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  • Hot Flash in from the Cold

    [This entry has been making the email rounds, and a RR reader suggested that the message was important enough to post.  I agree.  gjr]

    Emergency Weather Bulletin

    This text is from a county emergency manager out in the western part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan after a severe snow storm …

    The Mining Journal, Marquette, MI

    WEATHER BULLETIN

    Up here in the Northern part of Michigan we just recovered from a Historic event — may I even say a “Weather Event” of “Biblical Proportions” — with a historic blizzard of up to 44″ inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10’s of thousands.

    Snow1   

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  • The Great Commission

    George Rebane

    Missionary1 Christians are taught that one of their most important tasks in life is to win people over to Christ and the Gospel; it is called the Great Commission.  The preferred method to accomplish this has been for Christians to proselytize their religion as far and wide as possible.  Islam is among the few religions that also exhort their adherents to extend their belief system.  When expanding territorial hegemony is an added objective, this makes a lot of sense.  Today, most religions are satisfied to perpetuate their beliefs within the cultures and communities in which they arose.

    After services today we picked up our church’s monthly bulletin and read about several of the missionary efforts that our church supports around the world.  I have had mixed feelings about sending Christian missionaries to distant lands, especially lands that are poor and hostile to Christianity, and hostile to western civilization in general.  In the bulletin we read about a couple from our church that is preparing to depart for Morocco this summer.  They will preach the Gospel to the Muslims, and attempt to win hearts and minds for Christ.

    In preparation for their mission they are practicing (I don’t know another word for it) on local Sacramento area Muslims.  Our church membership is being asked to support their Moroccan sojourn through our wallets and prayers.  It will cost a lot more to save a soul in Morocco than in nearby Sacramento.

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  • Stimulus Stingers

    George Rebane

    When RR suggested that the American Rehabilitation and Recovery Act of 2009 was a misnomer, and it really stood for the American Redistribution and Re-election Act, many liberal readers took their usual exception to this as just another unfounded libertarian screed.  Now the state legislatures that accepted ARRA monies (California among them) are beginning to realize into which end their stimulus was really inserted.

    Politician As predicted, it turns out that states accepting ARRA dollars in 2009-11 will find themselves with monies to fund the start or maintenance of multiple spending programs with no provision to continue their funding in out years.  The states with outstretched hands will have to pony up from their own coffers after the monies from the first federal checks run out.  The idiots in state capitols across the land could not think beyond ‘year one’ and realize that the stimulus is a one-off affair.  These guys definitely could not manage a family’s grocery budget, but instead are in charge of their states’ economies.

    A similar fate awaits all those market-ignorant ‘green jobs’ that will be launched with short-lived mandated funds.

    Meanwhile, the House/Senate conference committee, now secretly strapping together Obamacare, is in similar straits if we look at what was in the separate bills they have to work with.  For example the prescription drug benefits mish-mash will create changes that will cost individual taxpayers more AND in the process lower the government’s revenues intended to help defray the costs of Obamacare.  These idiots (someone find me a better word, please) continue to do this sort of thing in whichever direction they turn their sordid talents – make it cost more, and then deliver less (for example here).

    Concurrently, we taxpayers are being fed the same lame line that increasing taxes on big business will provide some sort of ‘fiscal justice’ in the land.  This kind of chicanery remains a workable ruse as long as the overwhelming fraction of voters continue to believe that corporations, instead of their customers, actually pay taxes.  Our state-run schools have welded that notion into the noggins of the sheeple.

    Business as usual dictates that every plan and practice from a politician is designed only to keep her sorry butt in office through the next election.  And regiments of unionized government employees work hand-in-glove here, counting on the threat of major public services disruptions to keep the taxpayers docile and compliant.  Since it is working, maybe it is we who are the idiots.

    More here and here.

    ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

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  • Welcome 2010!

    George Rebane

    Dear Readers, I wish you each a happy and fruitful new year.  And I thank you for frequenting this record of thoughts, harangues, laments, celebrations, and conversations about the epochal changes in which we are both witness and participant.  I hope our exchanges continue in the coming year, and that we find from each other something that leaves us to better understand and take strength from the coming whirlwind.  In the interval, from the 17th century Father Baltasar advises –

    Have the art of conversation, for it is the hallmark of the man.  No human enterprise demands greater heed, for so large a part of everday life, whence its dangers, or its advantages; if care is necessary to write a letter, which is conversation studied, and committed to paper; how much more is necessary in everyday speech, when the intelligence must at every moment pass examination? …  (Gracian 148)

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  • Obama’s careful calculations

    George Rebane

    With the overwhelming amount of the $787 billion left to be distributed from the American Redistribution and Re-election Act of 2009, it will be interesting to see how much vote buying will be done in Nevada County in 2010.  We should be getting most of the $6.1 million that has been promised to date.  After all, Nevada County did go left in 2008, and that for the first time in its 150+ year history.  But then again, since Rep McClintock has no real opposition in the coming election, why waste money here and make him look good?  It will be interesting to see what all goes into the Chief Community Organizer's equation next year.

