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  • Obama is a self-declared Marxist – addended (23jul12 update)

    George Rebane

    ObamaMarxismSince Obama opened his mouth during his 2008 candidacy, RR has maintained that the man is a Marxist.  There is little surprise in that conclusion when we consider his grandparents, parents, school years, Chicago brethren, his own words, and deeds as President.  But last Friday in Roanoke, VA he dispelled all residual doubt in a speech that laid it all out.

    There Obama channeled one of his own fellow travelers and former administration officials, Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the Senate in Massachusetts.  Communism’s Marxist basis admits no individual merit from individual enterprise.  All success in pre-collective social orders is suspect, and attributed to the successful having become so on the backs of the oppressed people.  The Marxists’ constant theme is that government, as the organizer of the collective, makes every success possible, as opposed to the vision, tolerance for risk, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit of those who start and build businesses.

    To the communist, businesses are rogue enterprises in society that must be absorbed into the collective as quickly as possible, and those that started and operated such businesses must be exposed for the pariahs they are and punished.  We can see it all coming together in what Obama is now getting ready to loosen on the nation during his second term.  From Obama’s speech last Friday –

    There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. … If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.  (emphasis added, full text here, and a related comment below)

    This is Lenin in the months before the Bolshevik revolution in 1918.  Both leaders maintain it is classes of people, marshaled by a correct government, that are the engines of wealth creation.  The enterprising individuals are the thieves and blood-suckers who claim the lion’s share of what they didn’t create and what never belonged to them.

    WSJ’s Daniel Henninger recently wrote about Obama’s newly revealing economics –

    There is no theory anywhere in non-Marxist economics that says growth’s primary engine is a social class. A middle class is the result of growth, not its cause. Barack Obama not only believes in class-based growth but has built his whole growth strategy around it. … One word appears nowhere in the 53-minute Obama speech on economic growth: “capital.” Human, financial, whatever. Capital dare not speak its name. … Most revealing is that the phrases “my plan” and “I have a plan” appear 13 times. A central role for planning often appears in emerging, underdeveloped economies, not in an advanced economy like ours in which the discovery and diffusion of productive new ideas is spontaneous, rapid and unpredictable.

    In The Road to Serfdom nobelist F.A. Hayek wrote of where such central planning has taken us in the past, and where it will take us in the future.  (You can order an abridged version of this classic from the Heritage Foundation.)

    But you may say that Obama is just one machine politician with no understanding of or experience in the private sector.  However, what gives this Marxist his power is the ‘dumbth’ that pervades the land.  Half of the electorate have no resources with which to critique his ideology, and see such statements as benign and possessing of a certain logic – the bitter fruits of a progressive public education.

    Obama_Success

    [Re The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.  Bullcrap!

    The Internet was developed primarily through the work of multiple universities, private contractors, and government agencies here and overseas.  What we call the Internet first came together as the ARPANET that was developed with DARPA funding to set up a rapid communication network among scientists and engineers working in academe, government, and private industry.  The first ARPANET link was established between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute on 29 October 1969.  Government had neither clue nor intent to commercialize any of this technology.

    The Internet was effectively commercialized with advent of the Worldwide Web (WWW) in the mid-1990s, again through the mostly happenstance multi-national development efforts of academe, government agencies, and private enterprises.  The WWW that we daily use resides on the Internet as a service based on such software innovations as hypertext protocols and the ubiquotous browser first developed at the University of Illinois.  The successful commercialization of the Internet has been brought about by private enterprise, and has happened because of governments’ absence, a ‘shortcoming’ which the Left has been trying to rectify ever since with various degrees of ‘success’.]

    [Addendum] H/T to RR reader.

    ReaganPoster

    [23jul12 update]  Gordon Crovitz writing in 23jul12 WSJ has a more detailed report on the development of the Internet – ‘Who Really Invented the Internet?’.

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  • Transhumanism, Cosmism, and the Singularity

    George Rebane

    Last week my son-in-law sent me David Brin’s latest great sci-fi novel, Existence.   I couldn’t help but immediately put it into my reading stack.  Like most of you who frequent RR, I read several books concurrently, and Brin’s description of the state of the world in mid-century was something I had to know sooner than later.  As a geo-politics, philosophy, and machine intelligence junkie, I was not disappointed as this page-turner immediately grabbed me.

