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  • Ruminations – 21jan2010 (updated)

    George Rebane

    • open letter to the President
    • interview with Dr Anna
    • [update] Glenn Beck special 

    After Massachusetts, the leftwing of the progressive movement is exhorting President Obama to do better in 2010 lest we witness “the re-emergence of a vicious, feudal corporatism.”  It is instructive for all, especially those not wedded to socialism, to read the open letter to the President on truthout.org, one of the country’s most progressive websites.

    The letter summarizes a litany of long simmering complaints from the far left about Obama’s performance, and a frustration that “Democrats are anything but limp windsocks, pointing whichever way the wind blows.”  Here the progressives again make it clear that they are not intrinsically part of any established political philosophy in America, but an independent and extreme ideology which declares that “we are ready to take this country in a fundamentally new direction."

    Progressives are now angry and want to see some results.  They are demanding of Obama that “You are going to have to put them down – with true progressive action, not the frail rhetoric of appeasement.”  Any student of 20th century history is, of course, familiar with the nature of “true progressive action”  (see update below).

    This will indeed be the most interesting year yet.  The progressives are telling us all to stand by for ram.

    Today at my Thursday Rotary lunch meeting I was intercepted by Dr. Anna Haynes, one of Nevada County’s voices from the left, and a tireless worker in the vineyards of anthropogenic global warming.  As an identified and targeted AGW skeptic, she paid me the honor of questioning me on my sources for reliable reporting on climate change.   I answered her questions and we concluded another encounter that was pretty much like the two previous ones we have had – civil and colorless.  She left and I got back to my meeting.

    For those not familiar with Anna, she runs NC Voices, an excellent information and access website that updates and headlines Nevada County’s information sources which include newspapers, radio stations, county/city governments, and local bloggers.  She does a workmanlike job maintaining that site in addition to writing her own NC Focus blog.

    Russ Steele (NC Media Watch) and RR appear to be her favorite foils.  Both of our blogs are consigned to the off-page extreme right column that was formerly labeled ‘Read with care’, and has now been upgraded to ‘Climate Contrarians’.  If you live in the county, I recommend Anna’s labor of love to you.  It’s a good way to start your daily surfing of the local scene.  (BTW, RR pays homage to her work by featuring both NC Voices and NC Focus links in its right hand panel.)

    In the interval, we may be certain that the information I gave her will be put to good use.

    [update]  Tomorrow 22jan10 at 2pm PST Glenn Beck on Fox News is airing a special that illustrates the denied history of "true progressive action" taken to its logical conclusion.  It's worth turning on your DVR so that you can see and show it more than once.  Fasten your seatbelt.

    We post-WW2 immigrants from Europe were blown away by how little of the war's history was known by or taught to Americans.  When we told the stories of what really happened, people stared in disbelief and walked away.  It couldn't be so because everyone knew Hitler was the biggest, baddest, and the only monster that had walked the earth.  Pointing out that Adolph was a third rate killer and quoting facts to the contrary (and this was even before the Cultural Revolution) was beyond the ability to handle by people who had been carefully taught.  Things have slowly been coming to light, but then only to people who read and think.  Perhaps as adults we are now ready to take a giant step in understanding our country's tilt during the last forty years or so. 

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  • Repudiation

    George Rebane

    Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts yesterday should send a clear message to all progressives in the country, especially of the Democrat ilk.  But I doubt that it will.  The true believers will just hunker down and figure out how to recast the socialist revolution they are trying to pull off.  Fundamental transformation of the country is a long term objective and they have been working on it for over a century now.  They are a patient lot.

    In the interval, the rest of us can hope that enough Democrats in Congress now see their sinecures on the line so that they will begin to distance themselves from the current rush to collectivism by way of national bankruptcy.

    The people have communicated through polls, and now at least three elections, that they will countenance neither the pace nor the progressive agenda as framed by Obama and his Congressional acolytes.  That same gang of social engineers and their MSM colleagues will recast this vote as everything other than what it was – repudiation.

