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  • Approaches to Effective Education (updated 7aug13)

    George Rebane

    Our long lament with America’s education systems continues.  I was reminded of it again by a report on the entrepreneurial approach to teaching students that is rampant in South Korea.  There kids go to school during the day, and at night after coming home they go back to school, alebeit of a different type.  South Korean students are world class top performers (#2 after Shanghai), and are nudged into that status by parents who pay extra for extra tutoring for their little darlings.

    STEMSouth Korea is full of private tutoring academies (hagwons) run by entrepreneurs and master teachers.  Because of that South Korea is a literate and numerate nation – 93% high school graduation rate, ours is 77% – this means their high schoolers can read and cypher, while a good half of ours fall short.

    The hagwons are highly competitive, they advertise and publish their students’ test score averages and college admission rates.  Private teachers are continually rated by their students whom they correctly treat as their customers.  But even with higher ratings, most private teachers still strain to make as much as public school teachers, however many of them do make goodly fortunes.  The outstanding teachers are treated as we would treat rock stars, using online technologies they know how to leverage their talents.

    The country’s leading private teacher is Mr Kim Ki-Hoon who runs a 30 person teaching and publishing company.  Most of Mr Kim’s lectures are delivered online, and he supplements these lectures with his own texts that he self-publishes.  His personal income is about $4M annually.  Neither Mr Kim nor his thousands of colleagues/competitors are certified by the state.  The hagwons are run as a pure meritocracy in a free market with the non-performers being ruthlessly weeded out.  (more here)

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  • Ruminations – 2aug13

    George Rebane

    The surface calm during our cool summer is beguiling and more than misleading.  Over the years RR readers have had an early heads up on a number of national and international issues affecting us that are now coming home to roost, and several of them are already here.  All of them were pooh-poohed by the local Left, taking the cue from their national leadership.  Here’s a short list.


    UnsteadyStatesGreece is still in the tank     and sinking deeper.  Now the IMF is trying to quietly muscle in ahead of other creditors as it sees Greece hitting the bottom next year despite the Eurozone bailouts which have had no impact on Greece’s GDP growth.  There simply is no there there; Greece is a country that could economically disappear from the world scene with no impact save a haircut to those who lent it money.  Some time ago RR readers received a formula with which compute the probability of default; it worked in spades.  Other countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, and even Belgium are standing in the EU’s default line.

    Incipient financial ruin of America’s cities and states is acknowledged worldwide.  Again our light thinking Left denied for years the role of public service unions and their pension planning with sleazebag politicians.  Now we have witnessed a quiet pivot by progressives who are quietly trying to fix the unfixable without ever uttering things like SEIU.  For a snoot full of how obvious the problem is to all but the national liberal chorus and, of course, the oblivians, read ‘The Unsteady States of America – Why the pensions nightmare is only just beginning’ in the 27jul13 Economist.  Again, RR reported on this inevitability almost seven years ago when the SESF report presented to the local Board of Supervisors was risibly ignored.

    The current poster child of municipal malfeasance and corruption is Detroit whose 700K citizens have been characterized by Michigan’s governor as innocent “good people” on whom this financial disaster has come like an unpreventable act of nature.  Never mind that it is these same people who have continued to vote for the most corrupt collection of politicians decade after decade.  Now they all are looking with expectant faces toward Washington for what could become the first of a national avalanche of bailouts and bondholder haircuts as at least 100 more cities are stewing in their own versions of such Chapter 9 fiscal fiascoes.

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  • The Great Divide through Restructuring? (updated 31jul13)

    George Rebane

    51st_StateEight counties in northeastern Colorado are looking at the possibility of becoming the nation’s 51st state.  Like so many idyllic locales in the country, Colorado’s population corridor along the eastern slope of the Rockies has been successfully invaded by progressives immigrating from places like California where they have managed to soil their own nest.  And like in California, huge sections of Colorado now suffer taxation and regulation without representation from Denver.  So, these eight counties are exploring ways to again become free to pursue their own ideas of life, liberty, and property.

