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  • Did you know? – 18jan2014 (updated 20jan14)

    George Rebane

    This launches the sometime series of things that I did not know, or was not fully aware of the details.

    The censoring of free speech on college campuses is much more pervasive than the lamestream has led us believe.  It turns out that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has been keeping tabs on the shenanigans that liberal dominated academe has been practicing.  In 2007 FIRE found that three out of four colleges and universities in the land explicitly proscribed students’ and faculties’ First Amendment rights.  The situation has gotten better.  Today FIRE reports that the 2013 fraction has been reduced to about three out of five.  These diktats are all to be interpreted by the accusers who might claim to being offended on account of what they overheard someone say about sex, race, age, religion, national origin, color, marital status, pregnancy, disability, or status of veterans.  My question is why stop there when you’re on a roll?  Anyway, I didn’t have a clue that such a large majority of campuses were down on free speech which the Constitution guarantees us exactly because it may be offensive to someone else, but not in the ivied halls where enquiring minds are hobbled as they gather to discover and debate.

    California’s Cap & Trade law is following the Pelosi Principle to the letter.  State Senate president Darrell Steinberg is starting to worry out loud about all the undiscovered effluent that the “quarter baked” legislation is beginning to disgorge.  Well, the Democrats did get a glimmer of the crap they had cobbled together when early on they kind of forgot that the passed ‘Global Warmings Solutions Act’ (aka AB32) should really be referred to the ‘California Air Pollution Reduction Act’.  Of course, both names are ludicrous.

    But the real disaster for the Dems (and the rest of us) was the discovery that AB32 is driving businesses out of the state.  During strong denials of the same, the scumbags opened up the carbon credit markets to out-of-state participants that today reach as far as Quebec in order to let the state’s desperate businesses find cheaper avenues for making their mandated protection payments.  Now, of course, this means that the state will not get the projected monies for projects having nothing to do with ‘green’ or ‘global warming’ (e.g. high speed rail to nowhere) – we all (save the local leftwing lackeys) knew it would be another slush fund for liberal politicians buying votes.  When voters get stupid, they pay through the nose, except when they’re the transferees of transfer payments.

    [Added]  Reader Greg Goodknight has a considerable opinion piece in today's Union that covers global warming and Common Core among other topics.  Hope it's not paywalled.

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  • ‘Humanity in Jeopardy’ (updated 29jan14)

    George Rebane

    I was going to report on the just released results from the Index of Economic Freedom that celebrates its 20th year.  In it the dire news is that the US has dropped out of the top 10 of the 186 countries rated – we are now 12th and continuing to go down (more here and here).  In that report I would lament the eternally dense liberal mind that in its collective application is doing everything possible to reduce our freedoms and ability to have an economy which supports broad-based generation of wealth.  I would also point out the undisputable global evidence that it is the poor that suffer most in countries lower in the IEF rankings.

    But in this last great century of Man we have bigger problems facing us as a species huddled on the third planet revolving around a no count star in an unexceptional galaxy.  I was drawn to Max Tegmark’s report of the same title as reported in Ray Kurzweil’s newsletter (here).  Dr Tegmark of MIT is a physicist who, I was advised by a reader, just published Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2013), offering a new theory on the sum and substance of our cosmos.  But as we learn from his 13jan14 report, he wants to alert us to a much larger and proximate concern – our ignorance of and inattention to the impending Singularity.  (Regular RR readers should be very familiar with the topic featured in the Singularity Signposts section.)

    Singularity
    In the developed world we are seeing the impact of the pre-Singularity effects every time we open a newspaper or turn on the news.  Our own country is following an increasingly insane path in how we amplify these effects through taking another turn down on our educational system (cf Common Core) – dumbth abounds and continues to spread – and tighten the screws on wealth creation through ever higher taxes and regulatory pile on.  The declared aim of our progressive elites is to herd more and more of these low-information, increasingly un/deremployed sheeple into the voting booths so as to enable them to accelerate the process.

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  • Scattershots – 12jan2014 (updated 15jan14)

    George Rebane

    NID Rate Increase.  Our local water utility, Nevada Irrigation District, has decided to boost its water rates over 33%, or over a third in the next five years.  We are NID customers, and we protested the rate increase in writing before the hearing on the matter last Wednesday.  Niether fish nor fowl, NID is somewhat of a mystery utility in these parts.  Through its murky operations of power generation, recreation management, and control of all ground water in a tri-county area, it does deliver good quality water in a reliable manner.  Of course it should, since we here in the Sierra ‘make’ our own water which is the envy of the rest of California.

