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  • Republican Spring Social Invitation

    Rich Ulrey

    Join the Nevada County Republican Party for the annual Spring Dinner on April 9th and help us celebrate Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday! We'll begin the festivities at 4:30 PM at Alta Sierra Country Club. Enjoy a superb dinner, participate in opportunity drawings that help fund the Ruth and Drew Bedwell Memorial Scholarship Fund. Meet, and speak with your elected representatives and local and state leaders of the California Republican Party. Tom Del Beccaro, Vice Chairman of the California Republican Party will be our Master of Ceremonies. Featured speakers include Congressman Tom McClintock, State Senators Doug LaMalfa and Ted Gaines, and Assemblyman Dan Logue. Cost is $40.00 per person, and reservations can be made online by visiting www.nevadacountygop.org.
     
    [Rich Ulery is Chairman of the Nevada County Republican Party.  The information sheet on the dinner, speakers, etc is here Download Spring Dinner Invitation 2011.]

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  • The Liberal Mind – Go See for Yourself

    George Rebane

    The validation of the far left’s violent rage and call for revolution that we have seen with the advent of Wisconsin’s public employee labor unions (PELUs) is everywhere you look today.  While attacking by name those who don’t agree with their ideas about America or its future, these progressives cum communists take what they themselves do and, with great effect, turn it 180 on the conservatives.  I have labeled this response the (Saul) Alinsky Alternative, since it is one of the main tactics he teaches his hard left acolytes in Rules for Radicals.  It is among the progressives’ best practices rejoinder when they can’t handle the public debate on the issue itself.

    (The only accurate response that I have seen at the demonstrations in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio is that Governor Scott Walker’s bill, now signed into law, is “an assault on the unions”.  Belated and focused too narrowly on the PELUs, I would fully agree that it is.  The socialists consider such an assault charge to be their penultimate charge that points to the evils of free market capitalists, even if in this case their actual target is the American taxpayer.  The rest of us should consider it to be a wake-up call from Wisconsin.)

    Today the Alinsky Alternative is applied at all levels of the right-left debate that Obama’s presidency has brought into the forefront and focus across the land.  Locally here in Nevada County we have our very own version of the debate to which I have done my best to contribute in these pages, on the air, and in our newspaper.  The latest local attack from the far left is now focusing on the Nevada County Tea Party Patriots of which I am a member.  It is instructive to study the intellectual depth of their view of the overall tea party movement and, especially, that of our own NCTPP.

    I don’t want to repeat here the evidence that is readily available on other local blogs, but I do recommend that you visit the recent posts by Russ Steele (NC Media Watch) and Todd Juvinall (Sierra Dragon’s Breath) about ‘The Black Man: Progressives’ Trojan Horse’ posted on the NCTPP website.  As you will witness, in their own forums the left’s response to this and my recent pieces on ‘community partnership banking’ (here and here) are simply iconic.

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  • Dancing the CPB Sidestep

    George Rebane

    [This is the submitted form of my March column in The Union.  It appears in today's (12mar2011) printed and online editions of the newspaper.]

    Last Friday many of us attended a well-oiled presentation on the concept of ‘community partnership banking.’   This was given in the Nevada City council chambers by Mr David Rose, CEO of Unified Field Corporation.  It seems UFC has developed a business plan to franchise a series of what it calls Unified Field Banks to communities receptive to notions that revolve around sustainability, transparency, nurturing, holistic, and so on.

    The basic idea is a community re-investment program for becoming as independent from ‘the grid’ as possible.  Overall it looks like a bootstrap operation with many parts.  It even includes the creation of a local currency or script.  The argument goes that if we establish a local Unified Field Bank, then the franchisor – Mr Rose and team – will teach Nevada County to become a maximally self-sufficient community through making deposits and “investments” in a bank that in turn lends the money to approved and properly “aligned” enterprises, thereby benefitting us all.

    The good people of Nevada City Sustainability Vision Team were sold on the concept, and issued a call for the community to pitch in and make it happen.  In the process NCSVT convinced Mr Rose that Nevada City might be just the right spot from where to launch the entire UFC operation.   One little problem remains – $500,000 – the amount Mr Rose and UFC want before they reveal the community partnership banking secrets that they have been perfecting for the past two years.  UFC will keep half for their own operations and promotional activities, and the other half seeds the new Nevada City Unified Field Bank.

