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George Rebane
AB32 is California's chronic killer as most RR and NCMediaWatch readers know. Recently our Assemblyman Dan Logue along with 28 co-authors introduced AB118 as an antidote. Russ Steele has an update and lots of contact information for the relevant electeds. Please take a look here.
George Rebane
The President’s ‘news conference’ last night was Orwellian. The man can lie with a straight face so well it is scary, and the sheeple just believe. Here’s an interview that former Senator Fred Thompson had on his radio show with former New York Lt Gov Betsy McCaughey. You can download a copy of the bill now working through the House here, and read it yourself. If you only read the pages cited in the interview, you should get a cold chill at what is in store for us – especially if you’ve already had a lot of birthdays. This is the stuff of Hitler and Stalin, both of whom knew how to reduce healthcare costs in their populations.
Pages 16,17 will quickly convince you that, contrary to what our President and the Dems tell us, we will not be able to keep our previous healthcare insurance for long. The conditions imposed for doing that will have your insurance provider pull the plug very quickly after Obamacare becomes law, and then you’ll be at the mercy of the government’s “public option” monopoly.
And take a look at pages 425, 426 to see what one of their tender mercies will look like. After a given age you will have to start getting end-of-life counseling every five years to convince you that death is nigh, you shouldn’t expect to fight it with modern medicine, and here’s how you can get yourself checked into the nearest hospice so you can check out before you run up the bill too much. This will be socialized medicine on steroids. (more analysis here)
Now you know why this “piece of s#%t” (Congressman John Boehner) needs to be rushed through Congress quickly and signed into law before too many Americans understand what is in store for us all. And they just look at you and lie.
ps. and we haven’t even started on the cost related lies. Stay tuned.
pps. H/T to an RR reader from Washington state.
[update] Lo and behold, in today’s (23jul09) WSJ Betsy McCaughey writes ‘GovernmentCare’s Assault on Seniors’, making the case that rationing healthcare will hit seniors especially hard.
George Rebane
Not to worry for a wee bit longer.
George Rebane
The White House announced yesterday that it will withhold from Congress key economic information that it generates and distributes in the normal course of affairs. The Heritage Foundation reports that –
The White House … would be delaying release of updated financial and economic forecasts until the middle of August. In other words, its usual mid-July update of key forecasts for policy makers will not be published in time for expected House and Senate votes on health care reform. This delay matters enormously to the deliberations of Congress on this central issue. If it knew that the near-term budget picture is worsening and that it cannot count on a recovering economy to produce much needed revenues for reforming health care, it might hesitate in passing legislation that would add tremendously to the national debt. (More here)
Such withholdings in non-governmental affairs would be either outright illegal or beneath the moral character of upright individuals. Obama is purposely letting Congress proceed with a perceived truth about the economy that he knows is materially different, i.e. a lie (see ‘philosophical aside’ below).
With this act of withholding relevant information, that the White House clearly feels will impact Congress’ Obamacare against the interests of the administration, Obama descends into the realm of the common Washington sleaze bag politician. Obamacare, already on shaky ground in Congress and the national polls, is now being given the bum’s rush through the halls of the Capitol so that it may not receive the attention that it must.
George Rebane
The government employee compensation and pension crisis is beginning to come up on everyone’s radar. Well, perhaps everyone except some very closeted socialists here in our neck of the woods. I am always amazed when I read and sometimes participate in the comment thread of an article either published on a blog or a newspaper’s website. The comment thread of my 18jul09 editorial column – ‘Dear Government Employees’ – in The Union lived up to expectations. (also on RR here)
Many of the commenters had trouble keeping track of the editorial’s theme that made a fairly simple and widely acknowledged point. Government employees have become an unbearable cost burden to governments at all levels. The way that their salaries, pensions, and other benefits are compensated is no longer tenable, and that financial house of cards is now about to collapse.
Some members of the local readership however demonstrated that 1) they were unaware of this critical issue, and 2) that anyone introducing it must needs be an unsavory, selfish, and greedy kind of person who has no appreciation of the role of government in civil society. These folks also seem to have a lively imagination, seeing attacks on their cherished collectivist beliefs where there are none. To them it really doesn’t matter, a strong counter-attack is always the best defense, even against an imagined assault.
