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

  • KVMR commentary – Our Porous Border

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my bi-weekly commentary broadcast on KVMR FM85.9 today 28 May 2010.]

    Mexican President Calderon’s lecture to America was a reprehensible piece of hypocritical grandstanding.  Arizona is desperately trying to defend itself against enemies for which it is not supposed to be the first line of defense.  But because of its geography, Arizona is in an untenable position, put there by a federal government that has, through several administrations, abrogated the prime responsibility of all governments – border security and defense of the homeland.

    Arizona’s new law is essentially unenforceable.  For it to be effective, the police must violate the profiling prohibition.  Otherwise, under what guise would they be able to fabricate enough other violations in order to stop and inspect the bona fides of latinos and latino look-alikes?

    Profiling is the lay term for using likely prior data to combine with new data or observations in order to make correct decisions.  Scientists and engineers use a powerful law of nature, called the Bayes Rule, to do a multitude of beneficial things ranging from detecting breast cancer to controlling the precise orbits of communication satellites.  But we cannot use that important piece of technology to secure American air travel, our communities, and our porous borders.

    The circus of protests against Arizona has ramped into high gear with the federal government preparing to sue one of its distressed states.  For what? for attempting to enforce the identical law that it has chosen to ignore for years.  And now cities are piling on to boycott Arizona as if it were some rogue nation that violates human rights or international treaties.  The comedy reaches a pinnacle with Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento joining in, ignorant that California already has its own illegal alien law that is equivalent to the federal and now Arizona law, all of them unenforced and unenforceable.

    These happenings are especially ironic as we head into the weekend during which we remember and honor the memory of those who fought and gave their all so that we could be secure within our borders.

    I’m George Rebane, and I expand these and other themes in my Union column, and on georgerebane.com.  The opinions here are mine and not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    2 comments on KVMR commentary – Our Porous Border

  • We’re doing our part (updated)

    George Rebane

    NCARRA100528 

    Looking at the above chart should make all of us, conservatives and progressives, feel proud that we in Nevada County are not contributing much to the national debt burden.  In a year and half, we have only been given a skosh more than $1.5M of the American Redistribution and Re-election Act money.  You remember that supercritical ARRA stimulus the one if it didn’t stimulate the country right then and there, over that particular weekend, well hell, we’d all be up a creek without a paddle.  Now more than a year later, it turns out that the Chief Community Organizer was just joshin’.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    9 comments on We’re doing our part (updated)

  • The Price of Pork – Fewer Jobs

    George Rebane

    A new Harvard study paints a pretty grim picture of what we really pay for all those earmarks that political naifs have been using to measure the effectiveness of their members of Congress.  As with all government activities, pork projects impact the private sector in both how much money it has to spend, and where it wants to spend it.  Bottom line, pork kills jobs.

    In my lexicon the monies we pay to government are divided into taxes and tribute.  Taxes are the funds necessary to pay for government services that we all agree are needed, and cannot effectively provide through the private sector.  We thus come together, erect a government to manage our joint interests, and pool our money to pay for its operation.  Tribute is the monies in excess of taxes that a government, growing in size and corruption, takes from us by sheer force of arms and against our will.  For obvious reasons, politicians disguise tribute as a tax.  Where you draw the boundary between the two goes a long way to identify and label your socio-political ideology.

    In that light, pork is funded by tribute.  And the Harvard study now sprinkles academic holy water on what many of us have known for years.  The study is also summarized in today’s (27may10) WSJ here where we read –

    Part of the problem is that public money is "crowding out" investment opportunities for firms. "Some of our results point towards the role of competition for state specific factors of production, including labor and fixed assets such as real estates," the authors write. "Public spending appears to increase demand for state-specific factors of production and thereby compel firms to downsize and invest elsewhere." They add that "We also find evidence that the effects are most pronounced in sectors that are the target of earmark spending."

    Democrats and Republicans have promised earmark reform for years, only to abandon the effort in favor of "bringing home the bacon" and incumbent protection. The Harvard study suggests the Congressmen are really bringing home less economic prosperity.

    More on the study is reported by Heritage Foundation in ‘Harvard Study – More Government Spending Means Fewer Jobs’, and you can read Harvard’s report and the surprise at its findings here.  Closer to home, perhaps more people will now come to understand our Congressman Tom McClintock's position on pork. 

