Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 19nov18

[Apologies for letting the last sandbox get overfilled.  I guess time flies while you're having fun ;-)  Please continue adding to the recent topics on the fires, etc as appropriate. gjr]

Monday with The Union

George Rebane

Jo Ann and I very much enjoy reading The Union – our town’s newspaper.  (This pleasure preceded her joining the paper’s editorial board.)  I am particularly entertained by George Boardman’s columns, and the regularly occasioned other voices from locals with academic credentials like Dr Milan Vodicka.  Dr Vodicka is a longtime Nevada County resident and a naturalized citizen immigrant like me.  We have met him before in these pages - e.g. here, where I noted that “the good Dr Vodicka is an ‘Independent Education Management Professional’ with an academic pedigree from the California Institute of Integral Studies that prides itself with academic departments such as ‘Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion’, ‘Integral and Transpersonal Psychology’, and ‘Drama Therapy’.”

In today’s (19nov18) Union, Dr Vodicka illustrates his academic prowess to readers by misunderstanding the difference between the communist controlled economy of his native Czechoslovakia and the US economy we are now enjoying.  There he likens the centrally planned economy of his youth, that based all progress on the tons of steel produced while totally ignoring the people’s needs for consumer goods, with that of America’s which is based on defining our economic boom in terms of providing the wherewithal for record consumer consumption.  He considers both to be short-sighted ‘single attribute’ measures that fall equally short of other attributes that should be the proper measure of an economy.

His measure of an economy (seatbelts please) must center on how well it concerns itself with ecological and environmental affairs, instead of crass indicators like consumer satisfaction, financial growth, and a nation’s quality of life.  In Vodicka’s perspective – “Measuring the ‘boomness’ of the economic performance just by money is like wandering in the world being blind.”

The focus of this liberal academic’s (may I use that label?) environmental interest is, of course, scientifically indisputable ‘climate change’, aka preventable manmade global warming.  There he lectures us on the characteristics of “scientific fact” – “1. measurability, 2. verifiability, and 3. repeatability” - without noticing that the propositions which support ‘climate change’ can lay claim to none of these. (more here)

A correspondent sent me one of the countless debunkings of public policies put in place to limit human emissions of that dreaded CO2.  This was recently put out by Prof Rutherford Plimer, much published geologist and professor emeritus of earth sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and Adelaide.  Plimer points out again what the lamestream bends over backwards to hide facts about the natural emissions of CO2 by the ongoing eruptions of earth’s over 200 active volcanoes.  For example, just four days of the recent Icelandic eruptions “negated every single effort” all humans have made over the past five years to reduce CO2 emissions on our planet.  More convincing to discerning minds is the fact that Mt Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption, that lasted for about a year, “spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.”

Dr Vodicka apparently knows nothing of such ongoing natural processes that overwhelm human intents and activities, and he most certainly does not have the academic credentials to understand or dispute such obvious realities, which should at least invite some open-minded skepticism about our current politically faith-based writhings to combat global warming.

Turning now to our favorite local liberal commentator and RR commenter George Boardman, we learn from his column (here) that he has missed the news of the Central American migrants’ arrival at the border in Tijuana.  And it also seems that he’s unaware of the bus and truck transportation that is now available to the thousands whom he characterizes as being “weeks from the border”.  Again, it’s best not to know stuff that will upset the Left’s carefully crafted and continuously fed narrative.

California Wildfires – Some Reflections

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  Isaac Asimov

George Rebane

The combined body count of the Camp and Woolsey Canyon fires has topped 100 with an additional 1,000 missing.  Perusing the lamestream media without second thought, one comes away with the understanding that, at best, the fires are one of the regular unpreventable disasters that regularly visit California’s wild lands due to natural causes out of our control.  At worst, we learn that the fires are really due to global warming which now has created the conditions for these inevitable holocausts.  Moreover, they could be prevented were we only to implement the prescribed surefire policies to stop, or even roll back, global warming.

As a lifelong (60+ years) California resident and a student of its land, weather, and horticulture, I join with those who have a radically different view of the state’s regular wildfires and public policies that can greatly reduce their frequency, magnitude, and cost to life and property.

The state’s weather record shows two centuries of periodic droughts which have dried the forests, given rise to infestations by various critters, and to wildfires mostly caused by lightning strikes.  The fall ‘Santa Ana’ winds have always done their best to spread the fires, but with limited success until modern times.  Why?  Over the ages our forests evolved not only to survive fires, but actually require their regular occurrence to continue their life cycles.  The major characteristics of the age-old forests was the irregular density of trees (into copses) that prevented long distance/perimeter burns and which densities were maintained by the burns that did occur.  A little technical reflection quickly explains why such configurations became the survivable ‘steady state’ configuration of the forests.  (A more detailed look at the changes in the Sierra forests is documented by George E. Gruell in the rather pricey Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.)

Then arrived the hubristic Regulatus Californicus who knew better than the established natural order.  Starting in the 1960s and building on Smokey the Bear (born in 1944), this rapidly evolving breed of humanity quickly latched on to ‘saving the ecology’ as their raison d’etre for launching an unheard level of regulatory controls over peoples lives and property, enforced by an ever-enlarging Leviathan in Sacramento.  In the 1970s they discovered catastrophic climate change to add to their causus belli on the rest of us Californians.  They initially took the wrong tack and argued ‘global cooling’ with the advent of a new ice age, caused by CO2 and other atmospheric gases linked to humans that were supposed to be reflecting too much sunlight.

