Rebane's Ruminations

About

November 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  

ARCHIVES

OUR LINKS

YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

  • The Liberal Mind – Examples of separate worlds continue (corrected)

    George Rebane

    The 'Liberal Mind' segment of RR is dedicated to the analysis and illustration of how fundamentally different are the highways and byways of reason in the liberal (progressive) mind that give rise to their heartfelt and fervent efforts to create what to the rest of us often seems like a perverted and insane world.  In these pages we have another confirmation of this which is so clear and compelling that it needs its own posting.

    I began ‘Ruminations – 29jun12’ with a segment on another instance in which the Left seeks to summarily shut down and eliminate media voices with which it cannot compete in ideas and new reporting.  Specifically, I reported on the latest of longstanding efforts by the Soros funded Media Matters to shut down Fox News, a media channel that has eaten alive the competing left-leaning lamestream outlets in news and commentary offerings.  I argue that such tactics are totally asymmetrical from the polarized political poles.

    The gauntlet, to revealingly argue the other side, has most prominently been picked up by Mr Steven Frisch, a long-time reader and welcome (when being civil) antagonist of RR.  Mr Frisch is CEO of the Sierra Business Council, and is also a leading regional progressive intellectual and apologist for collectivist causes who has repeatedly denied any such biases and resents leftwing appellations as "name calling".  Its name notwithstanding, SBC is a regional NGO that promotes liberal policies and is funded by public and foundation grant monies.

    The following comment stream from the cited Ruminations post is repeated here in my continued effort to illuminate the liberal mindset.  An unfortunate artifact of the progressive debate on these issues is the progressive penchant for reducing the arguments to the address and critique of specific individuals.  Their ability to generalize and to embrace an ideological issue per se is often limited.   The exchange in the relevant comment thread follows –

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    56 comments on The Liberal Mind – Examples of separate worlds continue (corrected)

  • The John Henry Law

    George Rebane

    TechVsLabor
    For several years I have attempted to explain and prognosticate the future of labor in the developed world (e.g. see ‘The Great American Labor Squeeze’).  I will try to simplify the cause of the growing systemic un/der/employment, that is ignored throughout our political spectrum, by introducing what we shall call the John Henry Law –

    The company that pits its labor against another’s use of technology loses.

    The workings of the John Henry Law are made clear by the lead graphic in ‘New People, New Jobs’.  The law simplifies understanding of the vicious circle that all competing enterprises must join.  If you don’t maintain your place in that commercial whirlwind, another will take it, and you will see the impact in your profit/loss accounting.  The individual’s corollary to the law is – The worker who pits his labor against technology loses.  Labor is a cost, technology reduces costs.

    Next case please.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    15 comments on The John Henry Law

  • Conservatives miss impact of SCOTUS ruling (updated 2jul12)

    George Rebane

    Taxes for value not received or those that force behaviors are penalties.

    The last 24 hours has seen a tsunami of tortured analyses by conservatives doing their best to eek out something that resembles a silver lining in the SCOTUS Obamacare ruling.  Unfortunately, considering the scope of what came down, there is none.

    JohnrobertsThe Republicans in DC are talking into every mike available about how clever the ruling was, and that Obama’s goose is now really cooked because the court finally confirmed that he’s been lying all along about the individual mandate not being a tax.  BFD! The sumbich can’t open his mouth without lying, and his growing list of lies fills file boxes.  Most of the electorate out there still believes that Obama’s got a mysterious, never-ending “stash” from which they will continue to get more out than they put in until the cows come home.

    Respected blogs like The Blaze prattle with hopeful pieces titled ‘Five Reasons Why the Obamacare Decision might not be as bad as you think.’  Well, they continue to miss the big reason why the decision was a disaster for all Americans who understand the history and the present of government overreach.  (My own inadequate attempt at this was ‘SCOTUS backs Obamacare’ and its comment stream.)

    The argument that Chief Justice Roberts closed the door on the notorious Commerce Clause of the 14th Amendment is specious.  The ruling did no such thing.  Congress can continue to make all kinds of restrictive laws citing the Commerce Clause just like they have always done.  That door was not closed by SCOTUS.

