Rebane's Ruminations

‘CRT’s Attempt to Reframe Our Country’s Founding’

[Apologies for the belated posting of this third in the series of columns Ms McLaughlin which appeared in the 14jul21 issue of The Union.  The previous two can be found here and here.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has argued that critical race theory is “another right-wing conspiracy theory” that was “totally made up.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said that critical race theory is being “manufactured” by the right. Yet, over the July 4 weekend, the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, announced plans to teach critical race theory in all 50 states and more than 14,000 school districts. The National Education Association believes it is real, and they would be right.

One of the narratives being incorporated into critical race theory curriculum is the 1619 Project originally published in 2019 by The New York Times as stories, poems, and essays about racism and slavery. Twenty Africans, believed to be the first enslaved Africans in British North America, arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619. The 1619 Project suggests that this was the moment of America’s “true founding.”

Written by journalists and opinion writers, not historians, the project attempts to reframe our country’s founding around the concepts of racism and slavery.

Within days of its launch in August 2019, a number of notable historians pointed out numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements in a letter to The New York Times. They included professors Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon Wood of Brown University.

They disputed many of the statements presented as facts in the 1619 Project, not the least of which was an essay promoting the idea that the American Revolution was motivated by a desire to preserve slavery.

Northwestern University History Professor Leslie Harris, an expert on African American life and slavery in the pre-Civil War era, was the first historian to levy criticism who had actually supported the project and participated in it as a fact-checker.

During the publication process, she was presented with the assertion that “one critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

Harris vigorously disputed this claim, explaining that while slavery was an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the colonies went to war. Yet that claim remains in the published account.

According to Harris, colonists had no need to secede to protect slavery, as slavery faced no immediate threat from Great Britain. The opposite was true, Harris argued, as the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American colonies. It led most of the 13 colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. Thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies, and the ideals gaining force during the Revolutionary era also inspired many Northern states to pass laws gradually ending slavery.

These laws did not provide immediate emancipation, nor did they promise racial equality or full citizenship, but Professor Harris asserted that black activism during the Revolutionary War and the following era of emancipation led to the end of slavery much earlier than prescribed within those laws. Slaves often negotiated with their owners to purchase their freedom, or simply ran away in the confused aftermath of the war, and most Northern slave owners granted freedom to their slaves in advance of the time mandated by law.

Despite the many leading scholars who have discredited and criticized the project since its publication as historically inaccurate and ideologically driven, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary architect of the 1619 Project, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay introducing it.

The editorial staff of the New York Post, which had run multiple articles challenging the 1619 Project’s facts and arguments, wrote: “Too bad the Pulitzer committee now thinks that facts are irrelevant to journalism.” Most recently, Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater. (She turned it down in favor of a position at Howard University.)

African-American history and slavery is a critical theme in America’s story, but we can recognize the impact of race without denying the roles of other influences or erasing or denigrating the contributions of early American settlers and our founding fathers, as critical race theory attempts to do.

A dozen Civil War professors and scholars have stated that they are “troubled that these materials are now … the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of The New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights.”

Professor Gordon Wood, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for history for a book on the American Revolution, wrote, “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution. … I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. … We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.”

Despite its demonstrable flaws and distortions, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum approved by the California Department of Education this year draws significantly upon the 1619 Project to validate what The Wall Street Journal calls the curriculum’s “radical indoctrination.”

Ruminations -21jul21 (updated 24jul21)

‘You comply because you want it to end.  But because you comply, it will never end.’  The realworld of dealing with autocracies.

George Rebane

“There’s nothing partisan about seeking the truth.”  Thus spake Nancy Pelosi, one of the all-time duplicitous lying politicians of our times, as she rejected the nomination of GOP Reps Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the Dems’ 6jan21 House investigation committee.  That statement is just the most recent pernicious play on the intellects of leftwing voters across the land.

Minority Leader McCarthy responds to Pelosi by promising to pull all Republicans out of her committee, and launch a parallel GOP investigation of 6 January.  This will show the country how the ‘honorables’ of Congress play the game, kabuki performances all around.  These two will produce diametrically opposite non-partisan truths, and let the people pick which they like the best.  Something for everyone, what’s not to like?

[22jul21 update]  The 25^th Amendment was clearly adopted for the sad condition of President Biden’s mental state as witnessed by his recent townhall performance on CNN. (here) It unbelievable how little he can do in public without his pre-printed notecards.  The fact that there is no discernible effort to remove him means that he is totally in control of his handlers and, therefore, continues to serve a useful purpose, and/or not even Democrats want their idiot VP to ascend to the position.  But then again, in that case Nancy would be a heartbeat away from 1600.