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  • Ruminations – 19jan2010

    George Rebane

    • Avatar – the screenplay
    • Haiti and foreign aid

    I was reminded of my naivete by an email from a RR reader with a link to an article that discussed the message delivered by the film Avatar.  This blockbuster raises the bar for producing movies rich in very realistic computer graphics and extends all this into 3D.  I covered some of the implications of the film’s technology in ‘Avatars Lauren and Bogie, Together Again’.  But the Avatar storyline is something else.  It is typically simplistic Hollywood leftwing pabulum which I thought would come through in spades to everyone who saw it.  Wrong.  When our kids took us to see it over Christmas, we all talked about the anti-capitalist, anti-western culture, anti-religious (and a few more antis) propaganda content that seemed to hit the viewer squarely between his 3D glasses from almost every scene.

    It turns out, of course, that not everyone picks this up, and to that extent the film delivers another powerful punch as it is shown worldwide.  Everyone comes to it with their own view of history, and most young people with no such view at all.  How diverse these realities of the past can be was again illuminated in the comment threads to my Jan column (here and here) in The Union.  Collectivism did not fall with the Wall in 1989, it just changed clothes, putting on a much brighter and colorful coat that makes it blend in better with its competition.

    ForeignAid These pages have discussed the effects of foreign aid to poor countries, most recently in the context of post-disaster Haiti (‘Haiti – After the Dust and Tears’).  Bret Stephens in today’s WSJ writes ‘To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid’ and cites the 2006 report from the National Academy of Public Administration entitled ‘Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed’.  Foreign aid to poor countries has failed uniformly and by any measure, perpetuating misery and death.  This has been documented in Easterly’s White Man’s Burden (here), and now the cry is coming also from citizens of the recipient countries.  Perhaps most heart-rending is from Kenyan economist James Shikwati’s “For God’s sake, please just stop.”

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  • Avatars Lauren and Bogie, Together Again

    George Rebane

    In the early 1980s my firm in Los Angeles had just bought and installed the most advanced computer graphics system available.  It was the second one on the west coast (the other one belonged to a big aerospace company) and we used it to create multi-media images and videos for the then new PC controlled laser discs.  Word got out (well, we helped a little) and soon we were doing post-production work for Hollywood production companies fixing stuff that went wrong in producing movies and commercials.  Working with that system, it immediately became clear to us that this was the future of movies.  But more importantly, movie stars could live forever on the screen.

    Luaren&Bogie I called in our intellectual property lawyers, described what we thought was possible, and asked if dead actors’ estates had ever granted rights for ‘them’ to appear in new digitized productions.  The answer was no, because such screen incarnations had never been possible or occurred to anyone.

    The scheme to do it was complicated but straightforward since the actors’ faces and bodies existed on film from all angles, and we had lots of audio from them.  This would allow surrogate actors to act out the parts in a new movie, perhaps wearing special suits with lights and gridlines on them.  In post production we would then render the surrogate actors with the appropriate stars’ faces and even costumes.  The speech would be modified using the dead actors’ speech formants (analyzed speech components) to ‘superimpose and blend’ it on the surrogates’ voices.  The final product would be the real thing – Lauren and Bogie, or Lucy and Desi, or … .

    All we needed then was some faster and more commodious hardware – that would eventually come along given Moore’s Law – and to write some nifty interactive computer graphics (CG) and speech processing software.  Anyway, I later checked that part out with John Hughes, founder of Rhythm and Hues which along with George Lucas were then the world’s leading CG houses.  John agreed that all of it would be possible with the new hardware and a pile of cash.  Having neither, we both went on with our lives doing other things.

    Today the movie Avatar has brought together the CG technology developments of the last thirty years and demonstrated that it is indeed possible to make a new road movie starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or anyone else you care to pick.  I haven’t yet heard of the voice overlays I described above, but I bet someone is working hard on it.