    But what really happened, which people on the Right seem to not see, is that a new and bigger gate to government overreach has been identified, designed, crafted, and opened by John Roberts.   Now Congress has the additional Supreme Court invited power to mandate any behavior they wish to extract from individual citizens through private enterprises to public institutions.  All they have to do is to specify what they want us to do, buy, sell, trade, declare, surrender, … , and tell us how big of a check we have to send to the IRS should we refuse to do so.  And woe be to us if we don’t pay our punishment fines, … er, constitutionally permitted taxes.

    Obama’s nudge expert Cass Sunstein must be rolling on the rug laughing.  Everything that this socialist has hoped for in government’s ability to coerce and corral behavior is now law of the land.  The new and glorious gate has been opened, and Roberts has had the good grace to write Congress the owner’s manual on how to properly go through it every time they deem that a new stricture is required to make us behave better.

    For the record, liberty lost.

    [2jul12 update]  For a while there I was beginning to think that no one else really understood the real catastrophe that the Roberts Ruling has loosened on the nation.  It felt lonely, and I began to re-examine my reasoning on the matter, since even Charles Krauthammer (‘The Bonze’) gave no evidence that he saw what sure seemed obvious to me.  Fortunately, over the weekend some established heavyweights on the national commentary scene weighed in, and now I consider myself to be a member of a small and, hopefully, growing minority.  (What the hell, I never was any good at joining all those consensus clatches.)

    John Yoo, UC Berkeley Law School professor, said, “Some conservatives see a silver lining in the ObamaCare ruling. But it’s exactly the big-government disaster it appears to be.”, and then writes in ‘Chief Justice Roberts and His Apologists’ –

    Worse still, Justice Roberts’s opinion provides a constitutional road map for architects of the next great expansion of the welfare state. Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts’s tortured reasoning in Sebelius, the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress’s power to tax.

    In ‘A Vast New Taxing Power’ (2jul12 WSJ online edition) we read that

    … the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don’t borrow to buy a home, you don’t get a mortgage interest deduction.

    Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc “tax” permit that the Chief Justice has given it.

    And Holman W. Jenkins Jr opines in the 1jul12 WSJ that Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling in favor or Obamacare was even

    Worse, (that) in doing so, he may have read any constitutional limit on Congress out of the Constitution while pretending to do the opposite. Congress cannot compel you to do anything Congress wishes, but it can impose taxes on you until you finally have no rational alternative but to do whatever Congress wishes.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , ,
    19 comments on Conservatives miss impact of SCOTUS ruling (updated 2jul12)

  • Ruminations – 29jun12 (updated)

    George Rebane

    DropFox2George Soros funded progressive activist organization Media Matters is again shifting its longstanding campaign to shut down Fox News into high gear.  Their last year’s effort lobbying sponsors to drop Glenn Beck was so successful that they are next targeting Hannity on a fast track to shut down the whole network in this election year.

    RR has long maintained that the radical leftwing has had in its agenda the silencing of opposition voices for the simple reason that open debate of issues and solutions has always been harmful to their cause.  The self-declared middle roaders always gather to downgrade such campaigns by claiming that they are just symmetrical efforts by both left and right to silence each other.  To my knowledge no such conservative campaign has ever been exposed by the Left (witness the response of the local echo chamber on these pages) beyond their empty accusations.  Can anyone produce a strategy and planning document like this that was written by the Right?

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    16 comments on Ruminations – 29jun12 (updated)

  • SCOTUS backs Obamacare (Addended)

    George Rebane

    ObamacareLogoThe notion that we have a conservative lean to SCOTUS vanished this morning as the high court announced its decision on Obamacare.  The only scrap thrown to conservatives was the ruling that the act’s individual mandate to buy health insurance was really a federal tax, and not the exercise of a federal power under the 14th Amendment’s commerce clause (something its backers have strongly denied).

    So now the nation is looking into its largest tax increases since WW2 as it struggles to end Depression2.  To progressives this makes no nevermind , since they don’t believe that tax rates affect economic activity.  There are other provisions of the court’s voluminous ruling which will become clear as it is dissected word by word, and then, of course, litigated.

