Rebane's Ruminations

Fetus + 12 inches = Baby

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 May 2013.]

OK, if you’ve been habitually glued to the lamestream media, you probably just recently heard of the murder trial of late term abortionist and now convicted hat trick killer Dr Kermit Gosnell.  According to court testimony Gosnell ran a lucrative back alley abortion clinic right out in the open, visible from the street, and accessible from the sidewalks of Philadelphia.  His dilapidated storefront, cynically named ‘Women’s Medical Society’ with logos of a happily bouncing toddler between mom and dad, had not been inspected by a pro-abortion city health department for more than 15 years.   During this time the sleazy and filthy walk-in was the scene of hundreds, perhaps thousands of murders until some of his employees simply could no longer take it.

Gosnell was convicted for killing three live babies out of the uncounted thousands that actually died at his hands during the many years his death factory was in operation.  Babies, that he or his staff were unable to kill twelve inches before the point at which they exited the womb, were then immediately dispatched after their births.  These live human beings, as witnessed and testified by Gosnell’s workers, were then quickly murdered by jamming scissors into the backs of their necks to cut their spinal chords.  The defense unbelievably argued that the delivered and visibly viable babies were already dead, but it left hanging the question as to why they then had to be killed again.

Now consider that our current pro-choice understanding is that a baby, a universally acknowledged human being, a human who could go on to live a productive and rewarding life, can be just twelve inches and seconds from having been designated a fetus.  And as a fetus, it is legally only a lump of protoplasm liable for summary execution by one of a dozen ways.  Gosnell’s preferred method was an in utero lethal injection that did not always do the job.  But not to worry, the clinic’s ‘medical staff’ was twelve inches and seconds away, ready and waiting with the scissors.

So here’s the logic of the matter – if twelve inches separate a live baby from a formerly live fetus, does that not also mean that twelve inches separate a live fetus from being a live baby, a live human being?  This is what the legalization of late term abortions comes down to in our civilized society.  Twelve inches and seconds between an innocuous clinical procedure and a prosecutable murder.

I apologize for the brevity of this commentary, but there simply isn’t anything more to say beyond reminding you that there are still many more Gosnells out there.

My name is Rebane, and I expand on this and related themes on NCTV and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However these views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Conservatives’ Use of ‘Nanny State’

'The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings ...', L Carroll

George Rebane

Conservatives continue their idiotic practice of characterizing the encroaching leviathan of big government as the ‘nanny state’.  There is nothing nannyish about such a state, it is simply a government on its way to autocracy, in this case a collectivist autocracy.  To characterize such a government as a warm, competent, caring, and loving nanny who always has the best interest of her kiddies in mind is a brutal lie that continues to misinform the already woefully misinformed in the land.  Take a look at the picture of Mary Bloomberg Poppins on the cover of the formerly astute National Review.

A more accurate picture that needs to be conveyed for an increasingly authoritarian government is shown nearby, and even that is still off the mark.  I consider that the use of proper labels is extremely important because labels always invoke a collateral image with all of its semantics in the mind of the reader.  The Left must be smiling from ear-to-ear every time they see the Right lambast the leviathan as a caring nanny.

Illegal, or worse, undocumented immigrant is another equally important label that is misused in the place of the correct ‘illegal alien’.  An undocumented immigrant invokes images of the hordes of poor from Europe lugging their suitcases and boxes tied with rope standing in line at Ellis Island – the perfect picture of ‘the wretched refuse of their teeming shores yearning to breathe free.’  The problem is that these people were on Ellis Island because they followed our immigration laws which made them party to a two-party contract on the way to citizenship.  Illegal aliens violated those same laws, and now seek special dispensation to side step them altogether and remain here under the most favorable terms, terms which are constantly misrepresented by the Left at every turn in the immigration reform debate.

Such is the propaganda of our public discourse – by being the first to mis/name the baby you are halfway home.

CTA on ‘cultural competency’ – a peek into the pus

George Rebane

Our society is covered with plenty of boils and pimples from our attempts to do the ‘right thing’ with all the political correctness we can muster.  A correspondent sent me a piece on the California Teachers Association website in which the union highlights the politically correct sensitivities and behaviors of teachers confronting students who come to their classrooms from different cultures – ‘Are You Culturally Competent?’  It is definitely worth a read for a better understanding of what goes on behind the curtain that ails us.