    And not only will dead stars live again, but still kicking actors will be able to play themselves in a much younger year.  In short, an actor need no longer progress through the aging roles of yesteryear. Tom Cruise can play a twenty something when he’s sixty something, and Sean Connery will forever return to his 007 role.  People covering the industry have already started talking about it (here) since Avatar continues to rack up piles of cash.

    An aging population would flock to movies and programs that revived memories of their younger years with new material that comes to life with the same actors that inspired their youth.  There’s gold in them thar hills!

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  • Haiti – After the Dust and Tears

    [This post by Mr Steven Frisch is an expansion of the comment thread for ‘Haiti and Compassion’.  Steve is the president of the Sierra Business Council and frequently offers a more progressive perspective to RR posts.  Here he kindly accepted my invitation to post his more comprehensive thoughts on post-disaster US policy toward Haiti.  gjr]

    Steven Frisch

    I absolutely do not think we want Haiti to become a ward of the US.

    I think the US needs to be significantly less interested in creating client states in the future and more interested in helping to build economies and governance structures that secure freedom – by that I mean economic freedom, stable governments and military security. If we can use our political capital and economic power to help build stable governments we might not have to pay the price of remaining the world’s only hegemonic power.

    Ultimately we are neither our brother’s keeper nor should we think of ourselves as their betters. They must control their own destiny and decisions. We should help, then back away.

    Ensuring that Haiti does not become a ward of the US is going to be tricky since it is 90 miles from our shores and there are about 600,000 Haitians in the US.

    In the short term, during the crisis, I would not care too much about money.  First, food, water, shelter and medical care as part of the global relief effort.

    Next, we should just go in there and help rebuild. It should be an international effort, but we should just bite the bullet and set the example by guaranteeing funding in the low billions to rebuild Haiti's infrastructure and use that pledge to leverage the several billion more from the rest of the world, and do it quick. By rebuild I mean really re-build. Total infrastructure investment: roads, schools, bridges, water systems, sewage treatment, power plants, electrical grids, hospitals, churches, etc. I would have Clinton/Bush lead a private fundraising effort to backfill the guarantee.

    (more…)

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  • Singularity Signposts – 17jan2010

    George Rebane

    Here is a flurry of recent developments and advances that serve as ever more rapidly passing milestones as we approach the Singularity.  Their relevance to everyday life is sometimes hard to see for the non-technician, but they all have an impact on how most of us will be able to earn a living and stay healthy.

    HSapiens++ 

    My main worry about the latter is that the healthcare markets for these advances may disappear in the next few years.  All advances in human history trickle down from the early adopters who usually are better off than the eventual mass of users and can afford the expensive early versions.  The rest of us benefit when the new gizmo or process has demonstrated itself enough to bring in competitors or motivate the originators to continue working (i.e. risk more) to reduce costs.

    1. Quantum leap in battery design (here)  Ever wonder how all those sci-fi robots can do all the fancy stuff for hours/days on end when their form factor is about that of a human?  Well, it would require them to have embedded enormously more dense (e.g. KWH/cubic foot) energy stores than exist now.  A standard lithium ion battery pack would run out in a couple of minutes.  This article describes a new technology that would increase energy densities “by orders of magnitude”, just what the Doctor (PhD that is) ordered.
    2. New propulsion technologies for interstellar travel are described by this New Scientist article.
    3. The race between extending lifespans through biological vs machine-augmented means is ramping up.  Here’s an article that summarizes advances in the biological arena that promise steps closer to the proverbial fountain of youth.
    4. Never heard of crowdsourcing?  Well, you should because it may be a way that a lot of people will be able to earn a living in the future by combining their ability to perform simple tasks, which when integrated, will achieve complex objectives.  Crowdsourcing also has a sinister potential that an authoritarian state can use on its people.  More here.
    5. Best robots of 2009 (here and here)  These are the smart mechanical critters that are taking human jobs and making the remaining workers more productive.  What will the displaced workers do?
    6. Here’s a compendium of topics from the genius himself, Ray Kurzweil.  Besides being an awesome inventor, Kurzweil is the definitive futurist and in an interview shares his predictions about all things artificially intelligent and conscious heading our way.
    7. China is now the second largest producer of human knowledge and is expected to surpass us by 2020 (here and here).  In the interval they are busy building up a world-class military to project power worldwide.  What will we do with all of our lawyers then?  More importantly, what will we do with all of our students who ‘don’t do math’?