[23jul21 update]  Leftwing educator Mollie Mowat takes Union columnist Terry McLaughlin to task (here) for her recent abundantly researched column on CRT (here).  The woman understands nothing of McLaughlin’s column as she adequately displays generous helpings of her own ignorance and bias.  She illustrates the level of knowledge and scholarship so common in the ranks of unionized public school teachers.  And as expected from a progressive autocrat, she ends her screed with a wistful wish that opposing voices like McLaughlin’s be silenced in our media – “As a former teacher and lifelong educator, I am saddened that she is allowed to continue a frankly ignorant and racist rhetoric.”

[24jul21 update]  Bumblebrain’s exit.  Given his visible daily decline, even some Dems are now beginning to realize that he might not last.  I’m starting a contest for readers to predict the date when our next president gets sworn in.  Submit your entries as a 4-tuple [Earliest date, Latest date, Most likely date, Confidence (0 to 1) that the date will be near Most likely date] or just a 2-tuple [Earliest date, Latest date].  Some of you may recall that these four parameters also define a MAB distribution (here).  The entrant whose MAB has the highest likelihood value at the actual swear in date wins.  As a prize I will send a $1,000 check to the winner’s favorite 501c3 charity.  Entries must be submitted before 1 September 2021, earliest received entry resolves ties.

Sandbox - 19jul21

[If the US was being damaged even a tenth as much as claimed by foreign state-sponsored rogue hackers demanding money, and we did nothing, then we are over as a sovereign nation-state.  Rebane Doctrine calls for 10:1 retribution on the infrastructures of such sponsoring states; none of this crap about ‘balanced’, 'measured', or ‘proportional’ responses that we might take some day when we really get pissed off.  We’re playing with thugs who worship and understand only force – it’s time to up the ante and convince Russia and China that the price of cyberwarfare just went up.  Gjr]

In Appreciation – 14jul21

Sell your stuff at the price of courtesy, for that imposes the heaviest obligation; …courtesy not only pays, but it pledges, and it is gallant manner that imposes the greatest obligation; nothing costs a man of conscience more than something given him, for it is sold him twice, and at a double price, that of its own value, and that of politeness.  Nevertheless it remains true, that to men of mean spirit such noble talk is mere gibberish, for they do not understand the idioms of good style.  Gracian #272

George Rebane

Recently I’ve been doing some review and archiving of the last 14 years of RR’s contents.  And in the perusal of the voluminous comment streams in these pages, I am overcome with gratitude for the content of the almost 200,000 comments from readers of all socio-political persuasions.  Most humbling to me are the long, thoughtful, and citation-supported comments that append to and expand on my commentaries.  Most of these, over the years, have come from a small and faithful cadre of regular commenters.  It is a rare blog where comment contents abet and also vie with the topical posts – RR is so blessed.

I am also grateful for the cadre of readers who trade their ideas with me through emails, giving rise to long and fruitful exchanges, some of which I have been able to post.  And lastly, I have to also thank our readers of the Left.  Some of them take me and RR’s more rightwing readers to task on other blogs, whereon they can swim in more comfortable waters without having to match wits with those whom they criticize or seek to silence.

But the greatest thanks go to those liberals, progressives, et al of today’s woke cadres who now and then have the fortitude to take up their lance and do battle in our comment streams.  It is their welcome attendance that gives spice to the debates and that illustrate most clearly how differently our polarized sides see the same world, and the diametrically opposite directions each side wants to guide our republic.  After all, for a more complete telling, we need from all sides the observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man.

Scattershots – 12jul21 (updated 18jul21)

George Rebane

Power outage on Hind Tit Road.  Unannounced, PG&E decided to turn off power at 1130pm last night, and then back on at 4am.  The transients did their predictable share of problems starting with no internet (the ATT modem did not reset properly) to our well pump controller deciding to shut off.  One required the usual interminable call through ATT’s phone system maze, and the second required a manual ministration at the well house to get our irrigation system back up.  Other electrical/electronic systems required their own pain-in-the-ass resets.  When PG&E deems us worthy of a heads-up before shutting off power, we can then turn off or unplug all the sensitive stuff to avoid the hassles as we turn on the generator and then back to line power.  Ahh, the benefits of living in God’s country.