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  • “… and then they came for the trade unionists.” (updated 12mar2011)

    George Rebane

    So laments William Rivers Pitt of truthout.com, one of the most extreme leftwing commentators in my experience.  He starts his latest screed on the Wisconsin legislature’s attempt to balance the state’s budget that has suffered under the largesse extracted by its public service unions.  Pitt revs into gear with the now famous aphorism that ends in “.. and then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”  In full rage he condemns –

    Governor Scott Walker, along with the Koch Brothers and the right-wing radicals of the Republican Party, moved in darkness and with shameless deceit to gut the ability of dedicated laborers to bargain on an equal footing for the right to earn a living wage and to have access to decent health care.

    Kinda sounds like some of the local lefties when they’re in fine fettle with a full head of steam on.

    In today’s (10mar11) WSJ, Governor Scott Walker writes ‘Why I’m Fighting in Wisconsin’ and lays bare some of the hard data that illustrate the fiscal and personal thuggeries perpertrated by that state’s teachers unions.  I don’t think that any of his arguments will make a dent in the screaming hordes bussed into the Madison capitol building.  They are calling for “revolution” in this country a la the violence that is happening in the Arab autocracies of Africa and the near-east.

    We compare this with the more reasoned national discussions about the Great Divide (see category on right) which I have posted in these pages.  In public discourse, the collectivist’s historical route to violence has always been a short one.  The calls for revolution today are of a piece with this strategy, and should give us pause as we consider the future role of public service employee unions in our future.

    [update] Today the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported a union death threat received by a Wisconsin state senator – “We have all planned to assault you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head.”  Can you imagine the nationwide apoplexy in the lamestream media if anyone from the right would have uttered such words?  Instead, the lamestream was silent.

    Apropos to this, today in these pages I received a 'comment' from a prominent local leftwinger that in part reads, “…but rest assured the community knows who you really are, and what you believe, and will act accordingly.”  Do they all talk like this?

    [11mar2011 update]  While the FBI is investigating more liberal death threats against Wisconsin Republicans, that peace-loving progressive propagandizing populist Michael Moore has called for the nation’s high schoolers to hit the streets today and demonstrate in solidarity with the revolution he wants to start on these shores.  For the full unedited text of the email from which the above death threat was quoted visit the website of WTMJ Newsradio.  Notice the silence from the 'middle of the road' lamestream.

    [12mar2011 update]  This story just gets more and more crisp on the kind of people the left has always mobilized to 'get their message out'.  These public service unionists, and who knows what other criminals have been imported to up the body count, are out and out thugs.  Powerlineblog.com has more on it.  H/T to RR reader.

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  • Back from Idaho

    George Rebane

    Jo Ann and I just got back from Kellogg, Idaho with our brand new GMC 2500HD pick-up truck.  We flew up on Sunday, the trip through Seattle took all day because both of our airplanes had mechanical problems.  It was already dark when we landed in Spokane.  Snow covered most of eastern Washington, and it got even snowier as we rode to Kellogg in the van sent by the Dave Smith Motors dealership.  Located on I-90, Kellogg is a destination resort town of about 2,500 people nestled in a valley of the northern Rockies.  Lots of snow and ski lifts.

    GMC2500HD We stayed in a big hotel that catered to skiers and featured a restaurant that stayed open until 9pm.  The next morning at 830am we were picked up by our friendly salesman who arrived at the front door driving a brand new shiny GMC that looked an awful lot like the one I had specced out.  Yes, it was my truck, and I was given the keys to take it on a test drive before going back to the dealership for all the paperwork.  It was 1pm before all the papers were signed, all the features explained, the cell phones synced to the truck (the truck even has its own cell phone built in), and on and on.  The beast has about two million buttons and knobs, and I forgot more than I remembered.  Jo Ann and I decided that reading the manual on the way home would be just the thing to pass the time productively.

    The first leg of the drive took us back through Spokane, through a bleak snow-covered prairie, and down to a more hospitable region called the ‘Tri-Cities area’.  Our destination was Richland on the banks of the Columbia.  That is a trim and prosperous looking community and the home of one my Army buddies.  We visited for a while and then had dinner at a very upscale riverside (of course) restaurant.