But even with the state’s growing dumbth, it was hard to harness cooling as an adequate basis for enlarging the regulatory state.  So it was time to reverse the role of these gases from reflecting sunlight to retaining earth’s build-up of heat, and the great greenhouse gas gambit was born with CO2 now starring in its new role.  Some scientists quickly pointed out that we knew very little about earth’s carbon cycle and even less about long-term climate modeling, and most certainly not enough to reliably calculate (aka blame) any temperature changes on CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.  These scientists were quickly shouted down, and their grant monies to study the carbon cycle dried up.  And that has been their fate as the UN’s IPCC gathered the willing technocrats under its well-funded umbrella and became the voice of preventable man-made global warming.

The ‘true believers’ aka fanatical ecological nutcases, or simply econuts, now had a real arrow in their quiver – consensus science interpreted through selective faith-based lenses.  And they have been off to the races ever since 1995 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report – an evolving set of documents that now have had to be redacted, rewritten, revised, and re-issued many times over the years so as to keep the desired narrative in line with the vagaries of uncooperative weather patterns.

In the interval, the nation’s politically imperious progressive wave continued to grow as reflected in the staffs of federal regulatory agencies and, more importantly, in all elements of California governments ranging from Sacramento down to local leftwing NGOs funded to propagandize, monitor, and report on the state’s progress toward becoming 'green'.  And that, of course, included prohibiting any intervention, save heroic fire prevention and suppression efforts, in fostering the growth of high-density forests complete with huge ground level accumulations of duff and slash (“organic waste”).  All this has been done in the name of preserving the econuts’ vision of the natural order of fauna and flora on government lands, while in reality doing exactly the opposite as they created a wholesale unnatural order of wildland preservation never before seen on this earth.

And the bittersweet comedy continues unabated, as our progressive elites, in California and elsewhere, continue to blame the current spate of wildfires on climate change, even as they begin to evince micro-epiphanies, albeit sub-rosa, about the reality that decades of unnatural forest fuels build-ups is actually the dominant contributive cause of the devastations we have witnessed in recent years.  However, these leftwing central planners have yet to develop a public-ready narrative to effectively deflect the raw truth so that Californians – econuts and their voting legions of double dummy compliant constituents – can discover the cause of these holocausts by simply looking into a mirror.

(The Rebanes' up-close and personal experience with California wildfires was reported here, here, and here.)

Scattershots – 15nov18 (updated 17nov18)

George Rebane

A leftwing Union columnist most recently summarized the huge ideological chasm between the two polarized camps of Americans (see 15nov18 letters).  Writing in response to the Kavanaugh confirmation, the writer unabashedly blurted out a core progressive tenet that was in full display at the congressional hearings – “It is just as bad to assume innocence as it is to assume guilt.”  This violates the very basis of western jurisprudence, and has long been the norm for dictators as they attempt a forged judicial system under their rule.  Nowhere in recent memory have I seen such a stark reminder of how different we are, and how different will be our society were the Left to gain absolute control.

Defense spending and a strong American military has never been in the Left’s desiderata for all the obvious reasons.  Our military has suffered mightily under leftwing administrations, most recently under President Obama.  Today the Democrats continue their anti-military chorus, while they continue to entice their gimme constituencies with promises of more and mightier entitlements, most recently led by their efforts to implant a comprehensive socialized healthcare (“single payer”) program that has yet to demonstrate its sustainability in any land it has been implemented.  Their intended source of insufficient funds for such welfare projects is from our defense budget.  However, our military today has been so weakened that the non-partisan United States Institute for Peace has issued a landmark report ‘Providing for the Common Defense’ (download it here), which goes chapter and verse into the details of what we have let lapse along with the effects it has and will have on world order.  This state of affairs is an ongoing legacy of the Left, a gift that keeps taking.

[16nov18 update]  And then these little tidbits caught my eye this morning.

Khasshoggi’s killers to get the death penalty – well, not all of them, just the poor snuffies tasked to do the dirty work.  Imagine being a highly trained field agent for your country ordered to do a delicate little assassination of some ‘enemy of the state’ in a foreign land.  You go do the job that’s then discovered through no fault of yours, and you get tried and executed while the big kahuna(s) are untouched.  How will that affect your fellow agents as they contemplate their next mission to do the state’s dirty work?  (Work that into the definition of ‘patriotism’.)  But as ever, rank hath its privileges – some people just rank too high to fail, especially those whose enemy is our enemy, and who buy billions of dollars’ worth of guns and grenades from us.

“Hire sight unseen” is the MO of employers seeking to fill critical jobs in sales and STEM.  In this hot economy, the competition for even tentatively qualified labor is so high that all you need is to submit your creatively wordsmithed resume and pass a 25-minute phone interview (some with a robo-interviewer), and your offer letter appears in your inbox. (more here)  Of course, I assume that if you really bomb on your first day on the job, you’ll be let go equally fast.  I began my career as an aerospace draftsman in exactly the same way.  My phone interview with a job shop lasted less than five minutes during which I was told the address and contact person of my new employer.  Those draftsmen who didn’t make it were out on the street after the morning coffee break.