Cubans are rioting in the streets.  Cuba and Venezuela are the proxy goals of the kind of America that Team Biden and his socialists are promoting here.  “Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is spreading, many medical professionals have fled, and basic needs in hospitals, like reliable running water, are no longer met.”  I recall on these pages our lefties hailing Cuba’s healthcare as model of what nationalization can provide for its people.  Our problem is that no one can connect the dots between all those workers’ paradises and America.  Or worse, most of our electorate doesn’t even know the dots exist.  (more here)

[13jul21 update]  I have limited internet access after the power outage Sunday night.  Will advise when back to normal.  Now it’s time to scour the streets for an ATT truck and get the tech to come to the house.

[14jul21 update]  ‘California Fleeing’ is a well-documented essay by Joel Kotkin, Chapman University fellow and much-published analyst of all things California.  In it he presents oodles of data that overwhelms the head-in-sand denials that our state has a years-long and accelerating out migration problem.  “Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.  Reality reveals a different picture. …”  This piece was discovered and shared by one of RR’s astute readers and regular commenters – many thanks.  I repost here so it gets a more appropriate prominence in these pages.

Biden’s insane speech yesterday set a new record of being totally devoid of and detached from any semblance of reality.  The WSJ observed (here) that “the Democratic narrative on voting is becoming unglued.”  Example: The new Texas voter integrity law is the greatest threat to our republic since the Civil War.  The number of lies and ignorant citations of history in Bumblebrain’s narrative was simply jaw-dropping, and again demonstrated that he is too dumb to be evil, but his handlers are not.  Moreover, what equally astounds is that his handlers and the Democratic leadership are convinced that half the county is so ignorant as to lap up the crap out of Biden’s mouth without a second thought.  And dear reader, the strong possibility of that is the greatest ongoing tragedy in our beloved republic.

The Dems’ latest censorship initiative. This time their particulars are focused on “misinformation about vaccines” with the DNC exhorting to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages” according to Politico.  (more here and here)  The Democrats' national censorship initiatives have now broadened to social media corporatists who deny the posting of data published by government agencies like the CDC and NIH when that does not fit the Democrat narrative.  Marxism on the march.

My internet has mysteriously returned through a modem that ATT diagnosed as being faulty.  Wonder of wonders.

[18jul21 update]  “We’re going to get it done!” shouts Schumer on a video as he escorts Bumblebrain with a vacant stare off camera.  The “it” is passage of a $3.5T vote buying bamboozle advertised by the Dems as the most significant and desperately needed stimulus since FDR’s New Deal.  Out of the other side of their mouths comes praise for a robustly recovering economy that then must be compared to a dysfunctional spending plan during the depth of the Great Depression over 80 years ago, one that also did NOTHING to bring the country’s economy back.  On the eve of WW2, after 8 years of Democrat nostrums, unemployment was still at 25% and the economy was on its ass, waiting for the war to kick industry back into gear.  Now we have a vibrant economy coming back from Covid, peace around the world, tolerable tax rates, …, and Team Biden wants to flush the economy down the toilet just so that the Dems can stay in power, no matter how poorly Americans will fare on Main Street.

Global Tax Bamboozle

Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

George Rebane

Let’s start with an eternal truth, forever hidden from the lightly read and leftwing ‘economists’ – corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do.’  Today SecTreas Yellen is Team Biden’s point on the easy job of convincing the G-7 countries to establish a globally applied minimum tax on corporations that do business across national borders.  A 15% minimum on some line in a company’s income statement is being bandied about.  The EU countries are ecstatic about the prospects of taxing American companies for revenues generated withing their borders.  “The deal represents an intersection of Europeans’ longstanding dream to tax American tech companies and the Biden Administration’s attempt to bamboozle lawmakers into passing a competition-killing corporate-tax hike at home.”

But the whole idea for such a tax is a bad one from start to finish. (more here) Our anti-American Left sees it as a twofer – more revenues to support increased vote buying at home, and subrogating our Congress’ taxing powers to an international bureaucracy will take America another step away from sovereignty and toward a global government.

The bamboozle is particularly pernicious for the nation’s consumers, particularly those who are  both ignorant and poor.  For them the availability of needed goods and services will go down as their prices go up.  And all this is happening as they cheer on their scumbag politicians for delivering another tranche of social justice in making the corporations pay their fair share of taxes.  It’s actually a double tax on the corporations’ customers who then will have to pay higher prices and correspondingly higher sales taxes.

The international tax agreement, in whatever form it takes, will have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.  And what winds up getting through will be gamed to a fare-thee-well by the big corporatists.  You can bet the farm that their margins and, therefore, share prices will not be impacted.  What our socialists don’t understand is exactly how the corporations will game whatever new corporate tax policy is imposed here and abroad.  (Readers recall a fundamental Rebane Doctrine tenet - The bad part of capitalism is that they will always game the system, the good part of capitalism is that they will always game the system.  A corollary of this is that the corporatists have already gamed whatever change is planned for the system.)