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  • Weather Again Upstages Global Warming

    George Rebane

    An attentive reader from our country’s warmer parts pointed me to a piece that should send a chill up Al Gore’s hind quarters.  It seems that in recent winters the Baltic Sea has been getting extra icy.  The northern parts of that sea freeze regularly near land and the harbors.  But during these years of man-made global warming things have gotten so chilly around my native Estonia that the country is now having to add another icebreaker to its existing fleet of two. Estonia uses its icebreakers to help keep open the sea lanes of commerce in the Gulf of Finland and approaches to harbors like Tallinn.  (More here on EUreferendum.com from where I filched the photos below.)

    EstonianIcebreaker 

    Russ Steele (NCMW) has been keeping us abreast of climate change doings for years now, and he should be able to explain to all of us how big of a pile of weathers is required before we can call it climate change.  Of course, if we do conclude that all these weathers are really harbingers of climate change, then we bump into the inconvenient truth that it’s the politically incorrect kind of climate change.  You know, the kind that gets Big Al on the phone to his office to see what can be done to set matters straight again in people’s minds.

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  • Community Partnership Banking – Worm Farm 2? (updated 5mar2011)

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular radio commentary that aired tonight 4mar11 on KVMR-FM 89.5.  I have addended some observations from attending the 4mar11 meeting where the described banking concept was presented.]

    Something called ‘community partnership banking’ is being sold to Nevada City right now as you listen to this commentary.   Helping to sell the city on this new kind of banking service are none other than the good people of the Nevada City Sustainability Vision Team.  These are the same folks who wear many hats and belong to organizations like A.P.P.L.E. that brought you the well-known Nevada City worm farm.  Haven’t heard about the worm farm?  Don’t ask.

    But you might want to ask what is community partnership banking.  To get answers, the place to go is the well-designed website of the Unified Field Bank.  There you immediately learn that this is an organization with a mission to “serve the global environmental, social and cultural bottom line.”  I have never heard of such bottom lines, but at this point the journey is just beginning and one should not lose heart.

    As we go deeper into the website, we are immediately flooded with some very familiar sounding words and notions – nurturing, sustainable, renewable, holistic, transparent, empowerment, and so on.  These describe things like the bank’s vision, commitment, and intended operations.

    As I went through the website in detail, it became clear that Unified Field Bank is actually not a bank, at least not yet anyway.  They are really the Unified Field Corporation, a group of marketing and media developers loose on the country trying to set up a network of touchy-feely banks in communities that have a critical mass of sensitive, inclusive, and touchy-feely folks.  And as you might suspect, we here in Nevada County are blessed with a goodly portion of such people mainly concentrated in Nevada City and its environs.

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  • TechTest2011 Preparations

    George Rebane

    Earlier this week Nevada Union High School hosted the second preparatory seminar held this year for Nevada County high school students planning to take TechTest2011.  TechTest is the annual merit scholarship exam given to qualified seniors and juniors who are headed toward technical careers.   This year’s TT2011 will be given on 26 March from 9AM to 1PM in the NUHS Science Lecture Hall.

    Now in its fifth year, the test is written at a level of difficulty that science/math students may expect in their undergraduate lower division years at a first rate research university.  It is intended to exercise ‘out of the box’ problem set-up and solution skills that students will encounter in their higher education and on the job.  The test is administered and graded by Nevada County high school teachers under the direction of NUHS physics teacher Mr John McDaniel who heads the TT Academic Committee.  Scholarships totaling about $15,000 are awarded strictly on the basis of test scores with the top three scorers getting $6K, $4K, $2K respectively.  The next ten highest scores each receive $300.

    TT2010prob6 

    The annual test is sponsored by the Sierra Environmental Studies Foundation (www.sesfoundation.org) a 501c3 organization, and the scholarship fund is made up of contributions by private individuals, county businesses, and SESF members.  As SESF’s Director of Research, I have had the privilege of writing the tests.  A typical problem (from TT2010) is shown in the above figure.