    But the clear impact of the ruling is that US healthcare will now become a commons like its European forbears, especially the British National Health Service.  And it will suffer the same fate, only on an accelerated time scale since our nation’s debts and unfunded liabilities are already astronomical.  Specifically, fewer people will study to be healthcare professionals, thereby making healthcare resources more scarce and expensive – it all has to be paid for by someone.  And state rationing will become inevitable as the costs of delivery are further disconnected from impacting the patient.

    When we now look at the Arizona and Obamacare rulings as a piece, we ask what can we hope from SCOTUS in slowing our gallop to becoming a socialist state on the way to revolution or autocracy.  The Great Experiment – can Man govern himself? – that the Founders set up for us now seems on the brink of failure.  This November will let the historically challenged electorate decide – we live in the age of spin and sound bites.  To be sure, the socialists are already happy dancing in the streets, and promising to redouble their efforts in “building a new world.”  Stay tuned.

    [Addendum] Commenter MickeyMcD points us to a piece on mises.org, one of my favorite websites.  From there I filched the above graphic and reproduce the following by Murray Rothbard –

    Our very real medical crisis has been the product of massive government intervention, state and federal, throughout the century; in particular, an artificial boosting of demand coupled with an artificial restriction of supply. The result has been accelerating high prices and deterioration of patient care. And next, socialized medicine could easily bring us to the vaunted medical status of the Soviet Union: everyone has the right to free medical care, but there is, in effect, no medicine and no care.

    And Erick Erickson’s ‘I’m not down on John Roberts’ fills in the details on the political vs constitutional aspects of the court’s ruling.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , ,
    44 comments on SCOTUS backs Obamacare (Addended)

  • New People, New Jobs

    George Rebane

    The systemic and growing unemployment in these pre-Singularity years is an ongoing topic on RR, and a stringently ignored social phenomenon by our political elites of all stripes.  A graphic that illustrates this unemployment growth is the graphic below showing how manufacturing activity varies over time along with employment in the sector.

    EmploymentMfg
    Note how the normal cyclicity of business activity in manufacturing ratchets down the number employed.  Workers are laid off in recessions during which manufacturers implement labor and other cost saving methods for survival.   When better times return, the productivity changes are in place and few, if any, new hires are needed to continue business growth.  And this phenomenon is not restricted only to manufacturing, but repeated in almost every other sector of business.  The only sectors that seem to be immune are those requiring expertise in STEM areas.

    So the real problem is still how can we help the rapidly growing cohort of (non-STEM) unemployables.  Even as the employer of last resort, the government can’t hire all of them and force a diminishing fraction of the population to pay for it all.  It would invite a bloody revolution in a new age in which technology will no longer create as many jobs as it destroys (more here).

    Nevertheless, there are several technological advances available that look promising for delaying the day of reckoning, at least until some newer technology comes along to delay it even more.  I want to discuss three and summarize how I think they would help us in the near term.  These are 1) body worn multi-media input/output (I/O) devices connecting us to the cloud; 2) online education that bypasses the atrocious public schools which are beyond timely repair; and 3) computing/storage implants that connect directly to our neuro-system.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    12 comments on New People, New Jobs

  • States enforcing federal laws

    George Rebane

    Today SCOTUS handed down a decision to strike down major provisions of Arizona’s attempt to enforce fallow federal laws against illegal aliens – both illegal immigrants and illegal entrants.  The 25jun12 WSJ reports – 

    The court backed a section of the Arizona state law that calls for police to check the immigration status of people they stop. … That section was one of four at issue before the high court. The others make it a crime for immigrants without work permits to seek employment, make it a crime for immigrants to fail to carry registration documents, and authorize the police to arrest any immigrant they believe has committed a deportable offense. Those other three provisions were struck down.

    The question which now comes begging is ‘what other federal mandates – laws, regulations, executive orders, … – are the states no longer required or permitted to use their own resources to enforce?’

    The SCOTUS ruling has an effect on Dream Act Jr that President Obama seeks to impose by executive order.  My KVMR commentary on this has been addended.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    35 comments on States enforcing federal laws

  • When you don’t know grammar

    George Rebane

    GrammarIn these pages over the years I have taken a gentle jab at the growing gaggle of grammatical gaffes that now rain down on us from every quarter of society.  My own concern was not so much about formalism for the sake of formalism, but promoting formalism for the sake of clear communications.  In any event, I felt lonely in the occasional corrections I offered to friends and commenters.