Woke progressives continue to mangle the language.  The latest casualty to politically correct newspeak is the use of ‘body’.  Humans, people, and persons are now reduced to bodies – e.g. “Bodies that migrate across borders undergo tremendous change.” in the NYT.  The use of ‘body’ joins many other words whose meaning has been folded in with a lot of other meanings, making for ever more murkier communications.  Matthew Hennessey’s piece ‘How to Read ‘Body’ Language’ goes into more detail.  (And in the below comment stream you can see my exchange with a commenter over some silly semantics.)

Migrant caravans made up of almost all military-aged males.  Has anyone else noticed the pictures and videos of the various proto-illegal alien caravans approaching our border through Mexico?  Count the women and children.  And who is paying for all the food, shelter, transportation, and organization to get these thousands of Latinos to their designated destinations?

[17nov18 update]  Ramirez again summarizes it in a manner that is clear, concise, and complete.  (H/T to reader)

Nationalism cum Patriotism

'Nationalism unites; tribalism divides.'

George Rebane

The concept and notion of nationalism is now thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued across western countries.  The gist of the conversation or debate over nationalism is that it has been incorporated into the Left’s trans-national narrative as something that today portends giving rise to the more sinister angels of our collective nature.  To be more precise, leftwing politicians here and in Europe have unleashed the message that nationalism implies ‘white nationalism’ which implies ‘ethnic exclusion’ which represents the strong form of ‘racism’.  The lamestream media's daily outpouring makes all this very explicit, and it is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the leftwing grassroots.  An example of this reveals itself in recent comment streams found in these pages.

French president Macron did no one a favor by lecturing Trump that “nationalism is counter to patriotism” while defining his understanding of neither term (more here).  Such simple and unexamined semantic conquests continue to be the modus operandi of how language is co-opted into politically correct newspeak.  In more measured moments each of us can look up the pre-progressive definition of nationalism to find it means –

"Nationalism is a political, social, and economic system characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty (self-governance) over the homeland." (Wikipedia)

Nationalism is “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.” (Merriam-Webster)

Nationalism, “the strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.” (dictionary.com)

From these, and other such definitions, we see a common thread in an operational sense.  Nationalism is simply the ideological tenet that describes a nationalist as one who puts the interests of his own nation first when contending, comparing, or competing with other nations.  As such, there is nothing pejorative about any of these semantic variants.  And anyone of any color, religion, ethnicity, etc can join with others similarly distinguishable as a fellow nationalist to promote the sovereignty of a given nation-state.  (Sen Marco Rubio also expands on this here.)

Patriotism is nothing more or less that the expression of national pride within “the ideology of love and devotion to a homeland, and a sense of alliance with other citizens who share the same values.” (Wikipedia)  In other words patriotism is the display, exercise, and/or implementation of nationalism - i.e. patriotism is the practice and maintenance of nationalism.

Things get dicier when we start adding modifiers to create ‘white nationalism’ and ‘black nationalism’.  A white nationalist is not simply a nationalist of the Caucasian variety.  No, no, no.  The progressive definition of white nationalist has overt racial overtones such as white supremacy AND white separatism (two semantically orthogonal notions).  Today being called a white nationalist clearly assigns you to the deplorably racist neo-Nazi camp without any chance of redemption or opportunity to explain yourself using more precise language.

A black nationalist is not so encumbered, and enjoys a very asymmetrical definition.  “Black nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism in the United States which seeks to promote, develop and maintain a black national identity for people of black ancestry.” (Wikipedia)  Nation of Islam and Black Power are functional expressions of such black nationalism.  Any such reciprocal notions of promoting, developing, or maintaining a white national identity for people of white ancestry is strictly forbidden.  Moreover, evincing any efforts in those directions will get you placed on several lists of suspect and bad people that are maintained by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  And should such leanings be known in your workplace, you likely will soon be unemployed.

For the record, there is no evidence that nationalist Republicans, Libertarians, conservetarians, conservatives, or Tea Party members embrace additional attributes of nationalism than those included in the above definitions.  However, this conclusion does not fit the narrative of the Left, ranging from so-called moderate Democrats to their most fringe socialist cum communist cadres.  The America of the non-Left is, has always been, and will remain an evil nation-state.  And of this, our children must continue to be carefully taught in union dominated public schools and academe.

Do California Wildfires Serve a Greater Purpose?

George Rebane

Over 40 dead and counting, plus thousands of buildings and homes burned, plus hundreds of thousands of acres of trees and wild critters of all kinds killed, plus untold amounts of public monies pissed away that could have been used for many better things for the common good.  And all of this as the result of an annually recurring insanity put in place by well-meaning econuts through programs that started long ago with Smokey the Bear.  Today the epidemic of this seeming ignorance has become endemic.

Once upon a time the U.S. Forest Service’s mission was to actively manage the federal government’s resources. Yet numerous laws over the last 50 years, including the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act, have hampered tree-clearing, controlled burns and timber sales on federal land. (13nov18 WSJ)

Today the Agenda21 driven political divide has been augmented by the use of ‘climate change’ to double down on dumb forest management policies.  Moonbeam Brown has led a chorus of progressive pundits and their legions of true believers, claiming that preventable man-made global warming is the cause of all the recent catastrophic conflagrations (more here).  Again, the data does not support such emotionally charged political arguments; there is no scientific basis for a causal link, only a political one. (more here, H/T to reader)

President Trump’s message about governments mismanaging our forests is spot on, no matter how crudely it might have been delivered.  We have to reduce the tremendous fuel loads in our forests through active programs of undergrowth clearance, harvesting timber, and prescribed burns.  One only need to look at the circa 1850 photos of California forests to understand what humans have done over the last 150+ years.  Back then trees in the mountainous west grew in copses separated by open spaces – lightning started forest fires burned only a few copses that had grown too close together, but that was it, the fire didn’t spread and go on burning miles of trees.  It took human foolishness to encourage cheek-by-jowl growth through aggressive firefighting.  Forest thinning wildfires were outlawed, but never stopped.