    SN_1987A_900I’m a third through the tome and hope to report more on it later.  But Brin’s world of about 2050 is a very plausible one for those who have agreed with my prognostications here on RR, and those of George Friedman on Stratfor.  America has fragmented into a loose federation of semi-sovereign states and regions that still calls itself United States.  Global warming has caused the sea level to rise precipitously, apparently from the sudden loosening of massive ancient freshwater lakes underneath the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps.  And the social order is more stratified than ever with various “estates” of people having even a wider range of wealth, belief systems, and various affinities for technology.

    The Singularity has not yet arrived, however robots and very intelligent machines dominate all areas of human activity.  The web has multiplied into several levels of extremely broadband nets, and sensors are deployed everywhere, looking at and listening to everything.  Everyone is plugged in through various implants and headgear that superimpose layers of information and data into the visual and aural fields as people go about their business.  However, society is at a potential breaking point, having suffered several short but intensive global catastrophes and political calamities between now and then.  There are layers of visible and corrupt invisible layers of power with the main contention being between the ultra-rich (trillionaires) and the religionists – one group seeking stability, the other a revolution to a new world order.

    And then Earth is contacted by what is clearly an established galactic society.

    (more…)

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  • The Pelosi Principle Validated

    George Rebane

    [This is the submitted form of my regular Union column which was published in the newspaper’s 14jul12 print and online editions.]

    Every morning we wake up to reports of yet more of Europe’s countries foundering on socialist shoals.  Hollande, France’s new president, got into office by promising self-levitating growth, something he has no idea about how to accomplish beyond raising taxes and unfunded spending.  And a few weeks after his election the stark reality is that France will already break its pledge to reduce deficits, and enter a new cycle of accelerating debt.

    Readers may recall that France, along with Germany, were the main economic bulwarks against the falling dominoes of the European Union.  Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium, …, all of them are being taken down by the unserviceable debts run up by the their socialist programs of wealth redistribution.  They are now running out of wealth to redistribute, and the printing press beckons.

    In America, our Washington progressives have long taught their acolytes that Europe and its profligate social policies are the answer to our own economic problems.  But our problem is that we already redistribute so much wealth so poorly that our government borrows and encumbers our children with 40 cents of debt for every dollar it spends today.  And the only solution being applied is more lies about spending and tax increases.

    The biggest lie came wrapped in Obamacare (aka the cynically named Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, PPACA).  Obamacare itself was forged secretly and passed in the dark of night by Democrats who had not read the bill.  Their leaders’ response to the national protest was that Obamacare would reveal the power and glory of socializing healthcare after the bill became law.  In a statement inaugurating Congress’ new and fundamentally transformed process of legislation, House Speaker Pelosi informed us that it was only after passage that we would find out all the new stuff that had been written into it.

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  • The Great Pension Heist is Discovered (updated 17jul12)

    George Rebane

    Well folks, Scranton’s bankruptcy may have been the cognitive tipping point for the nation, but because of the lamestream cover-up we can’t be certain.  Following yesterday’s announcement by San Bernardino, the Pennsylvania city is now the 12th municipality filing Chapter 9, with 27 more jurisdictions standing in line to be next.  And the cause of these financial calamities is the same – paying for public service pensions has broken the back of every one of them.

    JustSayNORR has reported on and predicted this trail of tears for the last five years when Mike McDaniel and I co-authored an SESF position paper alerting Nevada County to the problem and putting it into a national context.  The Board of Supervisors gave us a polite listen and then dismissed the matter with a papered over version that everything was going well behind the curtain.  Now we know that our unfunded pension liabilities are over $119M, and that is computed with a la-la land discount rate.  During the entire time the local leftie chorus has denied that public service pensions would cause any fiscal failures, and that its reporting was all a rightwing scare tactic in their overall policy promoting the ideas of fiscal responsibility and smaller government.  Where are those useful idiots now?

    Before returning to how to handle these national disasters, let’s take a look at America’s tax situation.  Obama, in his eternal avoidance of his track record on the economy, is now shifting focus to tax fairness.  In his opening round, he has thrown out a placebo by urging Congress to exempt households earning less than $250K from the planned ‘Taxmageddon’ scheduled to hit next January.  And he’s going to exempt them for a full year – my, my! – before he shoves it to them in 2014.  BTW, don’t think he’s exempting them from all the other tax increases that will be popping out like corks out of champagne bottles next New Year’s Day.  What a guy!