Bottom line, don’t let any of this impact decisions on the disposition of equities in your portfolio.

Sandbox – 10jul21

[With daddy’s help Hunter Biden has figured out how to collect on all of his international graft accounts – the sumbich has suddenly become a world renown artiste, ‘selling’ his paintings for up to $500K apiece.  Daddy and his DoJ are making sure that the art connoisseurs don’t get fingered as their money gets laundered.  It will be interesting to see if/how these ‘Paid in Full’ receipts are displayed.  So, no matter how they are run, elections do have consequences.  Or as Josif Vissarionovich observed, ‘It matters not for whom the votes are cast, only who counts them.’  gjr]

The Great Divide – an updated review (updated 20jul21)

George Rebane

This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’.  The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’.  I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country.  And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine.  I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.

The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen.  Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border.  Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”

Equity Denies Reality (Addended)

George Rebane

[This piece was rejected by The Union as unfit for their readers.  I must admit that I was surprised at that response, and the reasons given by publisher Don Rogers.  I will have more to say later about my new understanding of the newspaper’s ideological coloring and journalistic demeanor.  The following is an addended version of what was submitted.]

Our public policies, including those now seeking equity, have denied reality for decades, so argues nationally prominent, quantitative sociologist and political scientist Charles Murray in Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021).  In his latest scholarly researched and richly referenced book, Dr Murray brings to light data that government collected and our media muffled on the intellectual metrics that characterize race in America.  As with his past dissertations (e.g. Bell Curve, Coming Apart), his politically and profusely incorrect Facing Reality is destined for the same opprobrium from progressives that graced his previous volumes.  However, his presentation of information and socially impactive conclusions are supported by databases assembled over the decades by our Dept of Education, FBI, and various accredited testing services.

What motivated Murray to produce this illuminating work is today’s broadly held contention that America’s fundamental creed is in peril.  The creed is from our Declaration of Independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”  And the danger to our way of life comes from a total misapprehension of how our multi-racial culture is viewed through the perspectives of cognitive capability and criminality, and how this gives rise to today’s misguided, and even insane public policies through which government misinforms, mis-enables, and misdirects Americans as we seek our places in the sun.

The long-taught but erroneous common wisdom is that cognitive capabilities are equally distributed across races.  Using census data Murray presents his analysis of our four main racial groups and percentages making up our 330M population.  Murray labels these European (60%), Latin (17.9%), African (12.8%), Asian (5.7%), Other (3.6%).  Volumes of data over the years demonstrate that in the aggregate these groups have measurably different distributions of closely correlating scores in IQ, SAT, ACT, and other skill-based tests which have been meticulously controlled to eliminate the usual sources of non-racial bias.  To illustrate this broad-based reality, Murray presents the proxy IQ distributions which are annotated in the nearby figure.

The racial distributions are the familiar ‘bell curves’, the size (area under the curve) of each being proportional to its population.  As usual, the data has been adjusted (normed) so that the country’s overall average IQ = 100, with a 15-point standard deviation.  The average IQs for each racial group are indicated in the figure.  At this point we remind ourselves that such basic measures of cognitive ability are embedded characteristics of people and not subject to rapid change through education and/or training.  The importance of such measures are that they reliably predict aggregate abilities to acquire and apply different levels of skill sets.

Scattershots – 4jul21 (updated 9jul21)

George Rebane

There are no more paladins living among us.  When some public atrocity is being committed, like someone or two having the crap kicked out of them on a sidewalk, or a Molotov cocktail thrown through a store window, or a brutal execution of someone sitting in a car, then all the gathered onlookers are concerned about is that they get a good video of the goings on, no matter how long the goings on are ongoing.  Concern for the immediate wellbeing of our fellow man, no matter how unjustly he is being treated, is no longer of any concern to anyone.  Where are the CCWs when we need them?  After all, they are issued specifically for use in case of incipient murder or mayhem.  But we can rejoice, the videos ultimately appear on various social media channels.  (Example @208pm on the last Sandbox)

[5jul21 update]  The XL Pipeline people are suing our federal government for $15B damages.  It is a proper suit since the Biden administration, in launching one of its earliest disasters for the country, abrogated its contract with the builder after it had most of the pipeline completed.  Bumblebrain’s compliance to his rabid anti-American Left terminated the country's energy independence, put the world’s oil prices back in the hands of OPEC et al, and resulted in the spiking of gasoline prices across the land as a major contributor to the resurgence of inflation.  The latter being a hit to the wallets of all Americans, hurting most the poor and the middle class.  The Dems only hope for 2022 is that most of our electorate will remain sufficiently numb between the ears so that they cannot ferret out the source of their pain.

