Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations – 6mar21

George Rebane

White supremacist hysteria has reached fever pitch among the progressive socialists.  Commenter BillT @ 835am cites (here) the dean of Arizona State University who announced that characteristics of precision, timeliness, quality expression (e.g. good written English), good work ethic, etc are all part and parcel of “white racial habitus” which perpetuates “white language supremacy” which means “it’s inherently white and racist”.  By the dean’s logic, then ‘black racial habitus’ that perpetuates black behavioral characteristics is inherently black and racist. (more here)

Covid science and disinformation is discussed by Dr Scott W Atlas MD, Hoover Institution senior fellow, former professor and head of neuroradiology at Stanford.  He recently gained a furious notoriety in the eyes of all Democrats and their lamestream lackies for serving as a C19 advisor to President Trump.  In the Feb 2021 Imprimus he asks ‘Science, Politics, and COVCID: Will Truth Prevail?’  I cite his short and very informative essay as another cogent summary of my own stance on the nature of the C19 pandemic and the various disastrous government response policies to the disease.  From all of my readings (also see below), the clear answer to Dr Atlas’s question is NO!

Fact-checking the fact checkers.  Today it is easy to make the case that media giants are “employing left-wing vetters to limit scientific debate”.  The work of fact checking by leftwingers primarily focuses on cherry picking a supporting counter-opinion report or two and using it to dun any scientific opinion that does not support the command/control narrative prescribing government diktats opposing federalist responses to the C19 pandemic.  The whole enterprise of fact checking is based on the Mega Lie that science speaks but with one voice.  The ‘one voice’ chosen by the ‘progressive health clerisy’ is then labeled consensus science to which all the hoi polloi must kowtow when thinking properly about such politicized issues as global warming and C19.  For more, see ‘Fact-Checking Facebook’s Fact Checkers’.

Scattershots – 2mar21 (updated 5mar21)

George Rebane

Those who judge the past in terms of the here and now are doing a great disservice through their ignorance of the then and there.

The Left’s promotion of America’s new cancel culture is in full swing.  We now have full scale censoring of politically incorrect content on our mass media – broadcast, internet, print, entertainment, … .  This incorporates the modern version of book burning.  The latest volumes to be ‘digitally burned’ and no longer available from major outlets include Justice Clarence Thomas’s ‘Created Equal’ video and , and now Dr Seuss.  Dr Seuss has been an icon of Americana and children’s literature for a couple of generations now.  Even an annual children’s reading day (2 March) was ensconced to recognize the birthday of Theodor Seuss ‘Ted’ Geisel (1904-1991).  But today our commissars of correct culture have deemed many of his works to racist and contain “crude and offensive stereotypes in several drawings of blacks and Asian-Americans.”  But those well-read in the country’s leftward lurch will recognize that such book burnings are nothing more than pages out of Stalin’s and Hitler’s playbooks to erase the old culture in order to make room for instilling their brave new world.  It was ever thus. (more here)

Common culture counts.  That has been a fundamental tenet of RR, and is now being adopted by many other national voices to counter the Left’s all-out assault on America’s traditional culture.  Six former US education secretaries co-authored ‘America Needs History and Civics Education to Promote Unity’ (2mar21 WSJ).  In there they cogently argue for a national education plan “to help teachers instill an understanding that is complete and honest but not cynical.”  The 6jan21 frustration that was expressed by Americans on the Mall and in the Capitol is a harbinger that the country’s political leaders, those who truly want to promote unity, should take careful note of and respond with appropriate legislation and regulatory relief for our public schools.  It’s a tall order the chances of success for which are not high given the entrenched collectivists in politics and the teachers unions.  Nevertheless, the authors cite the ‘Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy’, the culmination of a 19-month project by 300+ “scholars, educators, practitioners, and students from diverse backgrounds.” (more here) In sum, a minimally common culture for a constitutional democracy “requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively, as well as the knowledge and skills to act for the common good.”  The Roadmap provides the guidance for the several states to develop curricula that can provide such an understanding.

