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  • Typhoon Tarnaev – one year on

    George Rebane

    Today there have been many observances and rembrances of the explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon that killed three, injured over 260, and blew the limbs off 16 of them.  People were gathered at these planned events to celebrate their “show of defiance and resilience” in the face of this tragedy.  NPR this morning assured us that nowhere would the source and purpose of this disaster be mentioned.  It was to be a focused and positive city-wide celebration of healing, of how tough the citizens of Boston could be when confronted by such unstoppable natural disasters.

    On this day we will not revisit the real cause of those explosions; neither will we examine the event’s larger context.  We will not speak of the global terror that radical Islam spawns.  We will not speak of the constant killings that are committed in the name of that religion, and the cultures it grounds worldwide (14apr14 Abujah, Nigeria – 71 killed, 124 wounded).  We will not speak of the ignorance and hate that are taught in its madrassas.  We will not speak of its age old and ongoing treatment of women as sexual and reproductive chattel.  We will simply think of such occasions of medieval murder and mayhem as we would of any other incomprehensible act of God.  And there we will be in complete agreement with the Islamists, because they too believe they are carrying out acts of God.

    That we no longer nurture or care for our own beliefs may be the surest sign that our culture has no beliefs to care for and defend.

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  • A Takeaway from Bundy Ranch (updated 19apr14)

    George Rebane

    When tyrannies make the laws, all opponents of tyranny are then seen and treated as criminals.

    The ownership and control of our public lands is a mess, both legally and constitutionally.  Save for military bases (an arguably constitutional provision), why does the federal government claim ownership – laughably in the name of ‘the public’ – of large parts of the country?  Save for preserving certain particularly scenic locales as public parks, why do states need to own land?  (I find federal ownership of land for parks and recreation to also be constitutionally unfounded.)  Yes, there are reasons for state governments to share control of ‘infrastructure land’ that contain navigable rivers, flood control dams and levees, and water reservoirs, but owning thousands of square miles of open range, mountains, and forests, the case for such has no reasonable constitutional basis.

    PublicLands
    (Recall the definition of ownership, you ‘own’ something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you wish.)

    Due to the Bundy Ranch gathering of citizens concerned with the jackboot behavior of various fed and state agencies, the BLM has decided to withdraw in order to regroup and replan their next assault, because they apparently expected none of what happened – e.g. consider the set aside of a little ‘First Amendment Rights’ pen for the few people who might show up to quietly protest as permitted by their betters.

    I was heartened that this event finally demonstrated what can happen when citizens ‘just say NO!’, both in their courage to unambiguously state that a limit to overreach had been broached, and also by the rapid gathering of supportive citizens who were willing to take an unknown risk against militarized government units armed with machine guns, snipers, and helicopters.  I hope that this might set an inspiring example for locals all over the country to resist the next diktat that comes down from above to perfunctorily limit more of what/how/when people can do, say, wear, eat, build, travel, stay, read, watch, learn, work, recreate, worship, display, spend, receive, join, … .  If the Bundy standoff can serve as the starting point for Americans everywhere to change their recently inbred docile acceptance to one of critical examination and consideration before compliance or its rejection, then this will have been a productive milestone on the road back to liberty.  (Nevada County electeds please take note.)

    As to resolving the grazing on public lands matter, I expect that the feds will be back after an appropriate media propaganda blitz that will demonize the Bundys and others who may have similar thoughts.  Here we can hope that this will raise the country’s awareness of the public lands issue, and after appropriate debate, lead to a resolution that gets the feds out of the land management business and, perhaps, shuts down a tax consuming bureaucracy.  Important and exciting times ahead.

    [19apr14 update]  Contrary to the somewhat bombastic interpretations of our progressive constitutional pundits, the legitimacy of federal retention of vast tracts of western lands is being called to question by lawmakers in western states (more here).  The historical legality of such federal retention which I and a number of other observers have criticized is now coming to the attention of some of our conservative political leadership.  The bottom line is still that the feds have usurped the states’ intended rights to own and control (i.e. dispose of as they will) public lands within their borders, and a progressive judicial system has made mockery of the clear original intent of the Constitution in this matter.

