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  • And all these things used to be ours

    George Rebane

    Friend and Nevada County cartoonist extraordinaire RL ‘Bob’ Crabb nailed it in yesterday’s (3may14) Union with this offering (pilfered below) on the plan for the government to next confiscate our ground water, and either prohibit its consumption or charge us for it.

    Crabb140504

    I hope that all RR readers have been aware of these sub-rosa ‘takings’ that have been going on for some time now.  And I hope that all will understand where this will end up when the socialists finally achieve their Agenda21 objectives and declare their true colors – i.e. when the state will constructively own EVERYTHING.  (We all remember that you own something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you will.)

    The governments of America have been constructively appropriating private property for at least two generations now.  They still let us keep pieces of paper that state our ‘ownership’ of things, but that is a ruse.  All those pieces of paper let you do is to transfer possession and maintenance to another nebbish, and in the interval you are responsible for paying all government fees and legal liabilities that the property entails and may become involved in.

    These myriad fees and judgments are drained from us with the argument that they pay for marginal services that the government provides or allows someone else to provide in our behalf.  Upon examination, the overwhelming number of these marginal payments are nothing but payola and protection money.  Protection from what? you may ask – protection from not being jailed or worse if you don’t pay or resist confiscation.

    The next question then is, Well, for what do we pay the ever increasing amount of taxes on April 15th?  The answer to that is becoming more clear with every passing year – on the federal level, we are overwhelmingly taxed for wealth redistribution and debt service; on the state and local levels for reimbursing unfunded liabilities (e.g. public service pensions) incurred in our name, without our knowledge, and against our wishes.  Everything else on the margins will become a fee or extra charge added on to this or that purchase.  Ultimately, I predict we will marginally pay for every mile of public road we travel on, and for the air we breathe since the government will argue that it costs them to monitor air quality and chase down the ‘polluters’.  Also, look for a global warming tax to be levied based on some indescribably hokey metric that is guaranteed to keep on increasing regardless of air quality.

    Finally, the accounting for the amounts of these marginal charges will be unfathomable and beyond corruption (the successor word has yet to be invented).  In the end the concept of money will be withdrawn and we will all be consuming with government issued credits that will be allocated on the basis of an extremely elaborate rationing scheme – and no fair saving up credits, they will just disappear from your account in order to maintain a mandated level of material equality among the citizenry.

    And I do understand that some of you will argue that we are already on the threshold of this brave new socially just and sustainable world.

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  • The Great Escape

    George Rebane

    It gives little pleasure to remind us all that progressives are socio-economically ignorant, incorrigible, and unrepentant.  The great escape of companies from the once Golden State continues unabated.  From Nevada County we see the next stage departure of our formerly iconic Grass Valley Group as its remnants are merged with Miranda Technologies.  It is yet one more piece of evidence that manufacturing things here for consumption elsewhere has become a fool’s errand in these Sierra foothills.  We have nothing to offer a manufacturer except great scenery and added delays and distance over which raw materials and finished goods must be transported.

    On top of that, we are in a collectivist California that is successfully vying for being the most anti-business state in the Union when we pile on the state’s taxing policies, development fees, unionization, environmental strictures, and anti-growth regulations that generally dun all productive activities that create wealth and promote individual liberties.  All of these factors are not in the ken of liberals that range from the local lackeys to Sacramento’s ever leftward lurching and corrupt government.

    The latest of the shoes we heard drop is Toyota’s announcement of its escape from soCal to Texas, which includes the moving of thousands of middle-class jobs out of the state that has finally become unendurable to a company that first set up shop here in 1957.  The reasons for leaving are more than abundant and understood by other equally iconic California companies that are quietly directing their growth and expansion to the nation's 'fly-over country’.  Only the well paid and politically blind workers will remain to enjoy our climate and scenery.  Such amenities are no longer affordable to growing businesses and middle class workers.

    (more…)

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  • Common Core Town Hall

    When you have no case, abuse the plaintiff.  Marcus Tullius Cicero

    George Rebane

    CCtownHall_29apr14The well-attended town hall meeting reported in ‘Common Core Unexamined’ took place last night in the GV Elks Lodge featuring speakers Sandra Stotsky, Ed.D., Brad Dacus, and Lydia Gutierrez, M.Ed.  Dr Stotsky served as one of two credentialed education experts on the CC Validation Committee, Mr Dacus is an attorney and president of the Pacific Justice Institute, and Ms Gutierrez is a 20+ year teacher and is also a Master Teacher for the UCLA Mathematics Project.  Their presentations ended with an extended Q&A with the audience.