The American school is one place where a student new to our country should unambiguously learn what are our customs, language norms, behavioral protocols, dress codes, etc in the course of being taught the subject matter for which he is attending class.  There is already precious little time to get the lesson into the little darlings’ heads without detours to account for what may or not be familiar or acceptable to one or another student.  The lesson behind the lesson that the foreign student should learn is that when he’s in American society, then do as Americans do.  His home and relatives, not the classroom, are the place and people to teach, practice, and perpetuate his culture of origin. 

The fundamental lesson to be learned is that we Americans respect your culture to the extent that you learn and practice America’s culture when in our public arena.  We want you to become at one with us, and not the other way around.  Diluting that effort to acculturate foreign students in our schools in order to demonstrate ‘cultural competency’ works to impede, or at least slow down, assimilation.  And this goes doubly for students who come from global cultures which have already self-declared and demonstrated themselves to be inimical to traditional American values and mores.  (As a non-English speaker from Europe, I was among the tens of thousands of foreign kids fortunate enough to have been introduced to America in public schools at a time when such progressive impediments were not in vogue.)

In sum, this is yet another illustration from the catalog of crap that burdens unionized teachers in public education to the ultimate detriment of us all.

US Murder Rate History [Addended] (updated 27apr13)

 

George Rebane

In doing some research for the upcoming Breaking Bread episode on the Second Amendment, I found this clear summary of America’s murder rate.  It is compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center using FBI statistics. These numbers and the trend overwhelm the infrequent episodic mass killings that have occurred over the last years.

Guns account for approximately 75% of the means used to murder people in America according to factcheck.org (I thought it would have been higher).  The rate of guns used for murder has been going down for the last twenty years, while gun ownership has been steadily rising.  In 2007 Americans owned about 89 guns for every 100 people.  And other gun violence numbers also going down are ‘gun aggravated assault’ and ‘gun robberies’ which in 2011 were the lowest since 2004.  All this goes to illustrate and highlight the bogus nature of the recently failed gun control bill in Congress, and the misleading arguments used by the nation's gun control crowd even before the Second Amendment considerations are included.
 

[Addendum]  Apropos to the ongoing gun control debate, the following is a verbatim extract from one of several such emails that are circulating among conservatives, and fueling the polarization of Americans.  I post the email in its entirety to let our liberal readers understand what also fuels the emotions of the Right; emotions that go beyond the more reasoned and measured arguments usually made by conservatives in defense of the Second Amendment, and the private ownership of arms and the concealed carry of guns.  The Brunswick, Georgia mother most certainly could have used one, and should have had one to protect herself and her baby.  The murder is reported by CNN here, and the Crime Library site gives some background here on the alleged killer’s family.

Boston and pan-Islamism – some early ruminations

George Rebane

The end of round one in Boston’s latest experience with pan-Islamic jihad brings to mind several observations before round two gets under way.  My working name for round two is ‘Positioning for political justice’.  But here I’d like to put down some thoughts about two aspects – the larger frame of the Boston bombings, and the mighty law enforcement response visible on Boston’s streets.

In our public square many (most?) of us are still hesitant to connect the dots from such acts of terror to what, hopefully, is finally starting to be labeled a part and parcel of a global pan-Islamic jihad.  Some politically correct and evidence resistant pilgrims in public office continue to view incidents like Maj Hassan’s Ft Hood killing spree as “workplace violence” or some other equally inane appellation.  Others, including members of Congress (e.g. Reps Louie Gohmert, Peter King), are beginning to call for added surveillance of our Islamic organizations to match what has already been going on in keeping an eye on the so-called ‘rightwing extremist organizations’ that now include tea parties and veterans associations.

Many students of history and current events know that Islam is not unified unto itself.  Its 1.3B adherents come from many cultures all over Asia and Africa.  After the prophet’s death, Islam quickly devolved into many sects, each considering the other apostate and launching murderous attacks on the other.  About the only thing they all agreed on was that anyone not accepting their version of the prophet’s message deserved death, and that Islam was to rule the world by the sword and the Quran.  Once Muslims left Mecca and conquered Medina, Islam no longer pretended to be a religion of peace, save in their practice of taqiyya.