    Well, it turns out that the problem has grown to national proportions, and my quiet sufferings have been shared by many across the land – enough so as to warrant a full-fledged report on the matter, with appropriate illustrated correctives, that appeared in the 19jun12 WSJ.  Please read ‘This Embarrasses You and I’.

    As an addendum to author Sue Shellenbarger’s coverage of the use of ‘and’, I would like to add one more function for the necessary comma before the ‘and’ and ‘or’ that delineates the last item of a list of semantically orthogonal items.  And that is to allow the insertion, without comma, of alternative or compound items into such a list.  An example – ‘Get me the hammer, pliers or visegrips, screwdriver, and nails.’

    Finally, Shellenbarger did not cover a most egregious instance of poor grammar in the use of the apostrophe to indicate possession by nouns in the singular and plural number.  Apparently it has become a state secret to know when and where to insert the apostrophe.  You see people using it in front of the ‘s’ when referring to the plural – for example, ‘We visited the Smith’s last night – that occurs almost always when something is labeled by capital letters – for example, ‘Look at all the GMC’s parked in a row.’  Not many know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’.  And perhaps most difficult is the use the apostrophe to designate the possessive of a plural – ‘The students’ registration cards were lost.’ – in which case most people just give up.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    24 comments on When you don’t know grammar

  • Wireless Communication Breakthrough

    George Rebane

    A major breakthrough in wireless communication was announced by the University of Waterloo, Canada.  ACM reports that Dr A.K. Khandani and his team have demonstrated (and patented) a full-duplex, single channel methodology for wireless communication that promises to revolutionize all wireless communications.  Full-duplex means the ability to concurrently transmit and receive at the same time, and to do that over the same channel or frequency will at least double the bandwidth available for future communications.

    My own excitement about it is enhanced by its potential uses in the human body as new implantable electronics begin to use the body itself as communications medium through which such devices continuously ‘talk’ to each other.  I believe that this functionality will speed the introduction of machine-augmented-man (MAM) capabilities that have been covered in RR.

    In any case, I thought RR readers should be among the first to know as this technology start being adopted.  More here.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    6 comments on Wireless Communication Breakthrough

  • Dream Act Jr = American Nightmare (Addended)

    George Rebane

    [This the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 June 2012.]

    Our imperial President has announced another scheme to end-run the Congress and the Constitution with what some are calling Dream Act Jr – the senior version ran into a hornets’ nest of anti-amnesty sentiment in Congress.  In case you haven’t heard, the junior version would “suspend the deportation of some young undocumented immigrants” and provide a legal means for their staying in the country.

    This end-run initiative is well coordinated with the left-leaning media which provided both prequels and sequels to the President’s announcement.  The flagship softening up barrage was launched in the 25jun12 issue of Time magazine with its cover story ‘We are Americans – just not legally’ written by Antonio Vargas, a Phillipine-born illegal alien and self-declared homosexual who was brought here as a child.

    Anticipating the President’s thrust, the article goes on to detail the plight of such young people, who, through the criminal act of their parents, came to grow up in the United States, and in the process didn’t think much about their legal status.  That the mis-labeled and confusing ‘immigration problem’ has garnered so much national attention, has allowed such soft transformations of logic and semantics to take place, so that Time’s claim of two flavors of Americans – legal and illegal – now goes down unnoticed, and is tacitly accepted by many of our citizens.

    Time’s choice of Vargas as an educated Asian and homosexual journalist is an intended double bulwark against any critique of his one-sided presentation.  In such arguments the reader is regaled with anecdotal recounting of the good character, productive lives, and shared American dreams of these illegals.  In fact, the point is made to no longer call them ‘illegal immigrants’, for as Vargas educates us, “… I’m an undocumented immigrant or, put more rudely, an ‘illegal.’”  Forget about the now politically pejorative yet correct ‘illegal alien’, these individuals are just immigrants in America, the land of immigrants, who somehow don’t have some arcane piece of paper with their name on it.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , ,
    14 comments on Dream Act Jr = American Nightmare (Addended)

RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

Commenting Rules

RECENT POSTS

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

56 comments on The Liberal Mind – Examples of separate worlds continue (corrected)