    RR readers are familiar with the Great Divide debate that is growing across America as socialism’s autocracy reaches its tentacles into the last lairs of self-reliance and entrepreneurship.  (See the Great Divide category link in the right panel.)  The Colorado Eight are just the latest jurisdictions to express their yearning for a future not destined for a coerced comprehensive collectivism.  (more here, and google ‘8 counties, Colorado’)

    These eight counties may be on to something that can help preserve the Union, albeit in a restructured way that allows the Great Experiment bequeathed by our Founders to continue.  To the idea of breakaway counties forming their own state (a la West Virginia), I offer that restructuring could come about in certain cases where such counties abut a neighboring state more congenial to the culture and values of such disenchanted populations.  In the case of Colorado, these eight counties might consider appealing to Wyoming, if such a realignment is mutually attractive.

    Here in California most of the more sparsely populated inland counties already stand raped by regulations from Sacramento and Washington.  We have little in common with the liberal legions that dominate the coastal areas, and the two big metropolitan regions of the state.  The new state of Sierra(?) is beginning to look better by the day.

    There is no guarantee that such a restructuring will work because socialism is a disease powered by ideological evangelism – ‘We know what’s best for you, or else.’  And it spreads virally, appealing to the under-educated with promises of redistribution and through co-opting public education to manufacture more of the under-educated.  But then again, we can dream …

    [31jul13 update]  For completeness, this contribution to RR’s Great Divide category was meant to elicit inputs from the Left that illustrate what drives such a notion of self-governance in the America of the 21st century.  As of this writing it has done so in spades.

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  • The Liberal Mind – Expendable Dead for More Votes

    George Rebane

    Through extreme cynicism (read evil) or utter stupidity, the liberal candidates for mayor in NYC are again attacking the city’s ‘Stop, Question, Frisk’ policy which has been the centerpiece of policing that has dramatically reduced crime rates in that large metropolis.  Last year SQF was material in dropping crime another 30% from the previous year.  And now the leftwing candidates are all taking turns lambasting SQF as being a bad policy based on “racial profiling”.

    The best that can be said about the lot of these politicians is that each of them is profoundly innumerate; the alternative is that they know better and are just being slime bags playing to voter ignorance in order to get elected.  For openers, over 70% of NYC perpetrators are black, and only 53% of those stopped are black.  And of those stopped, fewer than 9% are frisked.

    Blacks make up about one in four or 25% of the city’s population, and constitute several times that percentage in perpetrating crimes and being victims of it by their ‘own hands’.  Yet when the carefully trained NYC police practice SQF in a manner that **under represents** the proportion of blacks stopped, the slime bags take advantage of their ignorant constituencies and shout ‘racial profiling’.

    NYCcrime
    The nearby graphic illustrates the situation that confronts the cop on the beat every time he starts a new watch.  The blue rectangle denotes the NYC population, the black rectangle is the black population, the tan rectangle is the city’s non-black population.  And the red rectangle represents the distribution of crime perpetrators.  So the question in the very successful application of SQF is ‘What in hell is a cop supposed to do when he suspects that a person has committed a crime or is in the process of about to commit one?’

    The situation about who the criminals are is so lopsided when it comes to race, that even under-applying SQF yields good results in the sense of drastically lowering the city’s crime rate, and in the process saving numerous lives annually.  Those lives mean nothing to the sleaze bags who are willing to sacrifice anything to get elected.  If they succeed in pulling back SQF, then the lives lost will be countable and directly attributable to their demagoguery.  But we can bet the ranch that not one politically correct lamestream outlet will report on that.  Why?  Because it’s the wrong agenda; it doesn’t count if blacks kill blacks, just like it doesn’t count when Muslim fathers honor kill their daughters.

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  • Wanted by Obamacare: The young and the stupid (updated 31jul13)

    George Rebane

    Obamacare3You really can’t make up the stuff that rolls out of what passes for brains inside the Beltway.  The ads SecHHS Sebelius is making to attract young people who neither need nor want health insurance, especially of the Obamacare variety, are designed to appeal to mental profiles that range between the innocent altruistic and the terminally imbecilic.  A cognitive niche well frequented by politicians, demagogues, and other salesmen of various stripe.