Joe Biden puts all his credibility chips on a Big Lie, and takes a page of bombast from Trump’s playbook.  He and Team Biden, echoed in the lamestream, now trumpet the claim that he is the nation’s savior from Covid-19.  Specifically, “he is staking his legacy on the lie that the pandemic was out of control until the day of his inauguration.”  And a more comprehensive segue to the old days of ‘journalism’ was made possible by the former president’s CPAC speech.  The hiatus is over, we can now stop having to explain (or avoid) Biden, and shift back to coverage of Trump topics that fit like an old shoe.  Gerard Baker says it best (here) –

The return to the limelight of a certain former president has triggered an unfortunate but probably inevitable relapse for the Trump addicts of our news-gathering class.  They’d gone cold turkey for a whole month and there were tentative, encouraging signs that the cure might be taking. Deprived of their favorite drug, some were gingerly discovering other, more wholesome pursuits: tackling the mountain of evidence that Andrew Cuomo might be a mendacious, incompetent, bullying sex pest; investigating the slight but tantalizing possibility that not all of America’s social and economic woes can be attributed to white supremacy; slowly weaning themselves off the urge to ask penetrating questions of the White House about Joe Biden’s rescue dog.

What must ol’ Bumblebrain do now to get back into an adult-level news cycle?  After all, he’s still the president.  Isn’t he?

[4mar21 update]  A CPAC puzzle?  A straw poll was taken at the recent CPAC conference at which many Republican luminaries – including former President Trump – spoke.  The poll indicated that 68% wanted to see Trump run for president in 2024, and only 55% wanted to see him nominated for the office.  This conservetarian doesn’t understand how the excess of the 68% would have him become a Republican candidate in 2024 without first being nominated – especially after he made clear that he would not support or start a third party.  From my perch it looks like a collective brain fart.  Other solutions most welcome.

The Capitol Fortress.  Thousands of troops remain guarding our razor wire wrapped Capitol.  Why?  The Dems insist on fake intelligence reports of another imminent attempt at a rightwing ‘insurrection’ (when there never was one in the first place).  The disorganized and frustrated mob that charged the Capitol on 6 January had no idea what they were doing or were supposed to do.  They got in only because the on-duty Capitol police were incompetent in every aspect of operational planning and execution, or ordered to allow a politically useful penetration of the building.  And the mob had nothing to do with the deaths that day, that was another fabrication by the Dems and their lamestream media.  So, the whole thing today was a set-up for the Dems kabuki security theater to defend against a supposed repeat today of 6jan21.  This attack was supposed to occur according to some unknown advisory from an unknown agency in our intelligence community – perhaps the FBI.  In spite of today’s nothing burger, the military will continue to occupy DD for another two months – to defend against some unknown threat - at which time another fake intelligence advisory will launch the next phase of political histrionics to keep the public apprised of their assigned place under the heel of the state.

[5mar21 update]  ‘A Compromise on Creationism’ – in this little 5mar21 WSJ essay (here) physician/scientist Dr Joshua Swamidass calls for reaccreditation of colleges that teach creationism as long as they also permit discussion of and courses in evolution, along with some other provisions about the transfer of creationism course credits.  (He misses the reciprocal call for accredited secular colleges to also welcome speakers who counter theistically progressive narratives.) What again astounded me was the citing of a 2019 Gallup poll that “showed that 40% of American adults ‘ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.’” (more here)  Interesting to note is that 40% with college degrees believe that the evolution of Man was guided by God, which indicates a belief in Intelligent Design (here, here, and here) that for obvious reasons is purposely confused with and perfidiously equated to Creationism by our secular humanists.  My own concern is that these ‘strictly creationists’ reject most of what science teaches about how we and universe function, knowledge that is also the basis for the politics of public policies.  How do these religionists vote?