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    No comments on The Price of Pork – Fewer Jobs

  • ‘The Case for Socialism’

    George Rebane

    Truthout The titled piece on the socialist website truthout.com seeks to dispel the notion that Obama is a socialist.  It touts a book on socialism as the answer to capitalism, and true to form, provides the following as its most penetrating argument against the assertions that Obama is a socialist.

    That these assertions are insane – and more than a little frightening – goes without saying. But they also reveal a profound lack of knowledge about socialism, the class struggle, and theories of governance.

    So there you have it, “without saying” is the sum of collectivist debate.  They simply label the assertions as “insane”, and go on to extol the history and virtues of socialism, along with the uniform failure of capitalism across the world.  As a thinking person, dear reader, it is good for the soul to examine one of these pieces now and then, for it relieves many doubts and fortifies any resident belief system that can muster in its defense something more than naked acerbics.

    The website though is aptly named, for they have succeeded in eradicating the last wisp of it in their outpourings.

    Posted at

    in

    7 comments on ‘The Case for Socialism’

  • Solyndra cum Soylent Green

    George Rebane

    President Obama’s visit to Fremont’s solar panel maker Solyndra caused a lot of confusion.  Union construction workers at the site were told to take the day off without pay.  And then there are reports that inside the plant non-union workers were similarly told to take the day off.  Apparently this was so as to minimize the total number of people within rifle shot of the President while outside, and minimize the potential unfriendlies inside the plant within pistol shot.  Security is complicated when the President travels, and I fully agree with the Secret Service in imposing such arrangements to minimize the likelihood of harm to our president.  There is, of course, some irony involved in the risk assessments, and the dunning of paychecks of the unreliable workers told to stay home.

    Wages2010 Solyndra is one of these ARRA funded companies – to the tune of over half billion dollars – that is creating about a thousand ‘permanent’ jobs, and, of course, some temporary jobs for unionized construction workers in the interval.  The company’s product will only be marketable with the government’s gun to the head of its customers.  Were it otherwise, no stimulus would have been necessary. In the meanwhile the money to fund this government enterprise (no free-market capitalist will call it anything else), was taken from people who could have put it to much better use in helping our economy recover.  This is the invisible impact of tribute monies whose public use is touted by the socialists.

    How would one assign the wages of Solyndra’s workers – public or private?  USA Today reported yesterday (here) government data shows that the total share of America’s private sector wages has fallen to 41.9%, which is an historic low.  And with the government building more Solyndras from coast to coast, this percentage is guaranteed to head for the mud.  Meanwhile, government sector wages are in a relentless climb.

    Solyndra will fold like a house of cards the minute people are free not to buy its solar panels.  (The lands of the former Soviet empire are generously dotted with the rusting hulks of abandoned factories.)  And this underlines the similar fate of all such mandated green job efforts across the land that are starting to flesh out the structure and form of our new command economy.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    No comments on Solyndra cum Soylent Green

  • ‘Cap and Flee’

    George Rebane

    That is the title of today’s (25may10) WSJ editorial summarizing how California’s AB32 act will ravage the state, and drive us deeper into an economic morass.  The piece begins –

    California, that former land of opportunity, was one of the first states to pass its own version of "cap and trade" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2007 when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the law, called AB-32, he said it would propel California into an economy-expanding, green job future. Well, a new study by the state's own auditing agency—its version of the Congressional Budget Office—has burst that green bubble.

    The study released May 13 concludes that "California's economy at large will likely be adversely affected in the near term by implementing climate-related policies that are not adopted elsewhere." While the long-term economic costs are "unknown," the study finds that AB-32 will raise energy prices, "causing the prices of goods and services to rise; lowering business profits; and reducing production, income and jobs."

    Readers of RR and NC Media Watch were made aware of AB32’s damage before our governator signed it into law.  Russ Steele has long been our local spearchucker in keeping us up to date about climate change, and the lunacy that its AGW variants are spreading across the land.

    California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office now confirms that “leakage” will be one the prime time bombs that this poorly conceived piece of progressivism will set off.  Leakage means that the stream of California companies heading for truly greener pastures will become a torrent when the contents of this ersatz ‘green jobs’ crock gets poured over the state.  Now only the terminally ignorant and ideologically calcified will remain loyal supporters of California’s continuing decline.

    Acknowledging that this disease is about to go nationwide, the editorial concludes –

    It should be obvious to Members of Congress that similar jobs and business "leakage" will strike the U.S. in general if federal cap and trade passes. The hardest hit industries will leave the U.S. and relocate to the likes of China and India where marginal costs are lower. The recently introduced Kerry-Lieberman bill all but concedes the point by calling for tariffs on products from countries that don't impose similar energy costs.