Now our ecological betters, using the government gun, have created critically flammable environments wherever they could identify an endangered critter or flower or fungus or … .  Put that together with population growth that has built homes and towns in the former wildlands, and anyone with an ounce of critical thought knows that the annual chance of disastrous wildfires quickly approaches certainty.  The reality is that the forests and chaparral will burn, no matter what.  The only choice we have is whether it will burn economically when and where we want it to burn, or whether it will burn when and where we can least afford to have it burn and at enormous cost.

The right choice should be an easy one.  So why hasn’t it been made?  There may be several reasons, but one of the most plausible explanations for our decades-long insanity in choosing badly is that such wildfires also serve a greater political purpose to aid the ongoing fundamental transformation of America.  If we consider public policies encouraging such annual holocausts in that light, then one can make the plausible case that our devastating wildfires are really the result of totally rational decisions toward an end which eventually will serve a greater common good – these wildfires are just another form of the eggs which must be cracked before our central planners can deliver their promised omelet.  It's worth a discussion.

[16nov18 update]  An environmentalists’ epiphany??? 

After decades of butting heads, some environmentalists and logging supporters have largely come to agreement that forests need to be logged to be saved. … Another dangerous factor, land-management experts say, is that forests have become overgrown with trees and underbrush due to a mix of human influences, including a past federal policy of putting out fires, rather than letting them burn. Washington has also sharply reduced logging under pressure from environmentalists. (more here)

Is liberalism really anything different from mental illness?  Why did it take decades for these people to recognize a solution known to the rest of us for over a century?  How many other such practical approaches to commerce, land use, and recreation do these people continue to deny America?  Does this epiphany represent some light at the end of this insane tunnel?

11 November 1918 - Ed and Jack’s War

George Rebane

My up close and personal introduction to WW1 came at the knee of my two early mentors Jack Maschmeyer and Ed Egold. Both were WW1 veterans who were sent ‘over there’ and didn’t come home ‘until it was over over there’. Both saw trench warfare at its most horrific and survived going ‘over the top’ several times. In 1953 we moved into an old house (built in 1830s) in rural Marion County, Indiana next to Ed and Mary who were in their early sixties. Today they would be mistaken for being in their eighties; they had lived a long life of hard work and it showed on most folks of that age in those days.

Sandbox – 11nov18

[CA fires continue to kill, destroy thousands of homes, and cost billions to contain. In the meantime prescription burns to reduce fuel loads are proscribed because of the potential of litigation costs from accidental or claimed damages from such burns. And police point out that mass shootings invariably occur in ‘gun-free zones’ where legal guns that could prevent/reduce deaths are banned. And the state’s housing shortage and high cost continue to be maintained by regulations and codes that cater to liberal governance dominated by the ecology epidemic. Insanity running rampant and on the rise. gjr]

My email has been hacked

George Rebane

Got a call from a friend this morning telling me that my ‘sbcglobal.net’ email has been hacked, and people are getting emails from this address with the following message with subject line 'Urgent.....George Rebane'

How are you? I need a favor from you.

I need to get a Gamestop Gift Card for my Nephew, Its his birthday but i can't do this now because I'm currently traveling.Can you get it from any store around you? I'll pay back as soon as i am back. Kindly let me know if you can handle this.

Please ignore this as another sign of out fraudulent times.  Thank you.

Victims of Communism remembered – 8 November 2018 (updated 9nov18)

[I post today’s ‘Presidential Message on the National Day for the Victims of Communism’ in memory of the 100-200 million people, including members of my family, killed by communists and communism over the past century.  This is the system to which today’s Left is repaving the road of return.  gjr]

On the National Day for the Victims of Communism, we honor the memory of the more than 100 million people who have been killed and persecuted by communist totalitarian regimes.  We also reaffirm our steadfast support for those who strive for peace, prosperity, and freedom around the world.

Since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, we have witnessed the effects of the tyrannical communist ideology—anguish, repression, and death.  Communism subordinates inherent human rights to the purported well-being of all, resulting in the extermination of religious freedom, private property, free speech, and, far too often, life.  These horrors have included Ukrainians deliberately starved in the Holodomor, Russians purged in the Great Terror, Cambodians murdered in the killing fields, and Berliners shot as they tried to escape to freedom.  The victims of these and many other atrocities bear silent testimony to the undeniable fact that communism, and the pursuit of it, will forever be destructive to the human spirit and to the prosperity of mankind.

Today, we remember all who have been denied the great blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under oppressive communist regimes.  Together, we mourn the unbearable losses so many have endured under communism, and we renew our pledge to continue advancing the cause of freedom and opportunity for all.