George Rebane
The rise of conscious machines has become an active focus of study in the artificial intelligence community. Consciousness and intelligence can and should be viewed as independent attributes of a biological critter, and therefore by extension, of a sentient (conscious) and sapient (wise viz intelligent) machine. RR readers are familiar with my view that such machines will not be ‘programmed’ per se, but will arise from within very complex computational environments that may or not have inputs from our real world.
We now hear of a team at the Federal Polytechnical College in Lausanne, Switzerland that has ‘assembled’ the beginnings of a virtual rat’s brain from the ground up. (more here) This means that they have created software structures that mimic the make-up of (a part of) the rat’s brain down to the neuronal level, with each virtual neuron having all the inter-connections that a biological neuron would have in the brain. This creates a virtual brain with a gazillion such connections the complex firing patterns of which are thought to give rise to intelligence, and perhaps even consciousness.
George Rebane
Walter Cronkite defined the television journalism of my youth. All this after he educated me with the ‘You Are There’ series that was “filled with the events that alter and illuminate our times.” I was maximally impressed by Uncle Walter, he was reliability, goodness, and truth embodied.
And then came the dark days of Vietnam in the late sixties when our six o’clock news was full of the combat reels from the jungles that had been flown across the Pacific in the last 24 hours. We saw the war as it was seen through the sweaty lens of combat cameramen walking through the jungle behind the infantryman when the Vietcong opened up. And again, Walter Cronkite knit the whole picture together for us, and put it into a context that related it to the scenes of rioting on college campuses and debates in Congress.
But then we witnessed the hiccup in the man’s career. He changed from pro-war to anti-war and decided that Vietnam was militarily unwinnable. This altered his reportage, and we began to get a very dower picture of that far-off conflict to stop the communist dominoes. I don’t know how much it affected his day to day reporting, but he definitely hit the nadir of journalism during the infamous Tet Offensive that North Vietnam launched in January of 1968. The countrywide offensive was a military disaster for the communists who were beaten back with overwhelming casualties on all fronts.
Walter Cronkite and the mainstream media didn’t see it that way. They kept listening to Secretary of Defense MacNamara and General Westmoreland giving positive assessments of our gains. These assessments made them believe that the communists could never muster such an attack. And when it came, we, of course, had to be the loser because we also took extraordinary casualties in beating them back. But the big picture was settled in American living rooms with the evening news. Walter Cronkite now pronounced the war unwinnable, and unwinnable it became. Hearing this, President Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”
Cronkite never apologized when the truth of the matter was made clear to him and anyone else who would listen. We were then beyond listening (sorta like being beyond debate on climate change today). I was surprised and dismayed to hear him state numerous times that he was most proud of the effect his editorializing had on our ‘cut and negotiate’ policy that ended the Vietnam War, and caused the death of at least another million Vietnamese in communist re-education camps. He had taken lead of the liberal mainstream media.
George Rebane
[The following piece was submitted to The Union and appears today (here) as my Other Voices column for July.]
Dear Government Employees –
These are difficult times for all, times that now shine a bright and revealing light on things hidden and unmentioned in our communal life. Governments at all levels are broke and broken. And they are not so because we taxpayers have failed to pay our due. Today we know that governments are failing because they have grown too big, bewildering, and expensive.
The major cost of government turns out to be you in your sheer numbers and the compensation packages that you command from us. Overall, you are a coddled and privileged class, buttressed between unscrupulous politicians and your public-be-damned union leaders. You are paid wages that no private employer could afford, and your benefits are a lavish scam that will soon reveal itself – a story of its own for another time.
We know all this because you are being fired and furloughed in unprecedented numbers by jurisdictions that can neither borrow nor print. The feckless feds who still can are increasing your numbers. When forced to balance accounts, our electeds know their budget busters – the salaries and benefit packages that you have quietly installed for yourselves with the help of your unions and spineless politicians.