Sandbox – 2mar21

[The rabid Left is now advising all who would listen across the land not to hire or have anything to do with people who were part of the Trump administration.  And sure enough, that aspect of our now-arrived cancel culture is taking hold.  Today many of the Left’s lackies are publicly putting such people on their permanently banned list (part of their national unity campaign).  But how would it be if those of the counter-cancel culture grew some balls and started advertising for employees whose desiderata showed they had been a part of Trump’s administration - if not on the WH staff, then in one of the cabinet level departments or other agencies that were led by political appointees who brought along their high level colleagues and former staffers to help administer the federal bureaucracies calcified with thousands of career leftwingers?  If they can do it, why can’t we?  gjr]

A Sad Commentary About Unity

George Rebane

In his inauguration speech President Joe Biden went out of his way to emphasize and promise that his would be the administration to heal the chasm that separates Americans and bring us together again – he would unite us all.  From the policy statements that his WH started to issue immediately put paid to that particular inaugural lie; the new administration’s efforts to unite handily beat the setting sun to the horizon on that auspicious day.

But lying is not the only precursor to the Left’s love affair with disastrous public policies.  We have to credit them also with a genuine desire to benefit society, which, after all, has been the overarching objective of collectivists – socialists, communists, …, Jacobins – since the French Revolution.  Their problem becomes evident when they present the fruits of their deliberations and then attempt apologetics to bolster their freshly minted policies.  It becomes immediately clear to most who pay attention, especially those with some book-learning, that their supportive logic for any given policy simply does not tie.  It isn’t the kind of logic that the rest of us have been taught and successfully practiced in our professions.

This dichotomy between thinking processes by the Right and Left continued unexamined and fruitlessly debated for over two centuries until some psychologists and brain scientists at the University College London decided to do a clinical study and try to answer the question of why the logics used by the two sides are so different.  I reported on that study (here and here), and was a bit astounded to learn it revealed that collectivists use a different part of their brains than do the conservatives to solve policy problems that require use of logic tools.

Scattershots – 26feb21 (updated 27feb21)

George Rebane

‘Masks don’t work and are damaging to health’ concludes another panel of concerned physicians (here).  “The only randomized control studies that have ever been done on masks show that they don’t work”, stated Dr Eric Nepute, one of the three physicians on the ‘Unmasking Covid-19’ panel who further agreed with the now widely held belief that imposing the wearing of masks 24/7 in public is also an autocratic population control trial by governments.  Another panelist Dr Sheri Tenpenny referenced a mask-wearing study involving 25,000 German students where 68% of the subjects reported “some kind of impairment” from wearing masks.  These kinds of pushbacks are starting to pop up all over the place as imperious governments issue C19 response diktats without supplying any of the supporting science that they claim to be ‘following’. 

‘California’s Climate Contradictions’ include studies that present “New evidence that green policies punish the poor and subsidize the rich.” (here)  California’s insane public policies cannot stand scrutiny wherever you take a more considered and serious look at them.  Even the left-leaning non-profit Next 10 and Cal Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas concludes in a study that “California has charted an ambitious course towards decarbonizing its economy.  At the same time, California has among the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S. These two facts create a tension: decarbonizing the economy most likely requires electrification of transportation and space and water heating, but high prices push against such a transition. High prices also have troubling implications for equity and affordability.”  This is the strictly bottom-of-the-barrel thinking that we have come to expect from the state that ranks 50th out of 50 in doing anything beneficial for the taxpaying residents in its shrinking middle class.

Illegal aliens in California will get financially stimulated (here).  If you crawl over/under our border fence and make it to California, you will be rewarded with cash money, and uncounted public welfare programs, with a promise of being shielded from federal apprehension, an eventual amnesty, and a direct path to American citizenship.  All you have to do is remember which political party made possible open borders, illegal entry, and all the good stuff that followed.  Democrats have given 'vote harvesting' a whole new meaning by implementing massive programs of 'vote planting' on the front end - yea verily, tomorrow ye shall surely reap what today ye sow.

[27feb21 update]  I composed this little ditty for the Obama years way back in 2013.  Things have not changed much today with the new Democrat administration and Congress in charge.  And we voters have not become any smarter in the interval.  Here is the updated version of it.

Progressives Big Lie #7519 – Texas Power Debacle

George Rebane

The 24feb21 Union ran this cartoon on its op-ed pages.