[9nov18 update]  From one of our more prominent leftwing commenters - “almost 30 years ago one wall came down in Berlin and today another one is going up here.” (see comment stream below)

That is the reason our two polarized sides can no longer profitably talk to each other.  From what I and others of the conservetarian bent see, there is nothing that we can say to the now radicalized Left which today 1) has an enormous intellectual deficit regarding shared history, and 2) little or no ability to incorporate elemental reasoning into their conversations.

These pages are witness to repeated assertions by the progressives that securing our border with a wall is exactly the same as how the communist dictators secured their borders with walls.  No matter how many times here, and in other publications and broadcasts, people have patiently sought to explain to the terminally deficient that the two kinds of walls serve diametrically opposite functions – communism’s walls are built to keep their citizens IN, i.e. from escaping tyranny so as to prevent emigration; the border walls of liberal democracies are meant to keep illegal aliens OUT, and are built to minimize illegal entry so as to control immigration.  This enormous distinction has always been too difficult for a liberal mind to comprehend – for them a wall is a wall, and even more so if they can glibly ignore that significant nuance to promote their anti-capitalistic message to those equally dense.

From such simple distinctions, things go down when the conversation turns to more complex subjects such as the forms of governance, their dynamics and provenance.  For example, when now and again such leftwing worthies dip into their rich trove of historical knowledge and attempt to, say, deny the socialist underpinnings of the Nazis.  Here they go one up on the walls question, and claim that the American right, which wants to maximize individual liberties and reduce the size of government, is equivalent to Germany’s Nationalist Socialists who did everything to minimize individual liberties and maximized the size of their government.  Simply mind boggling.  And they want us to think like they do!!

The Election & RIP Prop6

George Rebane

Instead of my regular KVMR commentary, News Director Paul Emery suggested we do a little one-on-one for tonight’s news program.  So we sat down for a little gabfest about the election.   Paul asked me for any surprises on the outcome, and chowder-head me responded that things went pretty much as I had expected, while completely overlooking my total disappointment and frustration with the failure of Prop6 – you know, the repeal of the most recent California gas tax bamboozle from Sacramento.

Prop6 went down to solid defeat in California in the hands of a partisan majority of voters that over the years has vacillated between insanity and terminal stupidity.  CA already has the highest gas taxes in the land, much of them from previous initiatives promised by the lying sacks of s#!t in Sacramento that the taxes would go to fix CA’s roads and bridges.  Well, what has happened is that these tax receipts go directly into the state’s general fund to finance an endless number of programs and purposes – e.g. bullet trains, smelt salvation, succoring illegal aliens, funding govt workers pension liabilities, attracting evermore of the nation’s welfare recipients, … - that continue to leave us in an ever bigger mess.  And with already the highest gas taxes in the land, we continue to pay these fraudulent takings without even a peep.

So now our roads are really a mess, and that looks like a perfect opportunity for some capitol scumbags to go to the voters – over half of whom pay no taxes, and a third of whom get regular government checks - and ask them to dance another round of the SOSO samba.  Only this time the bill will be even more smelly because it has a built-in ratchet that keeps upping it ad nauseum over the years.  Those Californians who pay attention did put out the word on Prop6, pointing out that these new taxes will do nothing except increase the cost of transportation (especially for the poor), while once more destined for the state’s general fund to finance the ever greater insanities and inanities from Sacramento.

Defeating such an obviously fraudulent proposition should have been a no-brainer, hence it was designed precisely for those not so encumbered.  But like Lucy with the football, our Charlie Brown electorate again fell for the ‘can’t you see all them chuckholes and cracks and … all of which need fixin’?’  And, of course, today all them cracks etc are way bigger and more numerous and easier to see than last time, so the state’s not so nimble numbnuts dutifully checked the proper box to keep the most recent and onerous gas tax in place as the scumbags are already planning the next tax to fix the roads and bridges – hell, why stop a perfectly good bamboozle designed exactly for the kind of voters we worked so hard to attract, ‘educate’, and put in place.  No one out there in VoterLand asks what is the word for doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome.

Oh well, on the national scene things went a little better.  The Dems won the House, but the best they can do there is start more dead-end investigations of President Trump and the Executive branch, with a possible impeachment swipe at Justice Kavanaugh.  Republicans actually will welcome that kind of blatant congressional obstruction which will demonstrate to the country that just putting the new and more aggressive socialist Left in power is going to do nothing to get Congress legislating for the people’s needs.

President Trump’s first-half accomplishments re the tax cut, regulation rollback, foreign policy, and immigration will stay in place.  The border will not be secured, and healthcare costs will continue increasing with the bastardized system now metastasizing like a cancer.  It will be easy to focus the spotlight on the source of stagnation, and Trump will have something very solid and visible to run on in 2020.  The lamestream will have a hell of time ramping up their Fake News Machine enough to hide the source of grit and gravel grinding in the gears of government.

Meanwhile, the Dems will also have to work out their Gerontology Optics Problem with a leadership headed by Nancy the Penultimate Facelift, and backed up by a crowd of cretins like Mad Max Waters, Elijah Cummings, Comrade Bernie, Vacuum Head Ocasio-Cortez, the ‘Capitalist Bones’ of Fauxahontas, True Colors DiFi, SlyEye Chuckie Schumer, all straight out of Central Casting.  Every one of these will be on daily display filling countless screens across the land.  In the meantime, Trump will have a solid Senate majority to confirm and emplace as many constitutional judges and justices as are on his lengthening short-list.  All in all, not a bad night.

Election night and I am really pi&&ed (again)!