    But the latest batch from Team Obama to be crying bloody murder at the prospect of getting f@#&*d over by Obamacare is the National Treasury Employees Union.  This is the IRS union that will now represent the 16,000+ additional IRS numb nuts to crack the whip over the rest of us who have to comply with Obamacare’s diktats.  Those union guys know what a pile of crap our new healthcare law is, and they want no part of it.  So they are appealing to anyone who will listen at the White House for the messiah to have mercy and include them in the growing legions of leftwingers who want a pass on Obamacare.

    Their arguments are all the same – ‘we paid plenty to get your butt elected.  You were bought and paid for, now deliver!’  After applying the Pelosi Principle to the unaffordable care act, everyone with a couple of neurons to rub together wants to climb on the already crowded Exemption Express.

    If the Republicans can’t make hay with these kinds of political miracles coming their way, then …, oh never mind.

    [31jul13 update]  The daily dose of Obamacare atrocities just grows as the revelatory Pelosi Principle is applied to those thousands of pages.  The newest is something called the 340B program for hospitals about which Dr Scott Gottlieb writes, “The 340B program was meant to help about 90 hospitals buy drugs to treat the poor. Now 1,675 hospitals qualify.”  Read ‘How Obamacare Hurts Patients’, it’ll curl your toes the wrong way.

    This part of the Obamacare trainwreck is already driving the price of cancer treatment drugs through the roof and insurance coverage sky high for such drugs.  And then we come to the huge network of middle-men gamers that have suddenly appeared in the last year as this crap for law oozes across the land.

    In the meantime our liberal rooting section is citing tearful anecdotes about people who have and are being helped through outlandish government subsidies, while they totally ignore the tens of thousands who will now die early cancer deaths as the 340B program kicks into high gear.  And we all (well, not the progressives) have to remember that this is one of hundreds of such buckets of legal, regulatory, administrative, additional fees, procedural, … crappola that we will be forced to wade through in the coming years, unless by some stroke of luck …

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  • Atheists need chaplains too (updated 28jul13)

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 July 2013.]

    New levels of social justice are being sought in our military.  The very same people who militate for separating church and state in all corners of public life are now demanding to have their fair share of padres in the armed services.  Actually, in the military men of God are called chaplains, and now (seatbelts please) atheists are demanding that the military provide them the comfort of a compassionate chaplain who shares their religion. (more here)

    Did I say religion?  Yes, atheism is a religion because it satisfies the requirements of a distinct faith in the structure, organization, and origin of the cosmos and everything in it.  Let’s not confuse the atheist with the agnostic.  An agnostic is a person whose belief system is moot about the existence or absence of God, Creator, Universal Intelligence, or whatever you want to call it.  An agnostic believes that God’s existence is either unknown, or more strongly, that it is unknowable.  (more here)

    This is a distinct difference from the atheists, who sometimes also call themselves humanists, and who believe strongly that there is no God.  They have had their case made by notables like physicist Stephen Hawking and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Their philosophy is the ‘turtles all the way down’ theory of cosmology.  Mankind will just keep discovering ever more esoteric layers of scientific knowledge, each of which underpins all the previous layers of our understanding.  Research without end, Amen.

    But unfortunately, atheists can claim no science to back up their professions of God’s absence.  You see, science is a biped, it advances only on the principles of falsifiability and Occam’s razor.  The latter resolves questions between two competing theories which explain all the known observations and data, and then selects the simplest of the two for further exploration.  Falsifiability is the bedrock principle of science.  Every proposed theory of science must be such that it can describe tests or realworld experiments, which if it fails, would cause it to be discarded as a description of truth about our universe.

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  • Obama’s Latest Planless Pivot on the Economy

    George Rebane

    BarackObamaThe President is on the stump again in a desperate effort to divert attention from his administration’s scandals and jobless recovery.  He is pivoting on platitudes which the sheeple noddingly accept as planning.  I have often advised readers on the difference between an objective and a plan to achieve the objective.  The President is into his fifth year giving evidence that he does not understand that difference, but there is also an alternative explanation.

