Rebane's Ruminations
November 2026
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  • George Rebane

    California’s in the bag, but other votes must still be bought for Obamacare and cap n’ tax.

    NCARRA091211

  • George Rebane

    EarthwormFarm In the classic fashion of the Left, Obama’s jobs summit asked dumb questions – “I want to hear from CEOs what’s holding back our business investment.” – and then didn’t understand the answers.  With his top cadre weighing in at fewer than 8% having had any private sector (i.e. wealth creating) experience, what else would you expect?

    An example policy output of that little White House charade is a tax credit for a company creating a government acceptable ‘new job’.  As anyone who has run businesses knows, that is a topical band-aid, and not a systemic benefit for sustained growth, like lowering the corporate tax rate.  Henninger’s piece in today’s WSJ lays out the main issue of American job creation.  He concludes with –

    The Obama bet is that the U.S. can be a Franco-German welfare state, with a mammoth public sector, and still compete with China, India, Brazil, Korea and the rest. This is a pipedream. We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation.

    BTW, no one really knows what a job is.  Is it someone who weatherizes five houses and is then let go?  Or is it someone who is working in a sustainable business with growth and career prospects?  Or is it another government employee?

    Meanwhile one Nevada County version of ObamaJobs is hiring people with grant money to raise earth worms.  Now there’s a growth industry.

  • George Rebane

    OpenGovt Yesterday, with remarkably little fanfare, the Administration issued its Open Government Directive over the signature of OMB director Peter Orszag.  Mr. Orszag said, “The American people know best what their government should do for them. It’s fitting that our open government directive has been significantly shaped by the collective wisdom of the American people.”  Indeed.

    I guess we can now expect a totally different face of the White House, and that from a President who has installed more ideologically extreme and extra-constitutional czars serving concurrently to implement his will than any President before him.  These guys and gals don’t even have to answer your phone call, let alone tell you what they’re doing.  Almost all of the Cabinet officers can be or have been replaced by two-by-fours with happy faces drawn on them.  They are permanently installed in the White House cabinet conference room.

    At whitehouse.gov you can read the full press release (here).  However, the careful reader will note that the fiefdoms (nascent empires?) of the czars are not part of our newly opened government.  The rest of the established departments and agencies will at least get new ‘take a number’ dispensers in their entry halls.  

    But given the ‘hurry up, don’t read it, just pass it’ policy we have witnessed so far, this new open government initiative will be welcomed by all – well, at least by the Republican members of Congress.

    (Hat tip to my spy in the nation’s capitol for the heads up.)

    “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”  Patrick Henry

  • George Rebane

    – Obama’s Jobs Summit
    – Liars Central (aka District of Columbia)
    – Copenhagen Capers
    – Public Sector Unions Petition

    Last week’s White House jobs summit was a special comedy hour sponsored by the gang that couldn’t or wouldn’t get a private sector job.  Now they’re the ones who are putting together programs to create such jobs.  Of course, their recent tally of having “created or saved” hundreds of thousands of jobs was the runner up joke (or lie?).  A reader sent me a copy of the following bar chart summarizing some research by JP Morgan, which you may have seen on Glenn Beck a few days ago.  It’s worth noodling over as we let the “They’re not socialists!” echoes die down.

    PrivSectorExperience 

    Well, Obamacare will force you into the nationwide program of socialized medicine.  The crowd at Liars Central is starting to fess up the real terms of the Senate and House healthcare bills they will cobble into the country’s new way to ration fewer medical services.  But don’t worry, not everything will be reduced – the costs will be guaranteed to increase, and we’re not only talking about your wallet.

    In countless speeches Obama has stated what Majority Leader Harry Reid echoed at the beginning of the Senate’s healthcare deliberations, “One of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it.”  Since their only core principle is to do what is necessary to get re-elected, we now hear the update from Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), “We’re not going to be able to say ‘If you like what you have, you can keep it.’”  You better believe it, either they will outright make you a criminal if you don’t sign on, or they will remove all viable alternatives for healthcare from the American economy.  A medical vacation to Thailand anyone?