George Rebane

We’re watching the various channels report the returns.  And the directors and producers of their election night shows insist on putting on talking heads and politicians from all over the country who not only have no clue which way things are trending, but also no firm ideas on which way things will turn out given the up-to-the-minute data feeds.  Why put these know-nothings on the air to tell us their long-winded ‘on this hand, but on the other hand’ information-free interviews.  We don’t need to hear such ignorance (technical use of term) and/or ambivalence from invited talking heads; the program anchors can handle such 50-50 outcome monologues all by themselves, and they can do it more efficiently with backup data than the people on their panels or the senator from some state who will amble on in ambiguity.

So here’s the drill.  Ask the prospective person to be put on the air whether they have any firm convictions about which way this or that race will turn out given the data up to now.  If the sumbich says he hasn’t got a clue, then don’t put him on the air to waste the viewers’ time.  In short, if you have some firm position on an outcome that you can defend, then welcome and speak your piece – else we’ll get back to you when you’ve got something to tell us other than your long-winded ‘I don’t know’.  How come none of those stellar journalistic professionals putting these ‘election headquarters’ on the air know how to do this???

Ruminations – 4nov18 (update 5nov18)

“If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science.” Karl Popper

George Rebane

A regression function does not a theory make.

Climate change: A regular reader and avid follower of climate science Russ Steele sent me a couple of links that I’d like to share with our True Believers (the rest are “deniers”).  The first is a comprehensive yet compact analysis and refutation of the Left’s climate science hysteria (here).  The second is an analysis of ‘CO2 driven warming’ that again puts a lie to the whole thing (here).  Both pieces have solid assertions that can be refuted (i.e. they are falsifiable) with countering science and argument.  I invite our leftwing readers to respond with something more than another performance of their sophomoric Consensus Cantata.  In the meantime, meditate on the above two shibboleths now out of fashion with our progressives.

The definition of ‘nationalism’ is on the slippery slope, being shoved into politically correct meaningless verbiage that is appended with everything the Left dislikes.  I ask readers to give us an English word that means “a political, social, and economic system characterized by devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state. The belief that nations will benefit more from acting independently rather than collectively, and the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty over the homeland”, and nothing more or less.  What should be the label for such a sentiment shared by billions across the globe?

Midterm Election MABs.  Only three of us cared to offer their MAB distributions for the outcome of the House elections.  I have computed the MABs shown in the upper left of the above figure, along with the plots of the discrete MAB probabilities for each outcome for the number of House Democrats who will be seated January 2019.  Recall, of the 435 seats a majority requires at least 218.  The figure shows the definite and confident party biases of Messrs Steele and Frisch, with Moi the Chickens#!t timidly sneaking in there with a 0.5 confidence for my most likely (ML) of 220 seats for the Dems.  It is clear that RussS will win with the best prediction if the Dems get less that 219 seats, and StevenF will win if the Dems get more than 219.  And 219 happens to be the ONLY number of Dems that will make me the winner - very sad.  However, if we consider the 'wisdom of crowds' as the shown group average, then I am the closest to the common mind in this little prediction derby.  Alas, this is a position of which I have never been a proud resident.  Oh well, we'll see next Wednesday morning how it all shakes out.

Hate speech??  Hate speech is used a lot by progressives to describe stuff they don't want to read or hear.  Can anyone give an operational definition of 'hate speech' that can be used to categorize it?  Or is it a gift leftwingers are blessed with - something like 'I really can't define it, but I sure can tell when someone uses it.'?

[5nov18 update] Sen Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has issued a massive report documenting interviews with dozens of witnesses and accusers of Justice Kavanaugh, and his alleged sexual misconduct.  They have found “found that no witnesses could provide evidence to substantiate their claims”.  Instead, many of those who came out of the woodwork have now recanted their accusations – example, “the evidence appears to support the position that Julie Swetnick and Mr. Avenatti criminally conspired to make materially false statements to the Committee and obstruct the Committee’s investigation.”  For some odd reason the Dem sleazebags on the committee – those led by Sen Feinstein who conspired to torpedo Kavanaugh’s nomination through last minute political theatrics, are silent on the matter – no report contending the committee’s findings is forthcoming.  Should the Dems take the House tomorrow, the same troupe of sleazebags will resurface to up the ante on the crap they will manufacture in the attempt to impeach SCOTUS’s newest justice.  In the meanwhile, crickets.  (more here)

Bloomberg drops $5M in last minute appeal to bipartisanship by urging a Democratic vote tomorrow.  The former mayor of New York is confident that his audience is sufficiently dimwitted to believe his claim that he is not being political, but instead calling for us to come together under the magnificent plan forward for the nation as promised by the Left.  Let your search for common ground begin here.

Honduran and Guatemalan flags are in very obvious display in the columns of migrants headed for the US.  You would think that they would be carrying the flags of the country into which they wish entry, into whose society they intend to assimilate.  What are we missing here?

And speaking of everyone coming together to become one happy American family - here's the latest from our Muslim immigrants.  Get any of this from the lamestream?

‘A Short History of American Medical Insurance’ (Addended)

George Rebane

If there is a problem in the land, consider government guilty of its cause until proven innocent.

And that RR tagline applies doubly to the current cost of healthcare in America.  A short history of how we achieved healthcare costs that rank highest as a percentage of GDP is provided (here) by John Steele Gordon, nationally prominent author and economic historian.  Our healthcare costs have soared from 3.5% of GDP in 1930 to about 15% in 2015, indicating that “per capita medical costs in the United States have risen by a factor of 30 in 90 years.”