    His “plan” consists of specifics like ‘creating more jobs’, ‘raising middle class wages’, and ‘fixing education’.  Typical of socialist thought, his objectives all along have been to reduce inequality rather than promote growth.  And what such objectives result in are policies that seek to distribute ever more broadly wealth that has not been created by the private sector.   No administration has hurt the middle class as much as Obama’s whose policies have burdened businesses to such an extent that middle class wages have actually dropped during this so-called recovery.  (Recall, I still maintain that we are in Depression2.)

    Every new regulation and tax added by government increases economic friction.  For example, the closest Obama has come to specifying something from a plan is his prescription to fix education by reducing its cost.  How does he plan to do that?  We don’t really know, but the first thing he wants Congress to do is to pass a new law requiring colleges and universities to start submitting regular reports to government on their spending, student attendance, and graduation statistics.  Brilliant!  Now these hoary bureaucracies will have to add another layer of faceless employees to satisfy this new government diktat.

    MedianIncomeThe President continues to pillory his opposition with the Grand Lie that the other side has offered nothing better than what his minions have inflicted on us.  This ignores the specific proposals on tax reductions, regulatory rollbacks (including Obamacare), and tort reform that have been advanced continuously for years by the more conservative economists and institutions.  When these are brought up in Congress, the progressives immediately pronounce them DOA and then deny that any such proposals have been made.

    In the meantime 100+ more cities in the country are getting ready to follow Detroit and pull the Chapter 9 trigger.  The unfunded liabilities problem, created by atrocious union pension plans that was pooh-poohed for years (even on these pages), has now become a reality.  The response to it all has been a combination of crickets and denial, while at the same time arguing that the jurisdictions have no recourse but to pay the contracted amounts – one way or another.  Progressive public policies passing in review.

    The problem, as long argued on RR, is an electorate of ever more ignorant sheeple.  Obama is not laughed off the podium because the adoring faces surrounding him really believe in the fertilizer he spreads to grow their unfounded faith in the brand of hope and change he has been successfully peddling since 2008.  Our post-American president is on plan with his fundamental transformation, the major element of which is an economically weak United States which creates the pre-requisites for an international standdown and internal class warfare.

    So this is how the federal tension is going to spend itself for the rest of summer until the debt limit brouhaha starts again later this year.  The bottom line is that spreading wealth rather than creating it ignores the fundamental truth that the public sector cannot distribute what the private sector does not create.

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  • Corporate Taxes – One more time

    George Rebane

    CorporateRevenuesA major teaching point of RR over the years has been that corporations pay no taxes.  Corporate taxes are another preferred ruse of world governments to enable them to take more out of the pockets of real taxpayers.  Now we hear that the OECD is doubling down on the bamboozle with something called the “base erosion and profit shifting” (BEPS) project.  BEPS is supposed to stop corporations from paying lower than their ‘fair share’ of taxes.  However, as the nearby chart shows, this is a smokescreen since corporations have been doing anything but paying a lower share of the GDP in taxes.

    As the 23jul13 WSJ points out, what BEPS promises to do is to make corporate tax planning more complex and in the end raise corporate taxes.  The oblivians of the world will raise their voices in another chorus of huzzahs as they promote one more round of slow growth and auto-impoverishment.   In reality and “for all the huffing and puffing, there is no crisis of corporate tax collection. The deficits across the developed world are the product of slow economic growth and overspending, not tax evasion. But none of this has stopped the OECD from offering its 15-point plan to increase the cost and complexity of complying with corporate-tax rules.”

    The real solution is “everyone (moving) toward lower rates and simpler tax codes, with fewer opportunities for gamesmanship and smaller rate disparities among countries”.  But socialism never takes that kind of enlightened view of economic behavior or economies – after all, it smacks of the Laffer curve.  But none of these international machinations would be possible if people wizened up and understood the nature and purpose of corporate taxes.