    NCARRA091231

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  • The California Plan

    Dear Governor Schwarzenegger –

    The 12+% California unemployment rate has been on all of our minds, but an idea occurred to me as we drove home from visiting our kids in the Seattle area over Christmas.  You see, when I pulled into a filling station in Oregon a nice young lady wearing an international orange vest came up to the car and asked what kind of fuel I wanted.  In no time at all my tank was filled up and we were on our way, and I didn’t even have to get out of the car.

    FillingStnAttendant In case you didn’t know, in Oregon it’s against the law to fuel your own vehicle.  Filling stations have to hire extra people to pump gas like they did when you and I were younger.  I think Oregon passed the law to provide jobs for the laid off workers when their timber industry collapsed some years back.  To tell the truth, that young lady didn’t look like any laid off lumberjack I’ve ever seen, but she looked like she enjoyed the work.  So it seems that the Oregon plan provides extra jobs for everyone.  Then it hit me square between the eyes.

    Why can’t California do the same thing?  We have more than 9,000 filling stations in the state, and requiring each station to hire at least one gas pumper would put a lot of people back to work.  My wife and I got quite excited talking about that prospect, and she suggested there is no reason why we couldn’t also have a law that required the cleaning of windshields and rear view mirrors with every fill-up.  And that could be a job for another person; this would double the number of people back on the job.  All kinds of other similar ideas then came pouring into our heads.  I tell you sir, we were on a roll.

    One of the many advantages of this idea is that we don’t need to apply for any of those stimulus funds from Washington to make it work.  We can take care of the whole thing right here in Sacramento, and watch with pride as our unemployment rate plummets.

    But in reality, even the best of ideas needs that first step to get going.  It occurred to us that since you switched parties, it wouldn’t take much for you and our forward-thinking Democrat legislators in Sacramento to get together and have such a law on the books in no time.  And doubling the number of people for each filling station would put California back in the leadership position for these kinds of ideas – I can already see it being called the California Plan and quickly copied by like-minded states across the nation.

    Finally, the best part of all is that, once we get started on this, it isn’t hard to think of a lot of other areas that could be used to boost the state’s employment in a similar manner.  And to think that those folks in Oregon were doing this all along and keeping quiet about it.  I’m not sure why we didn’t think of legislating employment opportunities sooner, but now there’s nothing to hold us back on the road to economic recovery.  And thanks to California, the rest of the country will soon follow.

    Sincerely yours,
    George Rebane

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  • Ruminations – 28dec2009 (updated 29dec09)

    George Rebane

    – Obama gets an ‘A’ from me
    – Nigerian bomber underlines the government employee
    – Washington’s double taxation of investment gains

    Never mind the fruitless foreign policy escapades and stimulus packages that have not stimulated.  Candidate Obama promised one and all a “fundamental transformation” of the country into European type redistributionist socialism.  Many people didn’t pay attention or thought he was joking – he was not.  When Obama gets this healthcare bill on his desk, no matter how mollified it may appear, he will become the most effective American president since Reagan, and maybe even more effective when it comes to implementing his political ideology.  This will earn him an ‘A’ in my book.  And if he succeeds making Cap and Tax (aka Waxman-Markey) into the law of the land, I believe that he will become, hands down, the most effective president in our history.  We will then become such an economical and geo-political basket case, that there will be nothing left for us to do but sue the international community to launch a global order and accept us as a charter member.  Total success.

    That government is the employer of last resort has been a longstanding theme in these posts.  This was again verified when Mr Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried unsuccessfully to blow his balls off along with the left wing of the Northwest airliner in which he was a passenger.  Now can you imagine the Homeland Security and TSA workers who already had the guy on a watchlist, persona non grata in Great Britain, and were in receipt of the fact that in Amsterdam he had bought a one-way ticket for cash and checked no baggage.  Since 9/11 data on all passengers departing for the US is transmitted to our people before the plane takes off.  But that is only effective if there is someone with the appropriate skill set to read and react to such information.  Apparently the TSA gives ‘equal opportunity employer’ a new level of meaning.

    Not to worry, the SEIU will guarantee that these people will do a much better job administering nationalized healthcare and enforcing the new CO2 regulations.  In the interval the TSA is placing another layer of loonie-tunes strictures on the rest of us in the vain hope to convince everyone that they are on the job.

    DJIAaverages Today’s WSJ highlights the poor performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last decade when inflation is taken into account (here).  Now, as students of economics, we all know that inflation is a monetary phenomenon in the hands of those who control the supply of our fiat money.  And we also know that inflation is a purposive tax on dollar-based assets.  The bottom line here is that we are not supposed to notice that we are taxed once by inflation, that reduces the real gains of our investments, and then taxed again on the nominal (not real) profits as we attempt to dig ourselves out of the current slump.  Cynical is no longer the appropriate word for it.