Speaking to a Hillsdale College audience, he opens with the reminder - “Whenever one segment of an economy exhibits, year after year, inflation above the general rate, and when there is no constraint on supply, then either a cartel is in operation or there is a lack of price transparency—or both, as is the case with American medical care.”

The history of real diagnostic and curative medicine actually began around 1930; prior to that physicians provided little benefit in those functions, and relied on the body’s own immune and restorative abilities to heal the patient.  But at the beginning of the Great Depression medical science had advanced enough to start providing remedies, albeit costly, that really did save patients from some dreaded diseases and injuries.  The expense of these new treatments launched the field of “hospital insurance” – dominated by Blue Cross and Blue Shield (for doctors’ fees) which broadened to what today we call medical or simply health insurance.

Hospital insurance paid only for services rendered while the patient was in the hospital.  It paid the complete hospital bill no matter its amount or treatment, thereby causing patients and doctors to make expensive hospital stays longer rather than shorter.  Government succumbed to doctor and hospital lobbies to keep service levels and prices up.  This gave rise to a special category of highly regulated (as non-profits) insurance companies.  And off we went onto the regimen of cost-plus payments to hospitals and doctors.  Given this scheme, there was no impetus to contain costs since these were actually withheld from the customers (patients) who had no information nor motive to shop for better prices for received services.

Then came wartime wage and price controls which forced companies to compete for workers from an already scarce pool, not through wages, which were fixed, but through fringe benefits which launched ‘free’ health insurance.  There’s a lot more important detail about how the various government departments, greedy politicians, and well-heeled lobbyists worked together to permanently keep America’s healthcare from responding to the normal markets which tremendously increased our quality of life in all other sectors of the economy over the decades.

The solution from here is not a ‘single payer’ comprehensively nationalized healthcare.  Gordon points out that “our federal government already runs three single-payer systems—Medicare, the Veterans Health Administration, and the Indian Health Service—each of which is in a shambles, noted for fraud, waste, and corruption. Why would we want to turn over all of American medicine to those who have proved themselves incompetent to run large parts of it?”  Instead he outlines a number of “far better and cheaper alternatives”.  I won’t steal any more of his thunder here but invite you to read his eye-opening essay on the topic.  Gordon concludes his piece with –

Finally, we need to get the practitioners of modern medicine to recognize an age-old reality: there is no cure for old age itself. Maybe someday we’ll be able to 3-D print a new body and have the data in our brain downloaded to it. But for the time being, when the body begins to break down systemically, we should let nature take its course. … There are enormous forces arrayed against these economically sensible reforms. Defenders of the status quo are the most potent lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals. This is not to mention the leftist proponents of single payer, who favor whatever will increase the power and scope of government. So it won’t be an easy fight. But at least we have one thing on our side—Stein’s law, named after the famous economist Herbert Stein: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

[Addendum]  I was in a rush to get this posted before another scheduled chore would interrupt.  What I failed to mention is that the Dems are playing ACA and healthcare as their only card in this mid-term election, and blaming Republicans for the baked in shortcomings of Obamacare, such as the rapid rise in healthcare costs.  The question many conservatives have had lately is whether President Trump is overplaying his ‘immigration, immigration, immigration’ hand.  I would advise our president to also point out that the defections from the multiple ‘migrant caravans’ are occurring only because he is making real his intent to use every legal means available – including active military – to stop the planned illegal bums rush across our borders.  These people aren’t going home or staying in Mexico because their road is a long one.  But what our president should really emphasize is what he has accomplished for our economy – that should make the greatest impact on those voters who have the capacity to understand the basics.

In any event, I am among the few who believe that knowing how our healthcare became so expensive and remains so is important.  Unfortunately not that many people give a big rat’s ass about that as they demonstrate their concern by limiting their healthcare knowledge to five or six publicized slogans.

Sandbox - 2nov18

[In the last sandbox Bro Gregory cites a WaPo story that brings up the notion that large, violent caravans heading north for the US border might become the norm.  My strong belief is that they will indeed become the norm if President Trump is not able to either get Mexico to disperse them before reaching the border, or that our border security fails (due to political pressures from our anti-American Left) and thousands of illegal new migrants suddenly find themselves successfully on American soil.  gjr]

Scattershots – 29oct18 (updated 31oct18)

George Rebane

Growing numbers of liberals now embrace the notion that voting for a living can be more lucrative than working for a living.

Hallelujah!  Our distinguished liberal columnist and RR reader George Boardman comes out strong for the educated voter.  In today’s (29oct18) Union he writes, “If you haven't yet taken the time to familiarize yourself with the issues and candidates, if your vote is based on emotion, or prejudice, or party affiliation, what your neighbor says, or that you had a fight with one of the candidates in the third grade, do your country a favor and throw out that mail-in ballot. An uninformed vote is much more dangerous than not voting at all.” (emphasis mine)  That, of course, has been a major conservetarian tenet of these pages for years (most recently here), and I welcome him as a fellow promoter of the educated vote.  However, now Mr Boardman should prepare himself to be pilloried by the local panel of progressive pinheads who believe and preach that encouraging voter education is akin to proposing the return to the Jim Crow voter policies of the post-bellum South.