The dismantling of Hong Kong by the CCP remains an unreported mystery to the global news machinery.  No one has yet to report that it is in Beijing’s interest to destroy HK as a leading global financial center in the shadow of which Shanghai, mainland’s own financial center, has been forced to compete.  HK has been the port of call for international monies seeking investments in the mainland, Taiwan, and all of south Asia.  This felicitous situation has buttressed Taiwan and highlighted the business efficiencies practiced in an economically free environment with that practiced under strict CCP control.  To Beijing, and its compliant allies in Singapore, HK has been an irritating sore that needed to be excised.  Today things are getting so bad that major US tech companies are threatening to leave the city to save their staffs from trumped-up criminal charges (more here).  But no one is connecting the dots on HK’s ultimate fate as becoming just another seaport to serve China’s southern Guangdong province and its industrial capital Guangzhou.

Our Sacramento stupidos have suddenly realized that the state’s ongoing rape of its power generating infrastructure will leave us short of electricity as we proceed into a hot summer.  The Epoch Times reports (here) the CA Energy Commission and its PUC have asked the CA Independent System Operator to contract for more energy in the coming months.  There is no guarantee that such energy supplies will be available from other states similarly afflicted.  In their letter they lied that the need arises in spite of “California using all available tools to increase electricity reliability this summer,”  In reality, they abandoned the available and reliable tools of safe nuclear and clean natural gas power plants for a poorly conceived, inadequate, and premature green energy strategy that will guarantee power shortfalls in California for years to come.  Our state’s political monopoly has literally shit in the old well before the new one was dug (from an old Estonian proverb).  In sum, the politically incorrect but reliable Plan A has been abandoned, and there is no Plan B.  (H/T to reader)

[8jul21 update] Worthless Degrees.  Here’s a common story from the 8jul21 WSJ.  “Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.  Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.  The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data.”  For the arithmetically curious $30K/yr = $15/hr – the intended national minimum wage.  In Nevada County today an apprentice electrician with no experience and without even a high school diploma can get a job for $15-18/hr.

Classroom video monitoring.  The teachers’ unions are dead set against any video recordings of classroom instruction and goings on.  They claim it violates the students’ rights to privacy.  There is no such right to privacy for students in a public school classroom.  For generations parents and other interested parties have always been welcome observers in America’s classrooms.  With today’s technology it would be an easy matter to put streaming/stored classroom videos online so that parents could log in to see what little Johnny/Sally was being taught and assigned as homework.  My wife Jo Ann was a regular fixture in our kids’ grade school classrooms.  But not today, and the reason is clear.  The crap that marginally competent teachers put out under today’s closely guarded cloud of pedagogy would at a minimum disappoint and, most likely, enrage parents.  And this is doubly so as Critical Race Theory has started tainting all manner of K-12 subjects in our unionized public schools.

[9jul21 update]  ‘CDC Recommends Schools Open Fully Immediately, Says Vaccinated Teachers And Students Don’t Need Masks’  This has been true for over six months.  It is the work of the evil party and Team Biden that has prevented our children from resuming their education, and school attendance which never needed to be interrupted last year.  All this has accomplished is to make more reliable Democrat voters, which, of course, was the purpose of the school shutdowns in the first place.

Happy Independence Day 2021!

George Rebane

And the message from last year (here) bears repeating.

Sandbox – 2jul21

[The Chinese Communist Party is celebrating 100 years of perfecting the ‘Communist Man’ on mainland China.  Without even a close second, the CCP is the world’s most horrendous leading killer of its own citizens during peacetime.  Experts who do such body counts place the number of Chinese who have fallen under the hand of Mao Zedong alone at somewhere between 100M and 200M, and they are not yet done.  My conversations over the years with a number of native Chinese colleagues place the minimum killed at 120M.  It is important to know that these deaths took place over multi-year spans (e.g. during their Cultural Revolution) under the direction and with the full knowledge of the CCP leadership.  Communism, when a dominant form of governance and especially its Chinese version, is responsible for more purposed human death and misery than any other practiced form of such holocausts.  Stalin with a body count of 30M, Hitler’s 6M, Pol Pot’s 2M, and Vietnam’s 2M are pikers compared to what the CCP has been able to accomplish on their road to hone their draconian version of socialism.  None of this history is available to the devoted consumers of our lamestream media.  The attempt to make an omelet continues to be a grizzly business that, nevertheless, looks more and more attractive to our own socialists in their planned efforts to purge the country of ‘racists’, capitalists, and ‘white supremacists’. gjr]

The Ubiquity of Bias

George Rebane

I am a biased ideologue (q.v.).  My biases, along with their reasoned bases, have been spelled out in detail on these pages for well over a decade.  No other blog I’m aware of has so meticulously presented its host’s credo and glossary of vocabulary relevant to the topics covered.