    Here are the major points that I took away from the evening –

    1. The CC standards initiative is a brainchild of and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, currently to the tune of $250M.  The standards concern themselves mainly with literacy and STEM education.

    2. CC purports to be the nation’s first “college readiness standards”, prescribing the specifications for curricula that will prepare our kids for a college education which will serve them in tomorrow’s technology driven workforce.

    3. CC is not a coherent state led initiative, but it is actually promoted and ‘supported’ by the federal government through a program of grants to qualifying states.

    4. CC was put together within a short (six month?) time window by a committee of 17? – almost entirely from the ‘testing industry’ – under the aegis of the Gates Foundation without debate and/or consultation with parents, teachers, educators, school boards, industry, … . Since the GF is private, there is no requirement for it to report on the deliberations that led to the issued standards.

    5. CC was ‘validated’ in an equally short time frame that omitted the usual multi-year period of testing and evaluation that previously adopted educational standards have enjoyed.

    6. The two accredited experts on the CC Validation Committee – Drs Stotsky (lexicographic literacy) and Stanford’s James Milgram (math) – refused to validate the standards and resigned from the 29-member committee.  They wrote about their concerns in ‘Lowering the Bar: How Common Core Math Fails to Prepare High School Students for STEM’.

    7. Opposition to CC is now non-partisan and growing, even among the 45 states that initially adopted it.

    8. There exist no coherent CC testing procedures or test standards for CC curricula.  The recommended testing approaches are designed for computer delivery and grading.  The tests will be ‘dynamic’ in that successive questions will be delivered on the basis of the student’s answer on the current and previous questions.  This makes rating, ranking, and other forms of comparing students’ accomplishments difficult to impossible.  However, it does support achieving higher aggregate test scores.

    9. Fed funding will initially come through the residual No Child Left Behind appropriation which only requires high test scores in the states’ adopted testing programs (here, of course, CC).

    10. Parents have the right to opt their kids out of having to take CC assessment tests, although they must still participate in the CC curricula offered by the various school districts that are teaching to the standards.

    More later.

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  • Public Pension Punishments in a Progressive Posterchild

    George Rebane

    Illinois is a one of many states (e.g. California) that highlights the evils of progressivism applied wholesale.  It is worth holding up as an example of the latest problems with the trillions of dollars of unfunded public pension liabilities (much covered on RR) that are plastered over the nation’s fiscal landscape.  Today the state, a leader in corruption and crime, remains in a deep hole of public pension debt from which it hasn’t been able to dig itself out with past tax increases.  So now it’s time to raise them again.  (Here are some Illinois rankings published by their own Chicago Tribune.)

    At issue is the replacement of the state’s flat income tax with a progressive version like we have in California – the more you make, the higher tax rate you pay.  And as in California, this has already caused an outmigration from the ranks of the state’s high earning residents.  But that makes no never mind to the public service employee unions like SEIU who are now being joined by some of the most misguided Christian clergy on God’s green earth.

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  • Common Core Unexamined

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 April 2014.]

    Some years back the National Governors Association, realizing that America’s workforce was rapidly losing out in the global job markets, concluded that the country needed a new approach to K-12 education.  Its efforts to that end produced what today is known as the Common Core national educational standards (more here).  By educational standards they mean to prescribe a common basis for what things a kid is supposed know when they complete each grade.

    CommonCoreSince the old wasn’t working all that well, these new standards began to catch on with certain politicians and educators.  Then the federal government threw its weight behind Common Core, identifying its adoption by a state as having qualified for new No Child Left Behind grants.  And before most people knew it, Common Core standards were quietly taken up by most states in one form or another.  Today only five states have not signed up.

    But that is just the beginning of the story.  Academic standards make up only one leg of the three required to complete what we might call an educational system.  The other two are the curriculum that would support achieving the standards, and the assessments and evaluations, or standardized testing for short, that would tell us how well the students were meeting the standards.  Initially, the curriculum remained for each state to draw up as they saw fit, and most left it to local school districts.

