self-declared, fair-minded ideologues who have not changed their stripes since they first hauled wrong thinking people to the guillotine in the 1790s.

    Silencing opposition is just one of the many elements of the ongoing progressive pogrom advancing at full speed in California.  Nevada County’s latest casualty is another manufacturer – a ‘green company’ no less – hightailing it for Texas.  The 12may14 Union reports that KACO New Energy, maker of inverters for photovoltaic arrays, is prudently citing geography as the reason it is pulling up stakes and relocating to San Antonio.  Of course, none of this is felt in Sacramento as long the the lamestream keeps painting sunshine and roses on the foreheads of all those independent and middle road Californians.

    [14may14 update]  Warren Buffett has pumped more than $1.2B to support abortion and government programs to subsidize such takings of life.  This little revelation came to us through the chorus of lamestream crickets and Fox News.  Arguments pro and con for abortion aside, the issue remains a hot button in American politics which explains the cricket chorus.  But to underline the point that those who trust and limit themselves to the lamestream have no clue about a large part of the goings on in our land.  Into the same bucket we can throw the lamestream lauded $100M+ contributions of liberal billionaire Thomas Steyer who backs Democrats, especially those having signed up for draconian measures to combat AGW – remember ‘the debate is over’.  Instead, the asymmetry of liberal ‘journalism’ is again underlined by the blatantly false lies trumpeted about the Koch brothers relatively minor contributions to conservative causes.

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  • Happy Mother’s Day

    George Rebane

    ERebane1

    Ellen Rebane (1914 – 1990)

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  • Hillary and the Ragheads

    George Rebane

    The Boko Haran ragheads in Africa were given a pass by Hillary a couple of years ago when she refused to declare them to be a terrorist organization which would have kicked in sanctions on their financing funnel and limited their operations.  (This obvious designation was also requested by the DoJ, FBI, and CIA.)  Instead since then they have grown stronger than ever, in the process killing untold thousands of their fellow Africans.  As fundamentalist Muslims their contempt for women as chattel was again demonstrated in the latest kidnappings of young schoolgirls.

    We all remember that Hilary played first string varsity on Team Obama.  As SecState she delivered four years of undistinguished and unaccomplished service to the nation.  But even that is putting lipstick where it doesn’t belong when we add this massive blindspot to her carefully concealed role in the state department’s Benghazi Bungle.  (This latest, along with the IRS, NSA, F&F, …, is in a growing list of scandals that liberals, here and elsewhere, long ago assured us would have no legs.)

    BokoHaram

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  • Ruminations – 7may14 (updated 10may14)

    George Rebane

    The lying season is in full swing.  Yesterday the Obama administration released the latest assessment on the progress of global warming, climate change, or whatever their nom du jour for what’s happening with the weather (‘Third National Assessment on Climate Change’).  The bottom line of this latest issue of climategate is that the reason the economy has been doing so badly is that AGW has been screwing up America’s businesses with all these “extreme weather events” for which there is no evidence whatsoever.  The leftwing Brookings Institute reports that every year of Obama’s administration has seen more businesses close than open their doors.

    The report is again touted by 97% of all scientists in the universe who put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Americans spewing CO2 into the atmosphere; and if we only quit doing that then things would turn around and Miami streets would not soon be six feet under water.  Again, there is no evidence to support any of their claims other than the religious fervor of progressives some of whom have been awarding generous grants to compliant ‘scientists’ worldwide.

    A definitive refuting of the whole case is found in ‘The Climate Inquisitor’, but that will not make a difference in minds already calcified in “the debate is over” cement.  It is election year after all, and the American electorate has proven itself to be among the world’s most gullible and proud (just check the longitudinal study of the country’s adult literacy results).  So the bottom line for the poor state of the union is AGW, income inequality, and Bush2’s fault that Obamacare has landed flat on its ass – did I leave something out?  (Added scholarly refutation can be found in NIPCC's 'Climate Change Reconsidered II'.)

    Heard about the new National Women’s History Museum now being planned for the Capitol Mall?  This little progressive propaganda palace was going full-tilt boogie until some folks started questioning about the kinds of displays and exhibits it would ensconce.  Well, you’ve never seen the fogbank descend so fast before in Washington.  (Actually that’s not true, just recall the fog that hovered over the cowpile that became Obamacare.)  But true to form, the NWHM planners invoked what is sure to become a perennial progressive plaudit when such discoveries are attempted in the future .  They pulled out the Pelosi Principle – we really can’t talk about what is going to be in the museum until it is built.

    What??!!  Museums are built because there is a need to exhibit very specific things that society should recall, understand, and honor through the coming years.  But not according to leftwing logic; we build the damn thing first, and then we’ll tell you what we’re going to put into it.  Sign here and shut up.

    [update]  Common Core continues to confound.  The 7may14 Union published a distinctly one-sided and confusing report – ‘Republicans approve Common Core standards amidst opposition’ – on the McLaughlin poll released this Monday (more here).  From it the conclusion is drawn that Republicans and swing voters back CC – which some now call ObamaCore.  On the same day the Univ of Connecticut released its poll with the main finding that at least 6 out of 10 Americans had no clue about CC, with most of them not even having heard of it, and concluding that “Americans are skeptical about Common Core”.  While McLaughlin’s sample agreed with the wholesale ignorance about CC, its Republican backed conclusion was, when told that CC was a set of uniform national school standards, that they then backed it (more here).

    All that really happened was that the UConn and McLaughlin polls re-established that about two thirds of Americans don’t know squat about CC, and that those who claim they do have notions that range all over the map, mostly concentrating in the belief that CC is a new curriculum for schools.  None of the reports contain the illumination that “support” for uniform standards in schools does not automatically imply support for CC since that is only one specific set of standards which competes with various existing educational standards already in place across the land.  And you can bet the ranch that 99 and 44/100 percent of the people know nothing of what CC standards entail.  So to draw conclusions and then report that such polls discover support for CC is at best ignorant and at worst specious.

    [10may14 update]  More on the recent climate change bamboozle.  In a piece titled 'Inside the sausage factory', the 10-16may14 Economist describes the generation of the last IPCC report's executive summary (the part intended for policymakers and the only part anyone reads) –

    … having a report reviewed by officials who are themselves interested parties "created and irreconcilable conflict of interest".  The details, arguments and numbers remain in the full report.  But the summary aimed at policymakers is not necessarily a good guide to them.

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