Having again made that statement, I go on to the more universal contention that there are no unbiased presentations of facts or fiction by Man, especially when it comes to matters of human affairs.  We all have a specific world view, a specific way we receive and incorporate new evidence into that world view, a unique set of desiderata for almost all aspects of human striving, and, of course, our own way of communicating and convincing others of the correctness of our particular perspectives.

People who claim to be innocent or cleansed of bias, and therefore present views which they claim are in some sense ‘ex cathedra’, are charlatans, deluded, or both.  This assessment applies especially to those self-proclaimed middle-roaders who profess to clothe their preferences in various forms of authoritative infallibility.  Even in science and every other STEM field we find biased presentations and ongoing debates as to where resides truth, goodness, and light.  The most visible charlatans here are those who seek to buttress their biases with claims of non-existent ‘settled science’.

From this, I and others like me conclude that bias in human affairs is ubiquitous – it was ever thus.

Therefore, the best that disputants in a debate can do is present their case in the context of their respective utilities (definitions of ‘good’), and the reasoned bases which support their propositions.  Wise debaters know beforehand that even with the best intentions and transparent interchanges, all disputes cannot be successfully resolved.  In the art of negotiation, participants are advised to approach all such contentious proceedings with a firm handle on their own BATNAs (best alternative to negotiated agreement).

In our country’s gathering socio-political storm, ongoing debates, accusations, and indictments between the polarized sides are seen at all levels, from the national to the thousands of towns and villages across the land.  As detailed on these pages, the manner in which these contentions are conducted is highly asymmetrical – the Right always willing to spell out the America they want, with the Left keeping secret the details of their vision of a fundamentally transformed country.

From the Left’s published proposals and ensconced public policies, the Right cannot help but conclude that their desire is for a socialist (anti-capitalist) state under a much enlarged and intrusive government that controls almost every aspect of Americans’ lives, livelihoods, thoughts, and speech.  And the Left’s leadership continues to broadcast its vision of those on the Right as being racist, white supremacists who desire to return the country to Jim Crow days with an economy dominated by large oligopolies that pollute the environment and beggar their workers.  They present no evidence beyond repeated allegations to support their case.

[Addendum]  In discussions and debates with my leftwing counterparts in private communications and on this public forum, I often have my supportive citations of verifiable facts rejected on the basis of their having been presented by sources considered hopelessly biased, unreliable, and therefore rejected on their face.  Their opposition is seldom a substantive refutation of the message, it’s always based on the received credentials of the messenger.  The obvious reason for this gambit is that they have no substantive refutation of what has been cited, and therefore must needs be reduced to denigrating the source with claims that all of its output are widely known and acknowledged falsehoods – neither being the case.

A second gambit of the leftists is to require the rejected citation to be additionally buttressed by sources they consider unbiased and reliable.  It never occurs to them to simply go to their own sources and delineate the specific error(s) that were contained in the originally presented citation.  That may also be a too generous conclusion.  The reason they exercise either of these gambits is that they know the original citation to have presented the truth, and all that now remains for them is to deny, delay, and/or deflect the subsequent course of the exchange.  For the Left, countering citations with an equivalent depth of evidence seems to be terra incognita.

‘Parents wary of critical race theory’

[This is the second in a three-part series of articles on CRT by Ms McLaughlin.  The first was posted here on 16 June 2021.  This column appeared here in the 1jul21 edition of The Union.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

California residents may be familiar with euphemisms for critical race theory, such as “ethnic studies,” “educational equity” and “culturally responsive teaching,” but may not understand the philosophical premise, which is to divide all people into oppressors and oppressed.

My last column sought to describe examples of critical race theory curriculum our children may be exposed to, but parents who are speaking up all around the country tell the more authoritative story from their firsthand experience.