    Obama’s big message of the week has been ‘tax fairness’, and that the ‘rich’ are still not paying their fair share.  So what are the so-called rich paying now, and what should they pay?  Look at the table below.

    TaxFairness

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  • The Liberal Mind – The Continuing Conundrum of Conditional Contingencies

    George Rebane

    In this sector of RR we dedicate our efforts to the eternal pursuit and understanding of the liberal mind.  Awakened this morning by NPR’s segment on the November election, and Obama’s strategy for victory, jogged a stream of thought that may shed light on another important aspect of how our ideological opposites cope with the realworld.  That radio segment with correspondents Mara Liasson and Cokie Roberts emphasized that Obama’s electoral fate will depend on the vote of the Hispanics and blacks, and that today only 10% of the electorate remains uncommitted.

    I’ll come back to this report in a moment, but first let me offer the latest proposition to ‘The Liberal Mind’ – liberals don’t do well with conditional contingencies.  Specifically, most left-leaning (and those already toppled) thinkers seem to have a cognitive block differentiating between the likelihood (probability) of X being true, given that Y is true; and the likelihood (probability) Y being true, given that X is true.  In shorthand these probabilities are written P(X|Y) and P(Y|X) respectively.  And the conundrum that liberals, in the aggregate, suffer from is that they believe P(X|Y) = P(Y|X).  The comment streams on these pages are full of propositions, counters, arguments, and observations by our liberal readers that attest to this assertion.  Moreover, the media ‘airwaves’ covering our public forum debates contribute a daily torrent of supporting evidence based on that erroneous equality.

    Muslim_Terrorist

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  • ‘Does God Watch Paint Dry?’

    George Rebane

    [I fear that this posting will be of little interest to most RR readers.  It is memorialized here as part of my personal record of thought that I am willing to share with those few whose interest might be piqued by such subjects.]

    Religions in general and Christianity in particular are suffering an assault of reason that has reached a zenith through the ascendancy and promulgation of secular humanism (q.v.) that is now touted as the all-explaining worldview held by the educated in every land.  Christianity has been on the wane in developed countries – in Europe it is mostly extinct as a belief system – enjoying gains only among the pre-educated in less developed nations.  Staying its current course, Christianity may expect a similar fate in those countries when they too become developed.

    In my extended study of this phenomenon, the fundamental reason for the retreat of Christianity is that its adherents and protagonists continue to teach the faith through promotion of tenets that are easily rejected in this age of accessible mega-information.  What is taught from the pulpit on Sunday does not match the encountered reality during the rest of the week.  And when the supplicants and/or prospects present these dichotomies to Christianity’s purveyors, their counter to reason is ‘You must believe more strongly in the teachings, and then your questions and questioning will disappear.’

    Most people answer that they don’t want to become a person in whom such patently reasonable inquiries are no longer possible.  They see it as undergoing a form of intellectual lobotomy, which, at a minimum, will destroy the salutary parts of the image they have of themselves.  And they turn away, proclaiming to other potential seekers the details of their frustrated attempts to understand.

    As some previous posts have revealed, I am among those Christians who hold that Christianity is a most plausible and simple system (see Occam) of belief, one that lays the intellectual foundation for our cosmology and provides the most satisfying answers to the deepest teleological questions (the whys) about our existence and fate.  One can even argue that there exist perspectives from which Christianity is falsifiable.  However, such arguments cannot be made from what we may label as the commonly taught ‘everyday Christianity’.

    To all this, I believe, there is a powerful yet little known alternative interpretation that can lay to rest the standard litany of doubts about the scriptural history and expression of the faith.  One of the most compelling conundrums for the questioning seeker can be summarized by, 'Does God Watch Paint Dry?'. This is the title of a little apology I have composed for those who would still like to discover whether for them Christianity can serve as an illuminated path between intellect and faith.  Perhaps it will be of help.

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  • Reinette on a Roll

    George Rebane

    ReinetteSenumReading this morning’s Union I couldn’t help but notice the front page piece (paywalled here) on Sierra Roots and the Common Ground Homeless Garden.  The project is the handiwork of former Nevada City mayor Reinette Senum.  Its objective is to help down and out people in the county to have “a safe place for some of Nevada County’s homeless people, especially veterans, to sleep, grow food, hone skills and learn about healthy living while receiving guidance and resources to rebuild their lives.”