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  • Jobs Gone … and Coming

    George Rebane

    [This editorial appears today (16 January 2010) in The Union’s print and online (here) opinion sections.  This is the submitted version.]

    Some people around here have given up on real economic development for our county.  They see that the federal trough has been slopped and ready for all the little piggies who can recite the proper slogans.  Times are tough and everyone is hungry, so what’s there to think about?  Let’s dive in.

    It appears that a growing number of our more progressive and pragmatic neighbors have concluded that Nevada County’s economic future lies in the land of grants and loans, all connected by something called green.  They believe that we will climb our way out of this recession by stepping on stacks of carefully prepared grant proposals and loan applications while chanting ‘green is good’.  On the other side await the smiling feds ready to place around our collective neck a collar inscribed ‘Ward of the State’.

    (more…)

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  • ARRA for China? (updated)

    George Rebane

    It’s been about a year down the pike since the $787 billion American Redistribution and Re-election Act of 2009 was passed to claim the award as the greatest Congressional bum’s rush in history.  I wonder how this all strikes those holding their breath for the new green industries to be funded by such means.

    NCARRA100116   

    Russ Steele on NC Media Watch reports here on wiser heads from China locating their solar equipment manufacturing plants next door in Arizona so they can avoid California’s insane business environment, and still serve the equally insane mandated green energy markets in California.  And we’ve been thinking all along that they were going to locate here in Nevada County.  I wonder if the Chinese green companies are also going to get stimulated by Washington.  If I were they, I’d demand some of that ARRA money as a condition for buying and not selling our Treasuries.  (more here)

    [update] Late this afternoon the county updated its ARRA numbers, and we more than tripled our receipts.  Note also the increases in our applied and approved amounts.  County CEO Rick Haffey’s Friday memo to the Supes contains a bizarre account of caulking contractor bids (yes, this is one of the stimulated green jobs) for which a RFP (request for proposal) was published.  Only one contractor,  Steve Hull Construction, applied.  This apparently because of the number of hoops the government set up for qualifying contractors to jump through.  This is your government in peace and war, stimulating jobs within an industry that is flat on its butt.  If you like this, you’re gonna love the way Obamacare is going to be administered.

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  • Haiti and Compassion

    George Rebane

    HaitiEarthquake The devastating earthquake on Tuesday (12jan10) that pretty much leveled the Port-au-Prince region of Haiti is almost too big to get my mind around.  Thinking about the real size of that disaster must include the world’s response to it, and it promises to be colossal.

    Haiti is a country that by all objective measures is pretty much worthless to anyone not living there, and worth very little to those so burdened.  This conclusion is supported by any number of references about the country.  It has no natural resources that anyone wants, what used to be the natural beauty of Hispaniola has been decimated by its people (you can make out its boundary with the Dominican Republic from space), its governments are sequentially dysfunctional, its economy is on permanent international dole, and the people are a grim lot – mostly destitute, desperate, and uneducated.  Its major export consists of contraband humans on makeshift ‘boats’ risking shark-infested waters to seek a better life elsewhere – mainly in the United States.

    And now a world-scale disaster has struck that has left tens of thousands dead, and most certainly, countless more dying under the rubble even as I write.  Yet the world is rushing help of all kinds to that little cesspool of a nation.  Planeloads of supplies land on its single runway ‘international’ airport, and ships of all descriptions are being dispatched with aid to a seaport no longer able to receive them.  In thousands of homes across the world people are writing checks and sending them to various relief agencies.

    For years I have puzzled about the effect of the self-soothing aid we send to the less developed people of this planet.  As some RR readers may be aware, I have come down heavily on the side of arguments pointing out the harm our so-called aid has done to keep the poor regions perpetually poor.