‘For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes …’

[I was gratified to receive this book report from a dear and very astute friend who now lives in Florida.  For years he was a prominent developer and successful businessman in Nevada County.  A Stanford engineering graduate, he too joined the California exodus as our monopolist one-party socialist revolution became too much to bear.  By permission his email is posted here with minor edits for clarity.  gjr]

Tony Medler

Just finished For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization (1993, 1999), and still believe it should be required reading for politicians and students.  A couple of observations:

It is so obvious that so many empires, countries and civilizations encountered the same issues caused by the conflicts between monetary “needs” and resources. Almost all gave way to excesses that resulted in loss of vigor or rebellion. Our country is well down the road, losing competitiveness and leading to, I believe, eventual rebellion.

Charles Adams writes a wonderful history of taxation and the mechanisms that cause it promote energy within a system or create adversity toward business and prosperity. He is somewhat weak on how to correct or preclude the problems. History indicates that it is extremely difficult to fix the problem. Obvious solutions usually involve separation of spending control from taxing power.

I believe that there is a root cause that precludes any of these attempts at control. Our founders were aware of the problem and envisioned a legislature that was composed of citizens who would serve, not be subject to rules except those applicable to everyone, serve for limited periods, and then return to the general citizenry. We have evolved from that concept to having professional politicians who forget that it isn’t “we and they” but rather us. You can’t have equitable and fair taxation and spending unless the electoral system delivers properly motivated persons, and I think most would agree that our (accurate) view currently of politicians places them either slightly above or below lawyers as entities that are somehow needed but not admired.

How different could it be if we had a system where our legislators had in mind only the national good and not special interests, and worked only to provide those services most narrowly defined in the Constitution? A less inclusive set of services would also reduce the size of the self-serving bureaucracies. Place limitations on terms and preclude multiple services such as going from mayor to senator to president.

Somehow, we must get motivated, educated people to serve. Probably wouldn’t hurt to try to attract more business people into service. Most current politicians have little or no business experience and can’t properly relate to business issues. This hurts all of us.

Not optimistic that anything will change as we are well down what has previously proven to be a one-way road.  Thanks for suggesting the read.

Open Letter to our Government Employee Neighbors

George Rebane

This piece appeared (here) in 18jul09 Union when I was a regular columnist for the newspaper.  It was written in response to the dawn of the Obama age which already gave ample portent to the hard times ahead as he began stifling the normal rebound from the recession that was already starting to show promise.  Obama’s eight years confirmed my apprehensions and delivered a historically lowest growth recovery with higher taxes, huge regulatory overload, bigger government, and a humongous growth in national debt.  The advent of Team Biden and the Democrats control of Congress has already demonstrated that we are now due for even more punishment than before as our economy struggles to recover from the government-induced Covid recession.  It is time to reprise this slightly edited, open letter to the growing ranks of today's 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. For what you do, you are paid wages that few private employers 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, law enforcement, certain emergency services, and our border guards have an unquestioned role in keeping our country whole.

America the Unnatural

George Rebane

[This essay kicks off Independence Day week at Casa Rebane.  Jo Ann and I installed our annual display of bunting and a large Old Glory on our porch railing, which always brings good words from our neighbors.  Perhaps you too would consider giving more than a nod to a tradition that has bound us over the centuries.]

America is an exceptional country and an historical social experiment in more ways than I can count.  It is also an ongoing test of how humans can live and profit by behaving unnaturally toward each other.  That is by becoming sanguine in the practice of unnatural behaviors which go against the millions of years of evolution through which our progenitors and species survived.

Anthropologists and paleo-sociologists have long known and written about how primitive societies formed, fought, and sometimes flourished.  The pervasive watchword among all critters, including hominids, has been ‘Stick to your own kind’ (as even Maria was advised in ‘West Side Story’).  The fundamental behavior that supported survival and progeny was to be with and trust only those whose behavior you could reliably predict.  To this day, we distance ourselves (including denying their access to us) from people in our midst whose behavior we cannot predict.  This is the very natural ‘hardwired instinct’ with which all critters of some intelligence that includes are born.  Even infants begin expressing it at a very early age.

Scattershots – 25jun21 (updated 29jun21)

George Rebane

Biden on gun control smirked at the notion of guns in civilian hands being effective against a tyrannical government.  He cited that any such insurrection against our federales will require disgruntled citizens to have at least “F15s and a few nuclear warheads” to be successful.  This is the common hypocritical response of the Left that feared the unarmed 6jan21 Capitol mob as insurrectionists, and then continues to fear a population legally armed with politically-identified “assault rifles”, guns very seldom used by criminals to perpetrate ‘gun violence’.  The Left knows and has always known better than anyone else of what an armed citizenry is capable.  Bumblebrain now demonstrates daily that he the nation's ‘compleat idiot’ when it comes to governance, history, and human nature.

Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ is still an attractive nothing-burger for far too many light thinkers.  Mr Ryan Smalley writes (here) in the 25jun21 Union about the “true silent majority” that would be able to ‘just get along’ were they given a chance through a centrist third party on our political scene.  Unfortunately, he does not understand the nature of our polarization which involves diametrically opposite futures for America (see ‘Toward Unification’), and believes, that magically, the center will spontaneously coalesce to a collection of commonly supported public policies that its elected politicians will be able legislate, and we will all live happily ever after.  These policies will have the magical quality in that they will come into being without any notion of a commonly held or resolved view of America’s tomorrow.  As I’ve pointed out ad nauseam, our country is full of such Rodney King disciples who are incapable of understanding the problem and making progress toward a solution.

Juneteenth was sensibly opposed by 14 House Republicans.  All of them, including our Doug LaMalfa (here), explained their reasons to their constituents.  In a 25jun21 letter to The Union, a history-deprived and poorly-read Dean Olson could not fathom why anyone would oppose Juneteenth as a federal holiday.  Reps LaMalfa and McClintock published their most reasonable reasons for their oppositions, which were, of course, both ignored and/or misunderstood by our more progressive neighbors.  In its comment stream RR reader Gregory attempted to set them straight.  My own views are memorialized in ‘The Joys of Juneteenth’.

SBC job opportunity heads up.  The unfortunately misnamed Sierra Business Council is looking for some equally unfortunate individual who is required to have at least a high school education and “min 1-2  years” experience having done a long list of analytical tasks in the energy audit and consulting field.  And s/he will do all this for the princely sum of $20-24/hr as a “Planning Technician”.  This is less money that most property owners pay for an illegal alien doing weed eating on their property in preparation for fire season.  Nevertheless, as a RR public service, interested parties can get more information here and here.

[26jun21 update]  Here is that lying SOS Bumblebrain announcing agreement on an infrastructure bill that later he immediately made conditional on the passage of the most horrendous economy destroying tax increases in American history.  Have no idea what passes for thinking in that wrinkled melon on his shoulders.  This latest Big Lie is a sure fire reason for Republicans to walk away from the whole thing. (H/T to reader.)

[Later]  Bumblebrain has no idea what he says into a mic.  Apparently his handlers got tangled up with his first message.  Now he’s making “perfectly clear” again, this time that he will not hold infrastructure hostage to the humongous $4T vote buying bill of goodies that the Dems want to also pass.  But it ain't over yet - the adventures with an addled president.

A rehab that worked.  (The following from a correspondent.) 

After 6 burglaries, 3 car thefts, multiple illegal trespasses, an ongoing cocaine and alcohol addiction, committing 2 violent home invasions, 3 armed robberies, dealing Fentanyl and Meth, passing counterfeit money, beating 4 victims senseless and being arrested 23 times since 1998, George Floyd hasn't committed a crime in over one year now!

BUT.....IT DID NET HIS FAMILY $27 MILLION FROM THE STATE AND $20 MILLION FROM A GO FUND ME ACCOUNT.

We are one sick country to fall for this scam! Not to mention that our demented President and his VP met with the Floyd family on May 25th, the one year anniversary of his death and Nancy Pelosi, in June, 2020, gave the Floyd family a folded American Flag that had flown over the Capitol on the day he died, as though he were a fallen hero!  How SICK is that?

[27jun21 update]  The Defense Departments UFO report is essentially a cover-up nothing burger.  They told the country that they didn’t know what was happening and what is behind all the sightings recorded by the military from their ships and aircraft.  That kind of ignorance from our mainline national security institution is pretty scary in and of itself.  So now we’re supposed to remain sanguine about UFOs buzzing our aircraft and ships, and demonstrating kinematics and operational domains unknown to us mere terrestrials.  Given the information so far, my assessed probabilities are P(extra-terrestrial) = 0.8, P(terrestrial) = 0.2.  ETs have had billions of years to populate our galaxy and/or send info gathering drones anywhere they want.  (My take on SETI is here, here, and here.)

[29jun21 update]  The Democrats, all of whom are guilty of fomenting the nation’s crime wave with countable marginal deaths that can be laid directly on their feet, have now run out of all excuses for their horrible values and social ideology.  Their last gasp is to apply Saul Alinsky on steroids and blame the whole thing on the Republicans.  And you know what?  Their constituents are sufficiently dense between the ears so that a goodly share of them will actually believe the bull crap now being trumpeted through the lamestream.  Maybe some will even come here to exhibit their gray matter.  ‘A nation ignorant and free …’