From this the newspaper’s uninformed and progressive readers have the clear takeaway that the Texas electric grid is in disarray and dysfunctional, as the recent blizzard demonstrated, because the electricity market is too ‘free’ and unregulated.  The disaster that hit Texans, and from which they still suffer, was caused by too much capitalism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The actual cause of the grid’s failure and its normal high cost to consumers is purely and solely a government manufactured travesty, brought to you by the scumbag politicians in Washington and Austin.  (Remember, if society has a problem, government is almost always the cause.)  To get a handle on this rather complex kerfuffle, we first have to understand that across the country there have come to be two kinds of energy suppliers – more or less deregulated ‘retail generators’ and the usual regulated public utilities.  The corporatist ‘free marketeers’ led by outfits like Enron, successfully lobbied for new fed and state laws that allowed the set up of the two-tier supply structure – the deregulated retail suppliers were supposed to compete and thereby lower consumer prices below those charged by the regulated utilities.

The corporatists anticipated their windfall by promising to set up a green power generating infrastructure that minimized reliance on coal and nuclear.  It was going to be all wind and solar with gas back-up.  The green power part was going to be heavily subsidized by the feds, and natural gas was a just-in-time fuel that could not be efficiently stored by the remaining back-up power stations.  And to transport the gas through pipelines required the operation of electrically powered compressors.  As dollar signs danced in their heads, and since the deregulation didn’t require it, the last thing in the minds of these new corporatist retail utilities was spending money to maintain and harden the electricity distribution infrastructure.   Are you beginning to get the picture? (more here)

Now step back about 30 years when people started analyzing the vulnerability of green electric grids not backed up by reliable coal and nuclear.  They started issuing warnings which were ignored by the politicians in charge of legislation and prudent regulation.  In fact, the eco and corporatist factions caused most of these longer term studies to be shut down lest their pesky findings would get too much publicity. To add insult to injury, many jurisdictions such as in Texas, consumers were not allowed to pipe gas into their homes for heating, and codes were put in place to prohibit the building of such houses – ‘clean electricity’ was going to be the solution to all energy consumption needs.

This insanity continued with governors (e.g. Cuomo) prohibiting the building/expansion of pipelines to bring back-up fossil fuels into their states and appropriately distribute it in the regions where subsidized green power was expanding.  The point here is, that contrary to the Big Lie cartoons like the one above, there has never been anything free about the energy markets when corporatists conspire with econuts and scumbag politicians to force consumers to choose between regulated utilities and ‘unregulated’ retail electricity generators who wind up with a captured clientele that can be charged sky-high market prices when primary (wind and solar) generators inevitably fail and back-up power turns out to be inadequate. (more here) 

So today politicians such as Cuomo and Warren inhibit the building of needed infrastructure ranging from pipelines to gas compressor facilities, and go on to ignore and shut down studies that produce results which don’t support their Agenda21 green narratives.

But more fundamentally, as taught by Rebane Doctrine, unfettered capitalism in any market will become rapacious as it inevitably coagulates into socially egregious, corporatist oligopolies on the road to monopoly.  (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, …)  Capitalism, as an economic order to generate and distribute wealth, is an 800 lbs gorilla that always needs some minimal regulation by the collective in a stable and liberal society.  Capitalism is God’s paramount gift to mankind’s pursuit of happiness, but it does not come free.  We recall that the good part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system, and the bad part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system.  And there’s the rub for enlightened governance.

Consummating Corporatist Conspiracies

“Conspiracy - an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.”

George Rebane

Over the last year or two corporatist conspiracies have come into full bloom with the various progressive factions of the government and media as counter-parties.  Today the dominant vehicle for promoting the fruits of such conspiracies is the ‘green new deal’ in all its facets.  What makes the ‘surreptitious’ part of the plan work is that most Americans think that the GND was promoted as a temporary far-left hot flash to attract the socialist cum communist factions of the Democratic Party to support Teams Biden and Pelosi.  Walter Russel Mead goes into some detail in the 23feb21 WSJ (here) to remind us that  -

Those who dismiss ideas like the “green new deal” as mere left-wing fantasies miss the enormous appeal of these programs for corporations looking for new business opportunities. It isn’t only renewable energy companies looking for government mandates and funding. It’s major auto manufacturers dreaming of replacing every gasoline-powered car and truck on the planet with an electric vehicle—and reaping the public-relations reward of looking virtuous. It’s construction companies looking to replace the existing energy infrastructure.