‘Breaking Bread’ on NCTV (updated)

George Rebane

Late yesterday afternoon we finished ‘taping’ the first installment of ‘Breaking Bread’ (BB), a new series that is to air over the coming months on NCTV Channel 11.  BB is a roundtable discussion of ideas, happenings, and current issues of broad national interest.  It is based loosely on the historical French salons which were hosted by ladies of high social rank and means during the so-called Enlightenment period that lasted from around 1740 to the start of the French Revolution in 1789.

These salons were stimulating affairs where the latest ideas in the sciences, politics, arts, religion, philosophy, and literature were presented and discussed.  The invitees were the great thinkers, artists, writers – new and established – of the age, many of whom looked forward to these sessions as much for the nourishment of their bodies as of their minds.  A salon always offered some of the finest foods and spirits with which the hostess could afford to ingratiate herself in the eyes of society.  To be invited to attend a salon was a great honor, and you can imagine the competition of who was attending which salon(s) when and with whom.

(Versions of these classic salons were continued and expanded throughout Europe and America during the 19th century.  In the late 1970s Jo Ann and I joined with a number of other couples to establish a 20th century dinner version of the salon that featured a prepared presentation of a thesis, sometimes rebutted by ‘the loyal opposition’, and then dissected by everyone until the early hours.  These dinner salons went on for years and included some very interesting people and topics.)

The most recent inspiration for BB came from our own Reinette Senum and Patricia Smith, local activists and community leaders of known repute.  After some preliminary plenary sessions under the able leadership of NCTV’s Access Coordinator Teri Hicklin, who will also direct the tapings, the program’s format was adopted and the first installments selected.  BB will be a monthly one-hour offering, (co)hosted by one or two regular hosts, and featuring two or three invited guests.  The program will consist of a civil discussion – not a debate – of the subject du jour between the host(s) and the guests.

The inaugural tranche of BB hosts are Patricia Smith (medicinal marijuana activist), Paul Emery (KVMR News Director already known to RR readers), Reinette Senum, Eric Tomb, and yours truly.   As determined by a program’s host(s), one of the other hosts may also fill a guest role on a future program.

BB’s charter is to present definitive ideological viewpoints (ranging from crisp to outrageous?) on the selected issues – equivocation will be eschewed, i.e. no daisy talk – in such a manner that a landscape can emerge from which common ground may be identified, or an understanding of what notions, ideas, values, etc still stand in the way of our coming together.  Of course, there will always be an effort to reach and identify some areas of consensus, no matter how minimal.

Yesterday’s launch was titled ‘Language and Labels’, and was moderated by Eric Tomb, a well-known bookseller, intellectual, and man about town in Nevada County.  The program’s objective was to introduce the BB hosts, outline the show’s format and future, and give a sampling of it through a discussion of how language and labels guide and constrain our perspectives and perceptions.  The airing times of this installment will be announced by NCTV.

The first Breaking Bread with guests will be ‘taped live’ on 1 May next.  The subject will be the Second Amendment, and it will be co-hosted by Paul Emery and me.

[update]  The first episode 'Language and Labels' was broadcast on 7 April 2013, and may be streamed from the NCTV archives from this page under Breaking Bread. 

Marriage by any other name (updated 5apr13)

George Rebane

California’s Prop8 rescinded gay marriage in the state.  The will of the people may now be overturned by the Supreme Court which is hearing the appeal to uphold Prop8 that in the interval was overturned as unconstitutional by lower courts.  In this debate we recall that under California law, gay couples can already register domestic partnerships that provide the same rights and responsibilities as marriage.

So, as a couple of justices observed, it really comes down only to the use of the label ‘marriage’ when describing the association between homosexuals.  Historically all cultures have reserved that label to identify the prime familial relationship between a man and a woman.  Now the issue seems to be for the homosexual community to co-opt that label to also and with ambiguity identify their special relationship.  It is no longer a matter of the rights and privileges that the relationship confers, they already have that.

As another side matter in this decision, the impact of same-sex marriages on children raised in such families is not known as is claimed by the usual activists promoting this new type of marriage.  More here.