    Jo Ann and I protested the rate increase, not on some material grounds that they don’t need the increased revenues, but because they have not made the case for such a huge increase.  They simply cited the usual increase in costs, and the need to pump up their rainy day reserve again.  Their attempt at being open and above board was supposed to be fulfilled by disclosing their 2013-15 budget. (here)

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  • So You Wanna College Degree?

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 10 January 2014.]

    Did you know that college enrollments in the country are dropping?  For all the hullabaloo about American students placing well down on the list in the world’s youth smarts, it turns out that today fewer of our high school graduates are going to college to prepare themselves for the workplace.  All this in spite of the administration’s touting college as “the ticket to the middle class”.  As an aside, older listeners will remember when high school provided that entry point for almost all Americans.  But today it seems that undergraduate college is the new high school for the remedial work that students require to adequately read, write, and cypher.

    But the real reason for declining college attendance is that it no longer provides reliable value for its enormous costs which have been rising much faster than inflation, and more importantly, much faster than the difference in salaries earned by high school and college graduates.  In fact the salary differences have been decreasing by ten to twenty percent during recent years, while the cost of college has gone up over 16% since 2006.

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  • Ruminations – 8jan2014 (updated 9jan14)

    George Rebane

    Another one of my errors in judgment has been exposed.  According to former SecDef Gates in his forthcoming Duty, I am remiss in having been overly kind to Obama in assessing his dedication to his job and the duty of his office.  Gates knows better, and his views are being well publicized in outlets such as the Fiscal Times (here).  Nevertheless, I think the man has delivered a most measured and gentlemanly criticism of this administration and Congress.  From the excerpts I have read, the media is over-crediting the extent of his criticisms.   Gates’ book comes out on 14 January.

    Speaking of Obama and the legacy he will leave in 2016, what if the Republicans again gave Americans the chance to vote for Romney and Ryan.  Will we as an electorate have learned from our devastating mistake in 2012?  Then we re-elected a man who was demonstrably ignorant in economics, foreign affairs, and constitutional law – a man with no executive experience or legislative accomplishment, in addition to a “sealed” past and an extraordinary ability to lie that is only exceeded by his propensity to do so.  And we have reaped what we sowed.

    Against the Romney/Ryan ticket the Dems will run Hillary, who despite her past titles, comes with no discernible accomplishment, equally absent executive experience, and baggage that demonstrates her ability to make critical decisions and handle the ‘3pm phone call’ – forget about her handling the ‘3am phone call’.  The alternative to Hillary may be the buffoon from Central Casting – Wrong Way Joe.  Anyway, it’s worth a thought.

    And speaking of the constant crapola coming out of the White House, Obama’s shills are hyping Obamacare’s early performance, “crediting it with spending miracles.”  The problem is that according to federal actuaries none of it is true – “the new law had a minimal impact on overall national health spending growth through 2012.”  Nevertheless, its paid “boosters are taking credit for trends that began long before the law passed.”  And some wags observe that “maybe Obamacare should also get retroactive political credit for the germ theory of disease.”  (more here)

    [9jan14 update]  Everybody hear the latest about that filthy capitalist enterprise Walmart?  Well, it seems that the bastards have an employee health plan that beats the pants off of Obamacare.  It is much cheaper and provides more than three times the services than are available under the new limited access nationalized healthcare.  It’s just like the greedy corporatists to always show up well-intentioned government programs, just because these are poorly thought out, designed, and implemented.  Is there no shame left in the world?  (more here)

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  • Socialists’ Welfare Merry-go-round (updated)

    George Rebane

    Government can improve our lives only if it takes more of our money and liberties.  Collectivist tenet

    We woke up this morning to NPR’s dutiful support of the Dems’ initiative to extend unemployment benefits beyond their current 99 weeks limit.  The network devoted a supportive segment of its news for that legislation, and then added on a longer editorial piece, seasoned with income inequality references, that highlighted first person interviews with two longtime unemployed single women which were quite heart rending.  In this election year, these offerings were clearly meant to divert further consideration of the liberals’ mismanagement of the nation’s economic recovery since the summer of 2009, along with the reminders of DOJ and IRS scandals, the Benghazi massacre, ongoing foreign policy disasters, and the munificent blessings of Obamacare.

    Without the now well-worn recounting of how Team Obama has stifled economic growth that produced the slowest recovery on record, we do remind ourselves that if workforce participation today were what it was before the recession, then unemployment would still be above 10%.  And, of course, that is where it really is when we look past the hokey employment numbers the feds publish.