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 22apr14 (updated 27apr14)

    George Rebane

    The recent DoS attack on Typepad has made reading and commenting tough on RR and countless other blogs on that service.  In this interval I have had a chance to put some serious effort into one of my other lives – investor in and technical consultant to a rapidly growing financial engineering start-up that develops and licenses decision support products to the investment advisory community.  My job is to continue inventing new products, and help solve thorny technical problems as they arise that involve a lot of equations, data, and coding.  The work is actually the sweet spot of what I’ve done all my life – I get to ‘push squigglies’ and not worry about sales & marketing, facility issues, staff relations, hiring, regulatory & legal matters, financing & cashflow, …, well, maybe a little bit.  But I do get to worry a lot about why a certain solution is not converging, and how to deal with some pretty ugly looking probability distributions that impact serious decisions.  So as we are taught – the Lord giveth as He taketh away.

    Well, it looks like the move to dividing California is neither treasonous nor dead as our progressive pundits have continued to assure us.  I have no idea where the initiative to form the new state of Jefferson out of northern California will go.  But I and everyone who is paying attention understands what the prime motivation is behind this effort.  The main drivers of splitting the state are unequal representation, divergence of interests and values, and overreach of government (state and fed) into people’s lives.  Yuba county is the latest to join the already declared counties for forming a new state.  Nevada and Placer counties are being actively recruited by organizations like the Norcal Tea Party to also join the movement.

    As long preached on these pages, people like to live in smaller communities populated by others who believe and act more or less like they do – i.e. ideologically more cohesive communities with the ability to effect local control.  In its present configuration California is way too big even if we forget that it is heading toward an economic basket case under the perennial leadership of a cohort of corrupt collectivists determined to achieve the social, economic, and political objectives summarized under Agenda21 (see RR A21 category for more).

    According to an email from its former executive director Chuck Shea, CABPRO is back in the hands of the Board that had allegedly resigned.  Mr Shea and his supporting former Board members have withdrawn their lawsuit asserting their leadership of the organization.  Readers were informed of the controversy here.  No word yet on what the structure and direction of the revived CABPRO will be.  In the interval we are enjoying a peace that passeth all understanding.

    [update]  “Back-door gun control” is what some are calling the ongoing massive ammo purchases and orders by Homeland Security and other government departments that has now exceeded 2.5 billion man killing rounds.  Their latest is the addition of 25 million shotgun shells including 5 million deer slugs.  The ongoing government purchases that have no stated ending has caused an historical shortage and usurious price increases of ammunition for civilian markets.  For a government that expects its social policies to instigate civil unrest, all this makes sense – constructively disarm the public while adding guns and gun-toting personnel to government ranks.  DHS alone fields an army of over 100,000 armed agents which is the equivalent of about seven Army/marine divisions.  And the nation’s numbnuts are being told that all of this is to protect them from terrorists.  More here.

    [23apr14 update]  AB32’s wraps have finally been completely removed.  The state’s clean air act is in fact the wealth redistribution and voting buying scheme that many of us predicted here from the outset.  Carbon cap’n tax law had the other purpose of driving businesses out of California that hire the poor and lower middle class so that more may be added to the transfer payment rolls that progressive politicians direct toward their constituencies.  “California seems to be the place where bad ideas go to live—and reproduce.”  The Sacramento scumbags led by state senate president Darrel Steinberg have some not so surprising ideas where the AB32 tribute monies should be spent (more here).

    [27apr14 update]  A correspondent emailed me an insight by a physician who finally explained the unsavory odor that we experience every time more of Obamacare is revealed.  However, it was really Nancy Pelosi who first put her finger on it or in it when she pronounced the new socialized healthcare act as a member of things that have to be passed before their contents can be ascertained.  The now confirmed and propitious pairing is, of course, Obamacare and stool samples.

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  • Administrivia – 21apr14

    George Rebane TypePad has been under the most intense ‘denial of service’ attack for the last few days, and therefore RR has not been available for either reading for comment. They claim to be making some headway in “stabilizing” their servers, but who knows. Since everything was down, including their system site, they have been using Twitter to get the word out on their status. Here is the URL – https://twitter.com/typepad .  And here is some info they’re now putting out on their own site – http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/response-to-downtime.html .

    I add my apologies to TypePad’s for the misfortune they/we have had visited on us by the scum that often takes human form.

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  • HE IS RISEN!