    In November, Californians will vote on an initiative to suspend AB-32 until the state unemployment rate falls to 5.5%. The rate is now 12.6%, the third highest after Michigan and Nevada, and a state already leading the nation in lost jobs and businesses, home foreclosures and debt doesn't need higher self-imposed energy costs.

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    No comments on ‘Cap and Flee’

  • The Porous Borders and Amnesty Act

    George Rebane

    “Immigration Reform” is another in the legion of lies from Washington these days.  The first order of business – bamboozling the words – has already been embedded in our brainbones, thereby making it hard to have a reasoned discussion about the subject.  What subject?  Illegal aliens, or more specifically Illegal Entrants.

    We have been taught to label illegal entrants as ‘illegal immigrants’.  This fosters all the images of ‘poor, tired, and huddled’ immigrants who came off the ships from ‘their teeming shores’, and then became citizens and helped build America.  But those guys aren’t and never were the problem.

    USinhabitants

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    2 comments on The Porous Borders and Amnesty Act

  • Of Brownies and Obamacare and …

    George Rebane

    To get an idea of the impact of the new federal tsunamis headed our way, tsunamis that may finally swamp this dear land of ours, take a look at this 26 page recipe for brownies from the US Air Force cookbook – MILITARY SPECIFICATION, COOKIES, OATMEAL; AND BROWNIES; COCOLATE COVERED.   Can you imagine the number of people, the time, the cost, etc involved in putting out this tripe?  And this is repeated thousands of times a day throughout all the departments, bureaus, commissions, … .  This is simply the way they do things, all things.

    BrowniesPage1 

    I’m not done yet.  Now consider what is required to get some fed employees to actually work with instructions like this.  Remember, in all large bureaucracies – public and private, especially those with pension plans – the standing order is ‘CYA all the way!’  These instructions will be followed.

    And you’d think that with so many eyeballs checking and rechecking the damn thing over the years, that somebody by now would have picked up on the spelling of ‘chocolate’ in the title – or does that highlight another problem?  Your government in peace and war.

    (H/T to a regular RR reader with connections who is trying to get the total pagecount for this cookbook.)

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    3 comments on Of Brownies and Obamacare and …

  • First Designed and Built Living Cell

    George Rebane

    By now you’ve probably heard that Man has been able to mess with some snippets of DNA and fabricate a new double helix that when inserted into an ‘empty’ (of nucleus) cell body, the thing became a living and self-replicating cell.  While not the real deal of starting from scratch with a bunch of amino acids, it is a real milestone in our march toward the Singularity.  The feat was accomplished by the J. Craig Venter Institute and reported here.  Go to the source, because most of the journalists reporting on this will only confuse you.

    You might remember that Venter founded and ran the private enterprise that was one of the two teams which were the first to sequence the entire human genome.  Now there are several efforts out there competing to start designer life.  If nothing else, it will prove that intelligent designers can originate life.  And stay tuned, because this technology will change (probably all) life on earth for good or ill.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    5 comments on First Designed and Built Living Cell

  • Whitecaps in Our Teapot (updated 25may2010)

    George Rebane

    As election day June 8th approaches in Nevada County, all campaigns are heating up going into the home stretch.  In the attempt to cast prudent votes that reflect our values and hopes for the county, we now begin to really digest the voter information that has been blanketing us for the last several weeks.  I find this part of campaigns important from another angle, they sometimes reveal a whole lot about the people involved in the local political scene.

    (For the record, the Rebanes support and have contributed to the campaigns of Tom McClintock for Congress, Doug LaMalfa for California Senator, Barry Pruett for Clerk-Recorder, Sue Horne for Assessor, and John Spencer for District #3 Supervisor (we live in District #1).  And we have been members of and contributors to the Tea Party Patriots from the gitgo.)

    Recently sitting Clerk-Recorder Greg Diaz put out a letter full of lies and innuendo about the TPP and his opponent Barry Pruett.  Stan Meckler, the current fearless leader of the county’s TPP, stood up to defend our organization.  It seems that the scope of his defense has broadened beyond its intended limits, but then, this is what happens in public politics.  Stan sent out an email that starts out –

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    17 comments on Whitecaps in Our Teapot (updated 25may2010)

RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

Commenting Rules

RECENT POSTS

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

2 comments on KVMR commentary – Our Porous Border