    And then a dear friend up and went to Haiti a couple of years ago and started an orphanage (here).  Of all places, Haiti!  The pictures and stories from that effort washed away the aggregate statistics that characterized the country; now we were looking at real kids with real faces looking back at us.  They opened our hearts and we opened our wallet.

    None of that affected the broader calculations that had consigned Haiti to the ‘do not resuscitate’ category.  It was human emotion, pure and simple.  I have no idea how those kids will grow up and what they will do to or in the world.  Right then and there they were kids in need, and our friend was building them an orphanage.  What were we supposed to do, read him a page from Easterly’s White Man’s Burden?  (see also ‘The Catastrophe of Compassionate Charities’) 

    But all those neat conclusions seem to recede into the background when death arrives wholesale.   And so they died, leaving millions now living in pain that comes from more directions than we can count.  Undeniably, it affects all of us when a tsunami washes away a quarter million people, or a flooding river in China claims millions, or when we had fifty thousand people die within one minute or so last Tuesday.  I guess life loves life, and demands to fight back when it sees death at such scale.

    Perhaps these mega-tragedies are God’s way of giving each of us an opportunity to recalibrate and reflect the good side of our humanity.  Too infrequently, we are guided by Jesus – ‘Whatever you did even unto one of the least of these, you did unto me.’  Go write a check.

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  • Ruminations – 12jan2009

    George Rebane

    • Windfall profit taxes on bankers
    • Green Banks fund green jobs

    Liagra We are now assured that the feds will slap an extra tax on “windfall profits” that banks make from future risky investments.  These are the kinds of government induced investments that inflated the last bubble of outlandish real estate prices and sophisticated (beyond comprehension) hedge products which finally blew up and presented us with today’s recession.  As we all know, the feds (including the Fed) leaped in there to bail out the big banks.  No harm no foul.

    But after a little thought, someone in the White House said, ‘Sumbich, there’s a pony in this deal if we can only cut ourselves in on the action.’  And cutting themselves in is now in the works.   To the sheeple it looks like – oh yeah, now the government is really going to get ugly as a bear’s butt on all those fat cat bankers.  But to someone with two brain cells to rub together, it is what it is – a bright green light for the bankers to get into exactly the same kind of shoot-the-moon deals that got us in trouble the last time.  The bankers are smiling all the way to their outlandish bonuses.  Why? cause Uncle Sam just said ‘Go and spin that wheel.  We’re partners now and we’ll split the profits.  And if the wind don’t blow our way, that’s OK cause there’s more bailout money where that last batch came from.  Yee Haw!!’

    Meanwhile, the rest of us should strap some duct tape around our wallets.

    Them folks at the Center for American Progress are something else.  Partnering with another group of financial wizards at the Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute (hold the laughter, please), they came up with something to write home about.  Together, they figured out that if the government writes a check each year for $150 billion, they could see their way to “create” and sustain 1,700,000 new jobs doing all kinds of neat green things.  They call it the “Green Bank” and, with nary a blink, claim the “Green Bank can ensure (that) the clean-energy manufacturing sector is able to overcome several challenges, including securing access to capital when prospective lenders are reluctant to provide financing to manufacturers producing clean-energy technology.”

    Well no kidding, Red Ryder! (‘kidding’ is a place holder for a stronger sentiment)  It is indeed a challenge to talk someone “reluctant” and sane out of money to fund a boondoggle that pays $88,000+ annually to keep a body working on stuff for which there is no market.  So the Green Bank concept dispenses with the sane investor/lender problem, and goes directly to the government where there is no such impediment.  CAP simply reminds the feds that markets are no matter since the feds got the guns and can coerce the customers to buy whatever crap is produced from the ‘investment’, which, by the way, is also paid for by the same customers.  They pay for it twice, such a deal!

    Remember the Whiffenpoof Song?  OK, all together now, ‘We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way, Baa, baa, baa? …’

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36 comments on Ruminations – 21jan2010 (updated)