    (more…)

  • George Rebane

    NewsAnchor Just returned from a few days at California’s parallel universe by the sea.  No mention of Climategate there.  But the real noteworthy thing is that almost all the major broadcast networks are ignoring Climategate as the news it is per se (here)  It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the hacked CRU emails and the fraudulent ‘science’.  The fact that it is causing such a fuss around the world with important people suspended, and others demanding the return of Al Gore’s Oscar, and members of Congress calling for an investigation, a gazillion hits on Google, and Google suppressing ‘climategate’, Australia rejecting cap and trade, and on and on.  You’d think that this would be by and of itself news.  But no, their lips are sealed (by whom?).

    Now, most of us have dearly beloved leftwing friends who have always denied that the media have more than just a tilt to port.  What are they telling us now, when the MSM will not even mention the news about the news?

    Meanwhile, more outrage and global warming related scandals continue to boil to the surface.  Is this how news will be managed after America is “fundamentally transformed” as promised?

    [6jan09 update]  CBS has broken the Climategate story.  See NC Media Watch here.

  • George Rebane

    SwissMinarets Last Sunday the Swiss voted to ban the erection of additional minarets on the country’s mosques (here).  The vote was desperate, awkward, and overwhelming.  That small ever-neutral, obstinately independent country was seeking a way to say no to its colonization by Islam.  In every direction the Swiss have seen their neighbors with growing communities of unassimilated Moslems, and politically correct politicians competing in pants wetting competitions, powerless to slow the onslaught.  So the Swiss people went against their elected leaders and expressed their frustration in a vote that sends a clear but, most likely, an ineffective message.

    The Swiss are saying we don’t want to become an Islamic country, we want to remain rooted in the western cultures that have sustained us for centuries.  Switzerland invented successful multi-culturalism that has demonstrated how people of German, French, and Italian descent, who retain their traditions and language, can live together under one system of governance.  Islam does not tolerate the peaceful co-existence of multiple cultures, especially if they don’t share a common sect of a common religion.  Islam has become a world-class pain in the ass from Indonesia to Canada, wherever it has set down its roots.

    But what Islam has perfected is how to maintain and propagate its culture.  It does this by brooking no compromises in its ascent, and most certainly not in its ascendancy.  With this policy it has slowly, albeit with declared purpose, infiltrated Europe.  As most RR readers are aware, its colonization program is on track.  And the colonization will continue apace until a sufficient fraction of the countries are Muslim.  The next stage of takeover was again recently made plain by Omar Bakri, a British Islamic leader published in London’s daily Al-Hayat, who said, “Allah willing, we will transform the West into Dar Al-Islam by means of invasion from without.  If an Islamic state arises and invades, we will be its army and soldiers from within.”

    (more…)

  • George Rebane

    – raw Earth temperature data destroyed intentionally
    – another view of the White House security fiasco

    Hockeystick The 29nov09 London Times now confirms (here) that the original (raw) temperature data that was collected from thousands of realworld sources has been permanently lost.  This invaluable data was processed to yield a modified dataset which in turn was processed with all kinds of corrections, adjustments, and normalizations to give the final temperature graph in the shape of the famous ‘hockey stick’.  It is this hockey stick graph which purports to show a recent calamitous rise in earth’s temperature history.

    Then up popped ClimateGate – the revelation of the massive fraud from the CRU emails recently hacked and made public. This was reported here and over the rest of unblinded world.  The Climate Research Unit of Britain’s University of East Anglia is the mother temple of earth’s temperature history, and the basis for the UN’s IPCC reports that set off the political palpitations in the hearts of Team Gore and the global warmists.  Which palpitations, by the way, have yet to miss a beat on their way to the upcoming Copenhagen conference that will attempt another revival of the insane Kyoto greenhouse gas protocols, which no one ever implemented and/or lived up to.

    But the bottom line of the Times article is that the ‘scientists’ destroyed the raw temperature data that started all this.  This is something you NEVER do in science; raw data is sacrosanct, because from it all subsequent datasets are generated.  The permanent archiving of such raw data allows follow-on investigators to confirm or not the correctness of the revised dataset(s)’ production pathway.  Now all such work is conveniently no longer possible.  Like Hillary’s law firm billing records of yore, they have disappeared, and the CRU admits that they were destroyed.  Now that would be an inconvenient truth.