    Perhaps now a reasoned debate can start on the most appropriate process through which we can erase the overwhelming amount of the western red areas in the above map.  To be sure, the big government collectivists will fight tooth and nail to retain as much central control of domestic policies in Washington as possible.  America’s historical standards of liberty and self-determination demand the devolution of such central controls to the states and counties where the people live.

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  • Your life savings will bail in SIFIs

    Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. – Sir Walter Scott

    George Rebane

    Remember those banks and other financial institutions that were ‘too big to fail’?  Well, the IMF has confirmed that the world of global finance still has such enterprises so that if one goes down, it has the tendency to pull others down, resulting in worldwide chaos.  In the past – recall 2008 – governments put billions of taxpayer monies into such banks to keep them solvent as they started to be stiffed on the loans and other risky commitments that they had made.

    Regardless of all the happy dancing in the Rose Garden about increased employment and improving economy, what’s really happening is that the global economy, including America’s, is in a mess.  As a result, governments all over are worried sick about the size of future bailouts which promise to be huge compared to the amounts paid out a few years back.  Their reaction to this really tells the true tale of what is going on in the world’s fisc, and it ain’t pretty.  Catastrophe looms.

    In response, the mavens at IMF have come up with a couple of ‘improvements’ to make things better in the future.  But don’t hold your breath about anything becoming better for you.  First, institutions too big to fail will no longer be labeled so obviously.  Instead, they will be called Systemically Important Financial Institutions, or SIFIs for short.  All that means is that each SIFI finds itself in a row of dominoes made up of other SIFIs and lesser banks, so that no SIFI is going to go down alone.

    (more…)

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  • Who is that man?

    “… with the whole world full of fools, there is none who thinks himself one, or even suspects it.”  Gracian #201

    George Rebane

    Obama2014The news comes pouring in daily of Obamacare’s manifest incorrigible faults and the stream of palliative executive orders designed to rescue it.  The longstanding cases of this administration’s corruption and scandals are not going away in spite of the recently launched diversionary pyrotechnics about income inequality and discrimination against women in the workplace.  The federal government’s rogue departments and agencies continue recalcitrant.  Systemic unemployment and welfare rolls grow to record levels while the nation’s ability to defend its interests wanes as unpayable national debt climbs toward the stars – and the list goes on.

    What President Obama has done both domestically and internationally during his years in office can be only characterized as being 1) insouciant while terminally incompetent bordering on imbecility, or 2) a clever traitor who has every intention of reducing the US to second world nation-state peerage, dependent then on a strong global government to define and succor our economic and security needs.  There no longer is any discernible middle ground.

    Being generous by nature, I give the man the benefit of doubt, and hold him to be the former as he achieves the ends of the latter.

    (This brief summary is posted as a public service to RR readers who may have missed the unifying thrust of the commentaries critical of the administration that decorate these pages.)

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  • Con-Con and Common Core

    George Rebane

    RR, in its long suffering and dedicated effort to continue the posting of announcements of public import, your attention is invited to the following two.

    Con-Con or the Constitutional Convention as called for in Article 5 has become an item of some urgency for factions widely separated in their ideology and their view of our country’s future.  On the one hand we have national conservative leaders like Mark Meckler – President of Citizens for Self Governance – promoting the assembling of a constitutional convention of the states.  And on the other extreme there is George Soros, joined by hundreds of leftwing organizations and institutions, who are promoting the very same thing.  Both sides have widely differing agendas for what they think they will be able to accomplish during such a convention.  A main focus for both sides is the Second Amendment, approached for diametrically different ends.  The conservatives also want to revamp the Constitution to clearly “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government”, in short, a return to the kind of federalism envisioned by the Founders and much discussed in these pages.  (more here, here, and here)

    It appears that 34 states, the required two-thirds, have already passed resolutions and given other formal nods to holding a con-con.  However, not everyone is happy with the possible outcomes from such an undertaking.  Both sides feel that they can control and limit the convention to favorably address just the concerns on their agenda.  The requirements for any significant change – from amendment to rewrite – are strict and require a level of co-operation and consensus among the states that today is not visible.  So one can reasonably argue that the most probable outcome of a con-con is a shouting match resulting in no agreement on anything.  However, there is a chance that one side or the other may actually prevail, and that’s the scary part.