    George Rebane

    HeIsRisen

    As Christmas is the promise, Easter is the fulfillment.  Oblivion vanquished, rejoice!

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  • A confused op-ed by The Union publisher

    George Rebane

    The Union’s new publisher, Jim Hemig, gave us his understanding of today’s media landscape.  In his 18apr14 op-ed he compared “the difference between a journalist and a blogger.”  His point was that a journalist, especially if he works for The Union, has available all kinds of sources for reporting news and uses them to present a “balanced” view in the published product.  Hemig then let us know that “bloggers often don’t have such integrity.  They only share one opinion: their own.”

    He later goes on to also paint the entire online community (here we’re talking about a global resource with practically infinite content) as somehow speaking with voices that are intrinsically and ubiquitously biased, claiming that “if you really read The Union … you will find it is a balanced and a much fairer place than anywhere on the Internet (and definitely in print).”

    Now I am not familiar with Mr Hemig’s background and may well be underestimating the gentleman, but this op-ed piece does give me pause as to what kind of publishing and journalistic talent our newspaper is currently brandishing.  First of all, he grossly errs in posing the initial question, putting in doubt his understanding of the structure of today’s information media.  To wit, a blogger is a person who publishes a weblog or blog, and can be a journalist, commentator (like me), affinity group (e.g. gardening) editor, or simply a family member maintaining a family information and communication repository (e.g. on Facebook).  And a journalist is just one type of wordsmith from the many who can publish his work on one or more kinds of media outlets – print newspapers and magazines, TV, radio, cable, documentary videos, online news outlets (Reuters, AP), blogs, … .  Comparing the difference between journalists and bloggers is at best failing to distinguish between the content provider and the outlet medium.

    The Rebanes are long time subscribers to both the print and online editions of The Union.  The newspaper itself is a run-of-the-mill small town publication that often displays its best efforts in sometimes humorous, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes even infuriating ways.  We cannot characterize it as a career fulfillment workplace for anyone who works in the news industry.  Nevertheless, it is the most read news outlet in our community, and it is the best print medium we have and the best that our dollars can support.

    The good news is that for most local thinking people The Union is but one of a hundred sources from which they regularly get their news and commentaries that offer competing viewpoints.  The paper should be considered within this perspective, and our criticism of it should not be done in the context of putting it next to the big guys like the NYT, LA Times, or Washington Post.  Most certainly the claims of any news outlet for being fair and balanced – be it Fox News or MSNBC – should be taken with a block of salt, and that includes the breast beating of our little Union.  Not every story is or can be ‘fair’ to all concerned, and most certainly every news item doesn’t come with a hidden ‘balance’ that a journalist or commentator must always dig out and reveal.  The world is not built that way, but it can be painted as such by people pushing this agenda or that – and everyone has an agenda, which reality is easily verifiable from a perusal of the so-called world class media.

    In sum, The Union is Nevada County’s cosa nostra (‘our thing’) in news, let’s enjoy it as it is, and just smile when its management tries a little puffery to rebut its often gratuitous critics.

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  • Mexico Toughens Stance on Autonomy for Southwest US

    George Rebane

    Mexico City, 6 May 2024 – Mexico’s president Juan Carlos Echeverria announced in his Cinco de Mayo celebration speech in San Diego that Mexican forces that have staged over the last six months along Mexico’s northern border would be further reinforced.  Tensions have increased since Russia announced that it was providing additional combat air units and advisors to Mexico under the two countries’ far reaching mutual aid and defense pact signed last year.

    AztlanFlagNegotiations with the newly formed Reconquista Party have stalled over the status of Texas and Utah in a post-autonomous Aztlan which is to be comprised of the present states New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.  The negotiations have traveled a rocky road over the last ten months that started after the Reconquista Party sent their Commission for the Liberation of Aztlan to Washington with a list of demands for a new autonomous region in the southwest United States.

    Demonstrations by various Hispanic and immigrant activist groups have grown from peaceful gatherings protesting violations of human rights and outright repression of America’s Spanish speaking population to violent encounters with local police and country sheriffs.  Things took a definite turn for the worse last July 4th with the concurrent bombing of three power distribution stations which left most of western US without power for almost two weeks.  Washington still claims it has evidence that the strategic selection of targets and the coordinated attacks were carried out by Mexican nationals trained by their military with help from Mexico’s allies.

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