My preference is to retain the historical word ‘marriage’ in all languages to refer to the established union between a man and a woman.  We make up new words for new ideas every day.  Why can we not concoct a brand new label for the brand new relationship that the modern age recognizes between people of the same gender?  The benefits to such unambiguous identification in all matters of social administration and intercourse would be enormous.  One simple word would distinguish between the traditional societal norm and the newly imposed norm, and inform all of the exact nature of the so referenced couple.

After all, there is no intention to hide anything here, is there?

[5apr13 update]  In the comment stream below I introduced ‘garriage’ as the working label for gay or same sex marriage in order to facilitate debate and discussion.  Messing with an institution as fundamental as marriage in its expansion to embrace same sex unions has unintended consequences.  Some of these are now coming out in the media, even the lamestream, after chair of the Georgia GOP Sue Everhart raised the benefits that straight people may gain when they game garriage.  (She was instantly denigrated by the usual liberal intellects like Stephen Colbert.)  With each passing day, more and more interesting possibilities open up for non-homosexuals to become garried.  The most recent one I heard today was fathers garrying their sons and grandsons to gain relief from asset transfer taxes that today don’t apply in marriages.

We can all now anticipate the elaborate patchwork of exceptions, codicils, and special provisions that will have to be appended to any law that will insist on calling such gay unions 'marriage' instead of giving them a unique and informative label.  What a curiously deviant world progressive thought provides us in so many areas of human intercourse.

The New Pope and Christianity’s Challenge

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 15 March 2013.]

Cardinal of Argentina and Jesuit, Jorge Bergoglio, was elected Pope last Wednesday, the first from the Western Hemisphere to hold the Holy Office of Catholicism.  He chose to be known as Pope Francis (the First), a name that fits his reputation and humble demeanor.  His major tasks will be to straighten out the Vatican bureaucracy, also known as the Roman Curia, the standing of the Catholic priesthood, and halt the decline of Christianity in Europe and North America.

While the proportion of the world’s Christians has remained fairly constant over the last century, its center of gravity has overwhelmingly shifted from the north to south.  The Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life reports –

“This apparent stability, however, masks a momentous shift. Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a majority of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than it was in 1910 (93%). And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who are Christian has dropped from 95% in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as a whole.”

And even these statistics mask the actual declines in people who regularly attend church or even confess to believing in God.  Protestant Northern Europe has become a Christian wasteland, and in North America secular humanism is making great strides in attracting both young and old away from the faith of their fathers.

Today in America the state is actively and selectively proscribing Christianity and purging its presence from public life.  The ruling progressive mentality is dominant and has prescribed that we be sensitive to all religions in our midst save Christianity.  When the perceived sensibilities of people of other faiths are somehow disrespected, there is an uproar in the media with America’s secular humanists lending their weight to restore those aggrieved.  The only exception is the sound of crickets when a Christian or Christianity is disparaged or mocked.

Today Christians in America are a mobile bunch with over 50% having changed their religious affiliation at least once.  And the churn continues as the overall numbers decline.  To me that reflects an attitude that shopping religions is rapidly becoming the norm because people more and more are dissatisfied with what they learn or don’t learn during their encounter with this or that denomination.

As a Protestant Christian, I have seen that branch of the faith change markedly over my lifetime.  Churches no longer feel that their theology, with its message of salvation and how to live, is sufficient to contain the faithful.  Something different is required today if the pews are to be filled on Sunday.  The overwhelming solution has been to adopt a new ‘contemporary’ style of service that concentrates on entertainment and expunges the wonders of Christian cosmology and theology from its sermons.  ‘Sunday school light’ is the new liturgy in which a progressive ‘liberation theology’ focuses on current social issues during many Protestant and Catholic worship services.

The consequence is that altars have become rock band stages, the sacraments have been silenced, and an all-inclusive Christianity is the order of the day.  The parishioner soon asks himself ‘is that all that there is?’, if so, then let’s go find a place that has a better band, cooler songs, and more skits to entertain us.  If the church seeks first to be a social services club washed of irrelevant theology, then finding the best club is the order of the day.  The Pew Forum describes it as “a very competitive religious marketplace.”  And today that marketplace is more and more filled with Comfort Christians who cannot conceive of contending for what used to be their faith.