The Pittsburg massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue is the latest installment of the ongoing tragedy of our times that should remind us of the nature of these kind of deranged and lunatic killers.  They should not be confused with the several flavors of organized terror such as sponsored by the various Islamist groups.  These desperate lone wolves seek to put meaning into their pitifully empty lives, and are terminally ignorant to boot.  They have no idea that their killings promote exactly the opposite effect than that which their fevered little minds conceived.  Today the killer’s “All Jews must die!” has redoubled the pride that Jews have in their faith and the strength they draw from it.  And it has also brought the rest of us closer to the Jewish community, and more determined than ever to fight the age-old scourge of antisemitism as the poster child of faith-targeted persecution.

[Later]  While the Democrats and their lamestream lackeys are busy tying the massacre to our president, even the rabbi of The Tree of Life and the Israeli ambassador join in praising President Trump in his strong condemnation of the massacre and its antisemitic character.  Neither of them blame the the president for contributing to this tragedy.  Any bets on how this exculpatory news is covered in the lamestream which has already fulminated about the 'Trump connection'? (more here and here)

A reliable sign of a corrupt and/or out of control government is when it increases taxes for 1) no other reason (benefit to the public) than that it can, and/or 2) because it must do so in order to pay for under-budgeted existing but politically critical promised programs that no longer are sustainable (if they ever were from the start).  Of the first, the latest is Britain’s planned ‘digital tax’ – an additional tax on technology companies that deliver online services (e.g. social media, ecommerce, …) and yet another on the consumers using such services.  These are taxes that do nothing to improve or make such services more facile – it is just the next taking, because it can take.  (more here)  For an example of the second type we have Lawrence W. Reed, professor of economics and president of the Foundation for Economic Education, who draws a startling parallel in ‘Are We Rome?’ of today's America with the downfall of Rome, a nation which first declined from a republic to an autocracy that then bought its degenerating survival through public welfare programs which first destroyed its economy and then its means to defend itself.   

[31oct18 update]  I took to task Susan Rogers, liberal editorial board member of The Union, in my 18oct18 post.  In there I highlighted one of her more regrettable ‘Hits’ in which she opined that “any patriotic citizen should not have a problem with the concept of urging all eligible voters to vote.” (emphasis mine).  Today, after an apparent mini-epiphany, the lady shows us one of her (probably many) redeeming sides by a penning a course-reversal column – ‘Vote Smart or Vote Stupid’ - that advocates for the educated voter.  While she has yet to draw the proper conclusion about what an uneducated voter should do – as long proposed by your commentator and now joined by Union’s George Boardman (see above) – Ms Rogers does provide the reader with ample specific citations where the responsible and concerned voter may get needed information before marking hiser (my own contribution to gender-free pronouns) ballot.

Sandbox - 28oct18

[Apologies for the last sandbox getting a little rancid there.  We just returned from travel and I let things get away from me.  Well, now with all the additional stuff that's happened, there is a lot of catching up to do.  This morning NPR did a couple of hit pieces on President Trump, nimbly circling their innuendo wagons to blame him and the Republicans for all the current tragedies - happened and impending - while wondering why the other side doesn't stop "their hateful rhetoric" that is causing all this.  Of course, constantly pointing this out, their hands somehow remain clean.  gjr]

The Migration Mess (updated 28oct18)

George Rebane

[This is the updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 October 2018.]

A recently updated dictionary defines ‘migration’ as the “movement of people to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions.”  And not by accident, this sounds like something all good-hearted people should encourage and support.  Today we are suddenly presented with the prospect of over 5,000 Central Americans having mysteriously been massed and marshalled to march north illegally through three countries with the objective of overtly overwhelming our southern border controls, and illegally forcing their way into the United States to become wards of the American taxpayer.

Common Core = Obamacare of Education

George Rebane

More test scores keep rolling in telling those paying attention what our educational systems have done to the newest generation of America's students – and it isn’t pretty.  The only ones still genuflecting to our union dominated public schools are the nation’s progressives (including our local lefties) who dare not let light shine on the truth for fear (completely substantiated) that it blows up their social narrative.

In the meantime PJ Media reports ‘Common Core: ACT Scores for Class of 2018 Worst in Decades’.  Bottom line – our students’ scores in all subjects declined, but we took the worst hits in math.  There the “the average score on the ACT math test dropped to its lowest level in 20 years — 20.5 on a scale of 1 to 36. American students scored 21.1 in 2012 and 20.7 last year.”  We weren’t that hot to begin with, and now we’re just sinking lower than ever on the world stage of competing countries where STEM acumen counts most. (more here)

The latest big problem in our education, of course, is Common Core.  The propaganda on CC was that it would just establish some standards, but not dictate curriculum – wrong! 

Congressman Andy Thompson of Ohio has been, from the start, attempting to minimize the damage done by CC.  He says, "I think testimony we took during our attempts to eradicate Common Core showed the dumbing down of curriculum, the social justice indoctrination, the emphasis on social-emotional learning, reduced quantity and quality of reading, emphasizing screen time rather than classroom instruction."  Thompson went on to explain that the "destruction of proper math" has also been a contributing factor. … (CC proponents) place a higher priority on indoctrination than education."

None of the Common Core contamination of curricula makes any sense on the national scale, save for how it neatly dovetails into the objectives laid out in Agenda21.  (H/T to reader)