You and your handlers (whom we also fund) frequently portray your labors as selfless sacrifices to the rest of us. We don’t see it that way. You provide expensive, often unwanted, ‘services’. And even in your most dangerous jobs, you do not match the risks to life and limb that more of us encounter daily in the private sector. (Bureau of Labor Statistics) There is no doubt that we need some of you to be there for us. The military, certain emergency services, and our border guards have an unquestioned role in keeping our country whole.
Proper government should enable and oil the machinery of civil society. Today our governments have gone far beyond that, and have become the gear-grinding gravel that taxpayers must daily overcome. Whether you work in faraway offices or walk armed among us, today most of you are no longer ‘public servants’, but the instruments and apparatchiks of government that corral, control, and coerce us. We fear it will only take one ‘word’ from our political leadership for you to become our immediate masters. This has happened elsewhere, and, sadly, it can happen here.
Most of you and many of us don’t understand the difference between wealth generation and its consumption. It is we in the private sector, paying the assessed taxes and levied fees, who generate the wealth. We do this through our work and investments while risking our own time, treasure, and talents. The dual promise of reward and ever-present risk of failure keeps our productive edges keen.
You also claim to be taxpayers and investors. But it is hard for us to accept that, because every dollar you invest or pay in taxes was first taken from us. And these are our dollars that we cannot spend and invest ourselves. Today’s economic realities have made it clear that most of you are a burden not only to us, but in the larger sense, even to yourselves – you are eating the geese that lay the golden eggs.
In the final analysis things are what they are. And at sunset, we citizen taxpayers have no one to blame but ourselves. For it was we who first elected the politicians who promised to do for us what we should do for ourselves. And then through our public-educated ignorance and indolence, we allowed government to fatten itself while we were too busy building businesses, buying toys, and enjoying circuses.
So now we ask those of you who still can, please join us in the private sector and help recreate the wealth that supports our common quality of life. It is a bit colder and unforgiving out here, but you will soon find that to be a refreshing and invigorating part of life. You will then know that your labors also contribute the wherewithal to fund properly run governments at all levels. The nobility of the self-reliant sustainer of society will be yours.
This has been a difficult letter to write, difficult because so many of you government employees are also our friends and neighbors. But today things are changing as they must, because business as usual is no longer possible. We want you to understand how it looks to those of us who compensate your labors and make your jobs possible. We believe that in the end, we all want a more prosperous and free America.
Your faithful benefactor,
The American Taxpayer
George Rebane is a retired systems scientist and entrepreneur in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).
Weekly update of local fortunes from the American Restribution and Re-election Act of 2009. For all the folks out there holding firm that government is the solution – what’s wrong with this picture?
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those
who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
Thomas Jefferson
George Rebane
The unfunded public pension disaster is picking up speed. Municipalities are beginning to eye how to file Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The public employee unions in California are determined to keep milking the dying cows to the very end by trying to pass a law that (fasten seatbelts) would make it illegal for municipalities to declare bankruptcy without union approval.
A couple of letters to the editor (here) in the 16jul09 WSJ contain a candid view of the unions’ motivations in underestimating the unfunded liabilities that will hit their memberships’ benefits, and a flakey response by the union backed National Association of State Retirement Administrators. The latter live in a la-la land where cities can raise unlimited monies to keep their pension plans funded and current, and where real world concerns about running out of cash are “irrelevant to public pensions because they and their sponsoring entities are going concerns, not subject to takeover or going out of business.” Oh yeah?! watch Vallejo.
Regular RR readers will not be surprised as this tragi-comedy unfolds, but they will be updated and informed as we continue looking at how public employee benefits are negotiated, calculated, managed, and distributed. It will not be a pretty picture, and it’s happening all over the country. So what you read about happening in one far-off jurisdiction, is probably also happening closer to your own wallet.
BTW, all this is in addition to the stuff coming out of Washington. No level of government will be left behind in requiring you to pay your ‘fair share’ of the cost of their mistakes while we were too busy to keep an eye on them.
[update] Here’s little graphic for those who want to see them foreigners walk the walk.