    Common Core.  Switching gears to the plague now afflicting the nation’s K-12 curriculum, there will be a town hall meeting on the subject here in Grass Valley on 29 April 2014 at the GV Elks Lodge.  Jan Collins (530-802-0865) is chairing the event and states that “there is growing grassroots opposition nationwide to the new one-size fits all curriculum, and its accompanying testing and collection of invasive personal data about our children and their families. Home schools, private, and charter schools may find they are affected as well.”  Anyway, mark your calendars and come hear the speakers, and get the latest info on what all the fuss is about; it’s important.  More about Common Core here and here.

    CCtownhall

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  • Alert – RR commenting sign-in

    Both Mozilla Firefox and IE bring up an alert window when you try to sign in to comment on this blog.  The alert advises that you are attempting to go to an insecure URL.  I have a support ticket started on this to inform TypePad, and will remove this post once it is corrected.  I invite readers to attempt commenting to this post and relaying their experience.  Thanks for the trouble.  gjr

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  • Forecasting by Crowds

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended version of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 4 April 2014.]

    Recently our government has had some problems forecasting events critical to the conduct of America’s foreign policy.  We seem to have missed the boat on calling the response of Iran in its nuclear weapons development, the reaction of Syria confronting our ‘red line’, Al Qaueda’s attack in Benghazi, Putin’s reaction to warnings about Crimea, and the list goes on.

    Similar problems have been encountered for years by government and private sector economists and analysts in forecasting our economy’s response to various fiscal and monetary policies, and, of course, how people would react to new social programs offered by the feds.  The bottom line is that economists, analysts, bureaucrats, and politicians are always surprised by reality when it happens.

    The art of forecasting such events and responses has been a mainstay of our intelligence community, and a lot of effort has gone into coming up with new methods and processes to improve the accuracy of forecasts.  Today this research has involved lots of ordinary people who are neither forecasting nor intelligence specialists.  The field is loosely described as soliciting ‘the wisdom of the crowd’.

    It turns out that when you ask a lot of people to estimate some outcome, and then aggregate their answers, you wind up with a surprisingly good result.  This was discovered about a century ago when fair goers in England were asked to estimate the weight of a steer. It turned out that the average of the several hundred submitted estimates came within a pound of the correct weight of the well over a half ton animal.  Since then this has piqued the interest of researchers, and today there are several organizations using ‘crowd sourcing’ to forecast events.

    (more…)

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  • ‘The Real Crash’ – Summary Notes

    George Rebane

    I read Peter Schiff's The Real Crash (2013) last year and summarized its main findings found in Chapter 12 of the book.  Since I recently attended a conference where Schiff was the keynote speaker and posted on it – A Libertarian Lovefest … – I thought I'd share this little missal with my readers who may just want to cut to the chase.  Anyway, I ran across the summary while rummaging around in my files, so here it is.

    1.    Main thesis – We consume more than we produce.  Therefore foreigners produce more than they consume.  They are the creditors and have pent up demand since they are living below their means.  Such economies will see a surge in demand while ours will languish/shrink.  Invest in companies that will benefit from this shift.  The US economy will crash.
    2.    Sectors to invest in
        2.1.    Raw materials – they will drive more cars and buy more washing machines
        2.2.    Agriculture – they will eat more meat and complex foods
        2.3.    Energy
        2.4.    Manufacturing
        2.5.    Chemicals
        2.6.    Infrastructure
        2.7.    Utilities
        2.8.    Technology
    3.    Countries to invest in
        3.1.    Australia – energy independent, export to Asia, strong banking system
        3.2.    Singapore – wealthy and high savings, freest economy, large exporter
        3.3.    Hong Kong – low taxes and regs, big China exports, “corporate Mecca”
        3.4.    New Zealand – shift from ag to mfg, big exporter to Australia and China (free trade agreement)
        3.5.    Switzerland – prudent and fiercely independent, home to thriving banks, insurers, pharma, and chemicals, not in Eurozone
        3.6.    Norway – global markets for its oil, fish, forests, and minerals; not in Eurozone, swinging away from a social welfare state
        3.7.    Netherlands – third largest ag exporter, has Europe’s largest natural gas field, good place for “euro exposure”
        3.8.    Canada – growing what the US is shrinking: manufacturing, mining, drilling, extraction, logging.  Poised to shift exports from declining US demand to increasing global demand.
        3.9.    China – “capitalism and democracy are not the same thing”, rocky road ahead but potential for tremendous growth, big US companies moving major operations there.
    4.    Investment Strategy (“three legged stool”)
        4.1.    Quality dividend-paying foreign stocks in the right sectors (consider countries, currencies, sectors, individual stocks),  Euro Pacific Capital (brokerage company)
        4.2.    Liquidity and less volatile investments: cash (foreign currencies for liquidity, keep some dollars on hand) and foreign bonds (short maturities, non-dollar denominated, also convertibles), http://www.europacificfunds.com
        4.3.    Gold and gold mining stocks – Perth Mint Certificate Program, Euro Pacific Precious Metals
    5.    Global decoupling from US economy is the big fear.  Our economic collapse “has barely begun”.  Before collapse is complete, “US bonds and the dollar will crash.”