    But this is an election year, and vote buying from the ignorant and the too desperate to think straight is swinging into high gear.  The leftwing politicians’ job security formula is both staid and firmly established.  First, impede job creation and maximize the view that government, not the private sector, provides the good things in life.  Then as the (real) jobless ranks swell, with great ballyhoo introduce new welfare programs to help the unemployed while vilifying all opponents of added spending as uncaring of the nation’s poor and the unfortunate.  This will guarantee that more legions of the uninformed and the information-proof will vote for the same politicians and policies that got them where they now are, and keep them there.

    If you are a leftwing politician, what is there not to like about this time-tested and proven approach?  After all, since we are a democracy, let the people speak.

    [updated]  A new entitlement in the making?  Besides the attempt by the Dems to distract the country from the rank incompetence of this administration, the real objective here with the fifth year continuance of extended unemployment benefits could be to create a new entitlement category.  This would be the equivalent of being declared disabled and eligible for long term disability benefits.  In the case of unemployment, a former worker could qualify to be declared ‘chronically unemployable’ or ‘terminally untrainable’ or suffering from a broad-based ‘skills deficit’, or whatever … .

    The point of the title to this piece is that the socialist politician is always looking to lock in another cohort of reliable voters.  That our friends on the Left attempt to equate the current unemployment benefits run with that of our last president is understandable.  We leave it for them to answer how many years of breast-beating “economic recovery” is needed before this president stops calling for the next “emergency extension” of benefits, and admits that we now need a brand new entitlement to handle those permanently unemployed for reasons other than physical or mental disabilities.  In short, that he and his private sector innocent team will not allow the American economy to create the jobs required to bring real unemployment down to the levels enjoyed under more enlightened public policies.  You see, they don’t have to do any fancy thinking on this – just get out of the way.

    Benghazi

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  • Scattershots on Cultural Change (updated 6jan14)

    George Rebane

    I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.

    Today I mourn.  Stanford JD Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute informs us all how ‘The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’.  I mourn more deeply because it is at my alma mater where the coup de grace is being delivered.  UCLA has been the home of one of the nation’s flagship departments of English, but that has come to an end with a progressive and narcissistic turn of curriculum that today requires its majors to study not one whit of great English literature from the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton.  Instead, the students will now be exposed to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

    MacDonald confirms that in present day humanities “the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferable his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.”  Displacing the classics will be the mandate that UCLA English majors instead will take three courses from the areas of –

    -    Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies;
    -    Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies;
    -    Genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory;
    -    Creative writing.

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  • Scattershots on Cultural Change

    George Rebane

    I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.
     
    Today I mourn.  Stanford JD Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute informs us all how ‘The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’.  I mourn more deeply because it is at my alma mater where the coup de grace is being delivered.  UCLA has been the home of one of the nation’s flagship departments of English, but that has come to an end with a progressive and narcissistic turn of curriculum that today requires its majors to study not one whit of great English literature from the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton.  Instead, the students will now be exposed to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

    MacDonald confirms that in present day humanities “the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferable his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.”  Displacing the classics will be the mandate that UCLA English majors instead will take three courses from the areas of –

    –    Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies;
    –    Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies;
    –    Genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory;
    –    Creative writing.

    What has been the distinguishing meter of western learning, giving rise to the most advanced cultures on earth, has been “this constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present” that became “a defining feature of Western civilization, prompting the evolution of such radical ideas as constitutional government and giving birth to arts and architecture of polyphonic complexity.  And it became the primary mission of the universities to transmit knowledge of the past, as well … to serve as seedbeds for new knowledge.”

    And today, as polarized “politics grow ever more unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with some consolation.  There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.”

    On the other side of university campuses all across the country, schools teaching STEM majors will be seeing ever fewer American high school graduates who have been submitted to the new politically correct K-12 curriculum called Common Core.  Dr Sandra Stotsky, former member of Common Core’s Validation Committee, adds to the growing evidence that ‘Common Core Doesn’t Add Up to STEM Success’.

    Stotsky argues that “students who study under these standards won’t receive anywhere near the quality of education that children in the US did even a few years ago.”  As for mathematics, the basis for all STEM learning, CC’s leading math standards writer Jason Zimba explained that the curriculum “is to provide students with mathematics to make them ready for a nonselective college – ‘not STEM’”. (emphasis mine)

    Not wanting to put their government grant pipelines in jeopardy, heads of mathematics associations have duly fallen in line and endorsed a curriculum that clearly delivers a math-weakened body of graduates to our colleges and guarantees a declining enrollment in STEM majors.  Stotsky asks, “Why leaders of these organizations would endorse standards that will not prepare students for college majors in mathematics, science, engineering and mathematics-dependent fields is a puzzle. But no educational reform that leads to fewer engineers, scientists and doctors is worthy of the name.”