    [1dec09 update] Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT is one of the world’s most respected meterologists and climate scientists.  He and many of his peers have spent the last ten years publishing research and reasoned articles in the world’s press that point out the foibles, fantasies, and fiascos of the AGW hysteria mongers.  In today’s WSJ (here) he has again summarized the science that counters the politicized arguments which form the basis of the upcoming Copenhagen conference where Obama will try to promote his cap and tax legislation, or worse.  The worse part is the Copenhagen treaty on global warming that has been kept under wraps and may surface there for a surprise signing.  The voluminous treaty portends a Marxist world government with teeth to enforce the destruction of economies, and the transfer of wealth from the richer to the poorer countries.  Lord Christopher Monckton gave a recent talk on the subject (video here) in which he warns Americans about the loss of our sovereignty.  The leftwing promoters of our socialist future simply ignore all this and bet that so will you. 

    (more…)

  • George Rebane

    PewResults That question was asked recently by the Pew Research Center of a random sample of Americans who answer phones.  The survey contained a 12 multiple choice question questionnaire.  The questions were pretty vanilla about the current world.  There was only one question the answer to which may be debatable.

    The sidebar is one of the results panels that you can see when you visit the survey’s website, but go here first to answer the questionnaire to see how you did.

    Hat tip to a regular RR reader for the link, and who also remarked, “Scary.  And they all vote.”

    [update] On ClimateGate and AB32, I am fascinated how uneven is the coverage of these major news events.  One revealing the patent fraud behind the IPCC ‘science’ (and there’s a lot more to come as this door is pried open) and the silence of the lambs.  This even as IPCC scientists are beginning to denounce their colleagues (here) while our leftwing Congress is trying to rush Waxman-Markey through on the coattails of ObamaCare.

    The other news deals with AB32 – California’s economic death knell legislation now being hurried into practice by the socialists.  It seems that there is a great awakening occurring and an initiative, led by our Assemblyman Dan Logue, to get AB32 repealed in next year’s election.

    See more on this and related climate change news on Russ Steele’s NC Media Watch. 

  • George Rebane

    PiratesExecuted Piracy on the high seas – another symptom of a dysfunctional society of nation-states.  Just heard SecState Clinton blather about working to develop “appropriate 21st century means of controlling piracy.”  Historically pirates were the original international terrorists – not criminals – and were summarily treated that way by every legitimate government.  Using Admiral Nelson’s tactic of “going straight at them”, civilized society showed them no quarter – when they were caught, they were executed.  With this response policy and advancing technology, piracy essentially disappeared in the 19th century from the world’s routes of commerce.  Now it’s back because politically correct nations are tying themselves in legal knots trying to figure out how to deal with pirates that is more … more what?  Another sign of coming totalitarianism or Mad Max anarchy – in both systems the law abiders are punished and the scum runs free.

    In this putative economic recovery lots of economic indicator numbers are being published, analyzed, and interpreted by mostly innumerate journalists.  Their reports are almost all suspect because most of them can’t tell the difference between a number as an attribute attached to something, and a number being used in or derived through a mathematical computation of a realworld process that itself is being reported.  To them all numbers are simply ‘math’, and therefore excusably foreign.  So if such a reporter writes that ‘recent sales tax receipts are down’, that is not math.  But the equivalent sentence – ‘recent sales tax receipts are down 10%’ – is considered ‘math’.  And these people are supposed to be our window to the world?  

    The Nevada County Library privatization dust-up is in full progress.  A RR reader who has been following this in The Union (here) emails a sentiment that, I suspect, many harbor but have yet to voice.  “I'd likely make this business decision in 5 minutes. But then government jobs are ‘above’ business.”  In any case, I invite readers to keep an eye on how all this develops through the (count them) three working committees now involved in resolving the issue.  For perspective, please refer to my workforce and public sector union columns here and here.

    And finally, here is a typical leftwing discounting of the recent climate change email fiasco by fraudulent scientists (a summary here and a lot more on NC Media Watch).  As an educated reader, see how many dots don't connect in this pithy dismissal from the liberal website truthout.com. 

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