    In these preparatory seminars we go over test taking strategies that will serve the students throughout their educational years, cover critical thinking tools and technical approaches that are not usually taught in high school, and work out example problems from previous TTs.  All previous TT copies along with solution keys are available for download from the SESF website.

    This year about fifty students attended the two preparatory seminars.  These are fun sessions where talk often overlaps into student science projects and workplace situations encountered by scientists and engineers.  For me and other SESF members it has been an honor to work with Nevada County’s crème de la crème science and math students who are the new generation that will keep America competitive in world markets and create new industries to employ the country’s workers.

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  • The Two Sides of Wisconsin

    George Rebane

    The Republican instigated, public service union sponsored imbroglio in Wisconsin continues to roil.  The left spreads itself as the protector of workers’ rights and defender of America’s middle class, the right attempts the logic of ‘this can’t go on’ and sides with the country’s taxpayers.  I think the left is getting the better of it, again because their message is simpler and it takes the attention off the issue at hand.

    RLCrabb110226 

    A good example of this is the above cartoon by RL ‘Bob’ Crabb  that appeared in the 26feb11 Union.  (Bob is a friend and RR reader who lets me use his work to make various points.)  Here we see an obviously overworked and underpaid teacher, hopelessly harried in her classroom of unappreciative brats while on her desk sits another little darlin’ delivering a scorching accusation that is clearly over the top.  The strong message is that the unionized teacher is the misunderstood victim of an unjust attack by the right.

    The country’s lamestream media are not showing videos of the union thuggery that is taking place in Madison and other demonstration venues.  It seems that only Fox News has the guts to show how public service unions are responding to the compensation cutbacks and attempts to roll back their collective bargaining rights under current laws.  The workings and impact of such collective bargaining rights have been covered here and elsewhere.  They have been the bane of bulging the public purse beyond any capacity to replenish it.

    From the 1mar11 WSJ we are again reminded that collective bargaining for public service unions was opposed not only by the conservatives, but also by liberal leaders from FDR through Fiorello LaGuardia to private sector union chiefs like George Meany.  Why was that?

    Because unlike in the private economy, a public union has a natural monopoly over government services. An industrial union will fight for a greater share of corporate profits, but it also knows that a business must make profits or it will move or shut down. The union chief for teachers, transit workers or firemen knows that the city is not going to close the schools, buses or firehouses.

    This monopoly power, in turn, gives public unions inordinate sway over elected officials. The money they collect from member dues helps to elect politicians who are then supposed to represent the taxpayers during the next round of collective bargaining. In effect union representatives sit on both sides of the bargaining table, with no one sitting in for taxpayers. (more here)

    If you want to verify any of this for yourself, go talk to your local politician about who and how they represent you as the taxpayer in these negotiations.

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  • Patently Problematic

    George Rebane

    LetterPatent President Obama’s program to ‘Win the Future’ includes patent reform.  The current system implemented by the Patents and Trademarks Office (PTO) awards a patent on the basis of who can demonstrate that he invented it first, regardless of who first filed a patent application for the gizmo.  Obama claims that it will create more jobs and win the future (whatever the hell that means) if we change the system to ‘them that files first gets the patent’.  That is supposed to help the entrepreneur and generate more desperately needed jobs.

    Well, it turns out that it’s not that easy of a call.  I hold a number of patents and have started companies based on intellectual property (IP), the fancy word for protected know-how that launches lots of job-creating small businesses.  One of the things about the American business environment that has kept us on the leading and bleeding edge of developing and commercializing new ideas is that if you think of it first and can prove it, then you have something solid to bet on or take to the bank.  At a later time you can file for a formal patent when you are ready to introduce the idea to the public.  But before then, you can spend time talking to people and noodling out your biz plan before you lay out the big bucks.

    It costs a minimum of about $10K to $15K to file a patent today, and much more for patents on complex stuff like a new drug.  That’s not chump change to most people, especially if it involves quitting their day job to pursue their dream.  And it’s not something you want to write a check for every time you have a hot flash – after all, it might just be the onset of menopause.  So what most entrepreneurs do is write up the great idea, date it and seal it in an envelope, and file it with their patent attorney.  Then the inventor can work on building a prototype or spending money to figure out 1) whether the damn thing works, and 2) whether it can be the basis for a business.  First things first.

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