    [29dec09 update]  President Obama has upgraded his assessment of HSA’s performance to “catastrophic breach”.  Well OK, perhaps I was a bit too reserved in my comment above.  However, the tack they are now taking is classic government CYA (not California Youth Authority).  When ignoring or incompetently applying an existing law occurs, the event is used to pass new laws that more comprehensively restrict a broader population.  Recall Rahm Emanuel’s comment about not ‘wasting a serious crisis’.  With the new ‘hands in the lap for the last hour of flight’ rule now in effect, one can look forward to a not too distant tomorrow when all passengers will be required to strap on a diaper, and sit in new seats fitted with wrist and ankle shackles for the duration of the flight.  Your government in peace and war.

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  • Where is the moral fiber?

    George Rebane

    Where indeed?  In responding to my Christmas post, a reader emailed me about a grocery store incident in which a man, with daughter watching, helped himself to some mixed nuts from a bin.  She reminded him that that was stealing, and he reminded her that it wasn’t stealing at all since he was a regular customer of that store.  There was more to the conversation, but that was the gist of it.

    In her email she asked where is the moral fiber today that permits us to ignore or define away stealing.  This may be a question of our age, and it applies to a broader category of social infractions.

    We are now an enforced, non-assimilating, multi-cultural society.  A mono-cultural society teaches its young rules of social behavior much of which need not be codified into law since they are understood by almost all the population.  And if that culture also teaches the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent god, then correct social behavior stands on the divine dictates of morality.  You don’t mess with a god who knows your heart and can hold you to account if you persist in going against the rules he has laid down.

    But in a multi-cultural society, where behavior is enforced by the state’s ‘power of the bayonet’, things are very different, especially if the state religion turns out to be secular humanism.  The secular humanist worships complex combinations of atoms.  And since the constituent atoms are the fundamental material elements of this universe, they cannot represent any absolute good or bad, no matter in what combinations they may occur.  What can one say in an absolute sense about the progress of one particular dynamic path of such a collection of atoms versus, say, another dynamic path?  Can one such path be intrinsically ‘better’ than any other?

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  • Christmas 2009

    George Rebane

    The two main events in the Christian calendar are celebrations of the Promise and the Fulfillment.  Christmas calls on us to reflect on the Promise delivered – the arrival of Emmanuel, God with us, that made real what had long been promised.  By His appearance among us, the Promise of the good news and a new covenant of salvation between Man and God became an historical event.  He had come.

    Nativity (2)

    As Christians, we take great joy in the remembrance of that little noticed event two thousand years ago, an event that would alter the course of Man and his empires.  Today, in our own country and around the world, Christians again stand battered and confused by forces and events we scarcely understand.  But Christmas reminds us once more of the real hope for a better world in which we, in His image, will all have the freedom to grow and give according to the talents and opportunities afforded us.

    Jo Ann and I wish all of you a joyous Christmas, and a new year where ‘Better!’ will properly respond to every ‘How are you?’ coming your way.
      
     

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  • Christmas in Stettin, 1944

    George Rebane

    BerlinArea1945 Sixty-five years ago we celebrated Christmas 1944 in a small uninsulated cabin the Germans called a Behelfsheim, a ‘temporary accommodation’.  The Third Reich built these to house the tide of refugees fleeing the Red Army then rapidly advancing from the east.  Our cabin was in a long row of such cabins next to a large empty lot (it seemed like a field to me) near the edge of Stettin.  I remember a howling snowstorm outside was trying to force its way in through the thin walls.  That Christmas we had a little green bush with lit candles on the table but no presents.

    My great-aunt Alvi (Alvina) had come to visit with some small hard-to-get delectable that we had shared for the Christmas Eve meal, and then we huddled around the wood stove to hear Herr Goebbels’ evening radio talk to the nation.  Every night he informed us of the great victories the Germans were winning.  After the war my father told me that the German propaganda minister was not fooling anyone because the victories were constantly being won closer to Germany.

    Leading up to this Christmas the big news had come from the west.  The Germans had launched a major offensive designed to stop the Allies advance in France and set up conditions for a negotiated peace – or so everyone thought.  History would lump all these battles together as the Battle of the Bulge, and recognize it as a speed bump on the march to the Rhine.  Nevertheless, it was the season of hope and all of Germany was hoping that the terrible five-year war would soon be over.  

    My mom, dad, and I had arrived in Stettin the previous spring.  We were part of the growing wave of east Europeans fleeing the Red Army as it began its final offensive on Nazi Germany.  Our native country of Estonia had fallen to the Soviets that September, and it later turned out that almost one hundred thousand or 10% of the population had fled.  Those who stayed believed that after the war the Red Army would quietly go back across the USSR border and Estonia would again be free.

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