On an even bigger scale, respected scientists tell us (here) that the world is rapidly becoming an arena of clashing civilizations, each of which hew to one of the world’s great religious traditions.  It is into that arena that the humble and evangelical Pope Francis now takes the Throne of St Peter as the de facto leader of Christians of all hues.

My name is Rebane, and I expand on this and related themes on georgerebane.com where the linked transcript of this commentary is posted, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However these views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

The Liberal Mind on Choices and Fortune

George Rebane

Capitalism works best when corporations must woo their customers instead of government.

There is something in the liberal mindset that does not understand ‘choice’ when applied to individual responsibility.  In a recent comment stream one such reader stated –

“Do people actually choose to be poor? How many poor people would refuse a million bucks if handed to them by their daddies? Do people choose to die young because they can't afford proper healthcare? Do people choose to be hungry or watch their children starve? Do people choose to be homeless and sleep under a tarp in the snow? Do people choose to be miserable? I think not. "Individual choice" is corporate double speak for the freedom to pollute, sell us products that are unsafe, and use our children as cannon fodder to rid the world of leaders and economic systems not to their liking, all in the name of profit. Don't you get that you are being conned?”

Since the apparent answer to such ‘choose’ questions is NO, then that is sufficient reason to 1) require those not so afflicted be forced to sustain the afflicted, and 2) that there is a mysterious yet substantial connection between the notion of ‘freedom to choose’ and a nefarious catalog of corporate misbehaviors.  Before going further, I want to emphasize that such a belief and its follow-on reasoning is a common thought pattern among our liberal brethren – the above commenter is not flying solo.

Astounding as it may be, it is clear that the liberal does not consider or understand the causal sequence of mediating events/states that is usually involved between a decision to do/be or not, and the resulting state of misfortune.  They see it as a one step process – you either chose to, say, “watch your children starve”, or it was visited upon you by fate.  And since no one would really choose misfortune, it had to be the result of spontaneous and pernicious fate, or worse, the inevitable outfall of capitalism, corporatism, Christianity, greedy enterprise, free markets, and other divers trappings of social injustice.

Ideologies and Governance – a structured look

Only in America could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be labeled as "extremists".

George Rebane

Hereabouts and in more distinguished forums the governance debate continues as to which types belong to the Left or the Right.  The confusion from the Left’s academics seems to be with monarchy and fascism, and that stems from their use of the wrong set of coordinates that can productively frame the discussion.  In the minds of some pundits, the attributes of a given governance type are totally absent.  But when all is said and done, the modern progressives do accept a right/left view that is approximated in the figure below.
Without stopping to quibble about the specifics of what constitutes the ‘center’ or ‘moderate’, the single dimensional spectrum above does have some curious bookends.  The leftmost one ends in ‘communism/totalitarianism’, which state of affairs is reached after passing through a region where anarchism rules.  And the rightmost ends in ‘fascism/monarchy’ after also passing through anarchism.  The better read student here will immediately point out that the Left’s anarchism is not the same as that of the Right’s.  This is indeed correct, and I’ll have more to say about that below.  However, in this fractured view, regardless of each having traversed the swamp of anarchy, both sides terminate in totalitarian forms of governance under the absolute control of a great leader.

A more accurate, useful, and historically exercised representation of ideologies and their supportive types of governance is given in the figure below (click to enlarge).  Here we use a representation common in the system sciences wherein one significant dimension/attribute is isolated as being perpendicular (orthogonal) to a plane that contains all the other dimensions/attributes.

For the discussion of ideologies and their supportive forms of governance, the dominant dimension shown in the figure is the level of government control of the land and the affairs of its people.  This ranges from a 100%, suffered under the absolute rule of a totalitarian dictator, to 0%, wherein anarchy is the order of the day and there are no visible institutions of state.  In the figure the variation in this level of control is shown by the thick red line in the plane (dimension) perpendicular to the field (multiple dimensions) of the types of government control, hence governance.

Understanding this framework immediately clarifies the debate over what labeled ideology belongs where.  I have shown the various collectivistic labels distributed on generalized trajectories of governance as they proceed leftward (orange lines) in the direction of greater government control of wealth creation/distribution, property ownership, class memberships, and behaviors (liberties) permitted to the individual.