    “Whisper it, but corporations don’t pay taxes anyway. They merely collect taxes—from customers via higher prices, shareholders in lower returns, or employees in lower wages and benefits.”

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  • Transnationalists will simply SWAT us

    George Rebane

    Former Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) was recently interviewed about a significant piece on ‘American sovereignty and its enemies’ he co-authored in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs.  In there he details the thrust and progress that US transnationalists (nee globalists) have made in bringing the America we know and love to its knees in the community of nations.  In short, Senator Kyl corroborates the oft made case in RR that the real goal of our progressives is to deliver the US as a weakened and compliant nation into the arms of a new world order based on the collectivist ideology that currently underpins the European Union.  The objective is to eradicate the sovereign nation state as a viable institution on the world scene, and replace it with an overarching global government.  I think of it as sharia without Allah (but Allah will work if it speeds up the process).

    MilitarizedCopAgain, lest the leftwing starts its usual howls, transforming toward transnationalism is not a conspiracy, but is precisely the “fundamental transformation” promised by President Obama.  Recall that I have long held that all of Obama’s actions and initiatives can be explained and also predicted simply on the basis of his seeking to be the first post-American president (here and here).  Senator Kyl puts more meat on the bones of this proposition by citing the efforts of three recent Team Obama academics – Navi Pillay (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), Howard Koh (Yale Law School), Anne-Marie Slaughter (Dean, Princeton’s School of Public Affairs).

    These individuals form the vanguard of “a group of powerful legal scholars trying to make an end run around the Constitution” through changing US laws to put the country under the aegis of international bureaucracies instead of our constitutionally constituted representative government.  Formally, their movement is known as ‘legal transnationalism’, an initiative with “advocates (who) are making major strides under an Obama administration that is itself a hotbed of transnational legal thinking.”

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  • Ruminations – 19jul13 (updated++)

    George Rebane

    A fundamental tenet on RR has been that as government grows in size and scope, it also grows in becoming intrinsically evil through the conduct of its mega-monied politicians and recourse proof bureaucrats.  Here are some current observations that bolster that argument.


    CharitiesCooptedCharities have become fiefs of big government    .  How?  First, they take the money from those who would give more to charities, then they invite the charities to beg for the same funds.  But first the charities have to satisfy certain government agendas, and not the requirements of the people who would freely give.  Almost every charity of any size now expects to receive a sizeable portion of its funding from the state after submitting appropriate proposals and bona fides attesting to their politically correct disbursal of funds received.  In the 18jul13 WSJ James Pierson makes the case that “Much of the not-for-profit sector has become a junior partner in administering the welfare state.” (more here)  And that’s the point of it all, is it not?  – all benefices will henceforth flow from government to which all homage and glory belong.

    Eritrea and the United States are unique in that they shamefully share what here is called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).  This piece of obamunism became law in 2010, and as most of this grandiose socialist’s other ideas, it has turned into a monster.  First, it has made living abroad for Americans an expensive accounting hell, and then it piles on by creating bad will between countries that asymmetrically enforce FATCA-type policies on their expatriates.  Professor Colleen Gaffy (Pepperdine University) demonstrates that “the core injustice in America’s tax policy is that it is based on citizenship rather than residence.  You ask what could possibly be wrong to pay taxes in two nations concurrently.   The answer (here) will surprise you.  But ultimately FATCA is a sure sign that we are now acting like a descending autocracy desperately attempting to control and milk our citizens wherever they may be found.

    Agenda21 marches on.  The latest involves the “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to declare two million acres in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as “critical habitat” for the Sierra Nevada Yellow Legged Frog and the Yosemite Toad under the Endangered Species Act.”  And the consequence will be another constraint added to the long list that already prohibits Americans the use of their public lands.  And the telling part is that these critters aren’t even being endangered by humans, but other critters.  But that don’t make no never mind when Americans need to be herded and corralled into their sustainable smart growth stack&pack future.  Congressman Tom McClintock recently summarized an excellent appeal to sanity on the floor of the House in a short speech titled ‘The Real Endangered Species: The Sierra Nevada Hard Working Family’.

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