    Reinette told me about her idea for launching this project almost two years ago over coffee.  And this morning’s report is testimony for her having stuck with the project and getting it out the gate.  The Union piece is a little scattered on the progress and benefits generated to date, but the overall sense one gets is that things are on their way toward the outlined objective.  I want to congratulate Reinette in her persistence and for her hard work.  This beats some of her other attempts at getting enterprises like community banking into our county.

    My only lingering concern is that she has a solid plan forward for Sierra Roots that outlines realistic operations and long-lasting sources of cash, whether from government, charity, private donors, and/or generated revenues.  The project will have legs only if early on it is recognized for what it is.  In any event, no one wants to see Sierra Roots become an attractant for the homeless, drawing more indigents from far and wide with promises of a lifestyle that cannot be delivered.

    In the past Reinette has described this enterprise as becoming a going concern that will raise and sell its produce locally at prices which provide a “living wage” to the people who will live and work there.  I’m not sure what set of numbers will demonstrate that level of agricultural production in Nevada County, but starting out with county funded commuting for bringing in day labor doesn’t speak well for sustainability.

    In any case, these are hopefully temporary accommodations that will be worked out.  Reinette is an energetic, good-hearted, and dedicated woman who has demonstrated her ability to inspire people to launch into many kinds of community projects.  Let’s wish her every success as she goes on to build Sierra Roots into what we all would like to see as a movable feast that can be replicated in other places to give a hand up for the country’s homeless.

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  • Dimensions of the Student Loan Catastrophe (Addended)

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 6 July 2012.]

    The amount of federal student loans outstanding today stands at over one trillion dollars – that’s with twelve zeros, or a million million.  And yet we keep pouring taxpayer money into government programs operating under the wrongheaded philosophy that everyone with a college education is automatically on track to have a better economic future, achieve the American Dream, and contribute needed skills to society.  The truth is far from this commonly purveyed propaganda.

    Those who have studied the federal government’s efforts in designing and funding educational and training programs know that this record is dismal in all areas save one – and that is military training and the GI bill.  The educational and training programs of the US military are still unmatched in the world.  However, there are ongoing progressive efforts to bring that quality into line with what has long been wreaked on our civilian population.  For an overview of that damage, one need only read the studies done by the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.  (also see Addendum)

    But tonight I want to talk about the latest area of federal blundering in education – the student loan programs.  First and foremost to keep in mind is that decades of increased spending on education have yet to show any significant increase in student performance.  With this reminder I want to bring to your attention some unintended consequences of the federal student aid programs that were recently presented by Professor Richard Vedder in a talk at Hillsdale College.  Vedder is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

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  • Ruminations – 5jul12 (updated 6jul12)

    George Rebane

    HiggsbosonThere’s plenty of reason for celebrating the pretty good likelihood that the Higgs boson has finally been observed by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.  That massive boson fills in a long-empty part of our understanding how the universe is composed and works.  To be sure, there is a lot more work to be done on the Standard Model in which the Higgs has a dominant place – for example, the model is silent on a pretty important force field we know as gravity.  But as a junior  physicist and philosopher, I have trouble with the entire Standard Model and have continued to grumble about it for years.  Why?  Because it’s not pretty, and Nature (or God’s handiwork) in its elements and fundamentals ought to be pretty.

    The SM is a hodgepodge of sub-nucleonic particles with a hodgepodge of properties described by a hodgepodge of numbers.  It is not elegant in any mathematical or esthetic sense of the word.  And the anticipated extension to the SM is the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) which piles on to the hodgepodge more particles with more numbers.  The SM and MSSM remind one of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, full of ad hoc epicycles upon epicycles.  I am among the philistines who would feel much better about the direction of enquiry if the path via a Grand Unification Theory on the way to the Theory of Everything took us through ever simpler and elegant models and their related mathematics that would be something akin to Maxwell’s equations, or Einstein’s field equation, or quantum’s Schrödinger equation, or … .  (grumble, mumble, smurglemurf!).

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  • A Meditation for the Fourth

    George Rebane

    4jul2012
    On this most important and meaningful of our national holidays, I am reminded of the liberties, now gone, that we had last year at this time, and those we will no longer have when we next hang the annual bunting on our porch railing.  Perhaps we can spend some moments in meditation on these words –

    Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the constant approval of their own conscience. (Anonymous)


    RobertsObamaMotors

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130 comments on Obama is a self-declared Marxist – addended (23jul12 update)