    From this educational disaster in the making we segue to China – our global creditor, competing hegemon, second largest world economy, and fast becoming the foreign sovereign nation-state to own the most of American industries and employ the most American workers.  China has already eaten our breakfast, is now eating our lunch, and has eyes on our dinner.  If you want the current details on China’s ascendancy and the price we are paying for it, please read this piece by Michael Snyder (H/T to reader) that no media outlet (lamestream or otherwise) wants to broadcast.

    Snyder details the major acquisitions China has made in American media, natural resources, agriculture, and manufacturing industries, not to mention technology companies with which it intends to soon become the dominant player in the big three of nanotechnology, genomics, and machine intelligence.  Snyder suggests that learning Mandarin would not be a bad idea for today’s younger generation.

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  • Walter Williams on the Great Divide

    George Rebane

    WalterWilliamsThe Great Divide as a means to peaceably resolve the post-tipping point ideological polarization of the country is a major theme on RR and has its own category of related posts.  The thought of Dr Walter Williams, eminent academic, economist, and outspoken observer of the American scene, has often graced these pages.  At a recent Investors Business Daily conference Dr Williams gave his assessment (here) of where we are as a divided people and what we should do about it.  (H/T to reader)

    My thoughts on the matter in a similar vein have caused some of the more rabid of the local left to call me a traitor, and for my expulsion from these shores.  The fear of the Left’s losing their meal ticket is palpable and totally understandable.  Nevertheless, Dr Williams and many people now see a negotiated partition of the country as the only reasonable and peaceful way forward which will halt the growing tyranny by the majority of the ignorant and least productive over the productive minority yearning to again enjoy the freedoms our Founders bequeathed us.

    Please take time to read and reflect on the arguments presented in this short piece.

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  • Happy 2014 thoughts

    George Rebane

    Happy2014Well, 2013 is now the year that was, and boy, was it a doozer!  By now we’ve all read countless reviews of the fights, feasts, and foibles of the past twelve months.  But I keep coming back to what kind of a world we have created as this year draws its last.  Obamacare aside – for it will be a ‘gift’ that keeps giving – our national fortunes in 2014 will be determined largely by the disastrous foreign policy which has now been firmly ensconced by this administration.  The litany of its failures is torturous and long, and has resulted in our loss of respect in the eyes of both our friends and enemies.  A short recounting of how our hegemony has gone to hell in a handcart is recounted here in the 31dec13 WSJ – ‘Global Order Scorecard: A reader’s guide to the world’s traumas’.

    So as we face the new year, to what really do we have to look forward?  The loss of liberties will continue and pick up with the new regulations that have become a blizzard from Washington and all the state houses.  Remember, our common wisdom teaches that if a legislature does not give us more constraining and expensive laws during its session, then for some odd reason we call it unproductive and label it a ‘do nothing’ collection of central planners bent on extracting more while delivering less.  Mark Twain and Will Rogers taught the obverse.

    The upcoming November election will guarantee to make half of us very sad, while the other side celebrates staying or changing the course.  My own wish for the political scene is to welcome a movement toward multiple parties that more closely reflect the ideologies of smaller constituencies.  Today’s two big tent parties deliver everything you would expect from an oligopoly, and in my estimate wind up truly serving only about one out of ten Americans.  The rest of us, especially the ignorant poor, take it in the neck as the country goes deeper into debt (wait till the interest rates go back to normal) and our ability to project power continues to shrink.  As China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the Muslim Misery really start flexing their muscles while we scramble to ‘lead from behind’, everyone will come to appreciate what Pax Americana has delivered in the years since the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    However, that doesn’t mean that the domestic silly season will end any time soon.  There will always be those history-challenged who will point out America’s ‘transgressions’ in Korea, Vietnam, mid-East, Iraq, Afghanistan, …, and claim that nothing has changed since 1945.  So looking backward, I paraphrase the question asked Mrs Lincoln, ‘Other than that, how did you like 2013?’.  And looking forward I anticipate next year’s question, ‘Other than the election, Obamacare, (insert your favorite international atrocities, etc); how did you like 2014?’

    But all that aside, we are still a hopeful and a ‘can do’ people.  So I leave you, dear reader, on this New Year’s Eve with a wish that your own 2014 will be prosperous, healthy, and productive.

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33 comments on Did you know? – 18jan2014 (updated 20jan14)