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  • Media Bias – Living in Separate Worlds

    George Rebane

    Recently the Media Research Center released two reports on how Americans are exposed to what is happening domestically and in the world.  The data in those reports show that most of us who depend on the lamestream and Spanish language outlets get a totally different picture of what is happening – mainly the leftward lean of these stations is obvious in what is not covered and what is brushed aside with a mention of a few seconds on Saturday night.

    For example, Hispanics who restrict their news sources to Univision or Telemundo receive a fairy tale version of the Obama administration that has no domestic or foreign policy blemishes let alone gross screw-ups (more here).  They hear nothing of the NSA scandal, Fast and Furious, Obamacare’s shortcomings, IRS targeting of conservatives, Benghazi, or the fiascos in Syria and Ukraine.  Even the nation’s immigration reform picture is tailored for them.

    Speaking of immigration reform, the rest of the lamestream led by ABC, CBS, and NBC have uniformly suppressed the news that “immigration enforcement has totally collapsed” (Sen Jeff Sessions R-AL).  The DHS reported that the administration, under DOJ direction, chose to release in the US over 70,000 illegal aliens with criminal records last year instead of deporting them as called for by law.  In its stead, Team Obama is crowing that it “deported” over 250,000 such aliens.   But no lamestream is picking up that these deportees were persons caught crossing the border and simply returned immediately to Mexico.  Such catch and return cases have never been included in the reported deportation numbers that formerly involved only illegal aliens who had successfully established themselves in some manner, and then discovered by ICE and deported after due process.

    This list can go on indefinitely and is definitely lopsided when it comes to comparing the completeness of news coverage by right vs left-leaning media.  So when we consider what people know and believe, we are definitely of two separate worlds.  And this division does not even include those folks with little or no ability to assimilate any kind of news because of other cognitive deficiencies.  And they are the ripe pickings of Democrats and the progressive message.

    It must be this cohort that the voter registration forms, pre-marked by some liberal worthy, were sent to as part of Covered California’s outreach to include voter registration with Obamacare sign-ups.  Apparently the political party of choice was ‘Democratic Party’ marked with a bold ‘x’.   See if you can find any mention of that beyond Fox News.

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  • Global Warming – the latest official update

    George Rebane

    The Lysenko list of our leftwing is more apparent than ever with the release of the second part of IPCC’s latest report (AR5) on global warming.  It turns out that they’re quietly walking back the hysteria generated over the last years – the warming is 1) not anywhere near as large as previously predicted, 2) is coming later than predicted, and 3) is not going to cause all the predicted damage to life on earth.  In fact, if anything, the warming will create new millions of square miles of arable land suitable for growing more food for the planet’s hungry (Anthony Watts has more here).

    Trofim Lysenko was Stalin’s crop geneticist who helped set back agriculture in USSR during his tenure as the politically correct scientist of the communist state.  His findings agreed with and abetted the agricultural policies handed down to the country’s collective farms.  He sang the politically correct song prescribed by his masters, much as have the cadre of bought and paid for scientists that fashion the findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    By giving what appears as scientific substance to control minded socialists and other low information types around the world, the IPCC hysteria over the last 20 years has caused untold damage to developed country economies and even their environments.  The evidence for that is most clearly visible in the US with the growth of a rapacious bureaucracy that seeks to extend their control over every aspect of our daily lives.  But don’t expect that our left-listing loonies will let any of this dampen their fervor to fundamentally change America.

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6 comments on Typhoon Tarnaev – one year on