To these corporatists we add our technology oligopolies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.  A blatant example of corporatist trade of corporations’ support for suppression of competition is made in Amazon’s full page ad (see nearby photo) propagandizing of the $15/hr federal minimum wage in the 22feb21 WSJ and other lamestream outlets.  In this unashamed appeal for the government gun, Amazon wants its retail competition quashed through mandatory increases in labor costs for those small enterprises that still offer entry level job opportunities as opposed to integrating expensive new technologies or simply folding their tents.  As justification, the copy in its ad reads –

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.  For millions of workers, that’s 12 years without a wage increase – despite significant cost-of-living increases and the economic toll of the Covid-19 crisis.  That’s why we support the Raise the Wage Act that’s currently being proposed in Congress.  This legislation will increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour four years from now, giving 32 million US workers the raise they deserve while helping accelerate the recovery from the pandemic. … At Amazon, we saw the need to do more.  That’s why in 2018 we decided to provide all our US employees a starting wage of at least $15 an hour.  Since then, applications have doubled, our employees have had an easier time providing for their families, and local economies have seen a boost. …  We’re calling on Congress to pass the Raise the Wage Act.  It’s the right thing to do.

This piece of drivel has more holes in it than a sieve.  Nowhere have there been millions of deserving workers increasing their skill sets for over a decade without getting raises and promotions.  There exists no permanent cohort of American workers condemned to only $7.25/hr for years.  And Amazon’s applications have doubled because misguided government lockdowns have destroyed thousands of retailers among other businesses.  During this time Amazon’s online retailing business has boomed from people ordering their necessaries from home, thereby increasing Amazon’s happy requirement to build more distribution warehouses that need thousands more workers off the unemployment rolls.  (Amazon can afford to train and pay the $15 to carefully selected and appropriately capable new employees.)  The longer the lockdowns stay in place, the more money Amazon makes.  And in return Amazon and the oligarchs promote Democrat vote-buying policies with added benefit of virtue signaling to the nation’s light readers.

And fuhgeddabout “local economies have seen a boost”.  The promise of a $15 minimum wage has had nothing to do with any growth of local economies, growth which is only fostered by businesses that are allowed to operate at current labor costs to provide needed goods and services to people hunkered down in their homes.  Were that not so, then even more growth would come about if the minimum wage were to be $20 or $30 or even higher. As Raise the Wage Act becomes law and labor costs start rising, there will be a net fewer jobs available across the country (1.4M fewer according to the CBO), especially for the uneducated and unskilled who are also promised government checks if they vote correctly.

Walter Russel Mead concludes his adroit commentary with –

Business lobbies around the world are experts in regulatory capture and in diverting subsidies and mandates to serve corporate interests. It won’t be the greenest possible grid that wins the political contest; it will be the system that provides the most-entrenched interests with the highest rents that the best PR firms can present as sufficiently green. As lobbyists and green entrepreneurs rush to cash in on one of history’s greatest bonanzas, pigs will be adorned in green lipstick and white elephants dipped in green dye.

Yes indeed, you scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours.

Sandbox – 23feb21

[Did everyone see yet another shot in the shorts for what was known as American culture?  To propagandize the administration’s C19 response and highlight Trump’s alleged failure, the Bidens and Harrises observed what can only be described as a kabuki ‘moment of silence’ for the C19 500K death-count.  Now what could possibly be confusing about conducting a moment of silence?  All you have to do is STFU and look somber for a bit.  But not in Bumblebrain’s brave new America; there stood the two first couples (with Dr Jill still talking or giving directions to Joe) in front of the WH’s twin staircases festooned with 500 garishly-lit candles, while an off-camera band played an unusually loud and raucous rendition of Amazing Grace – moment of silence??!  Whatever norms we previously observed, henceforth these are to be eliminated wherever they are encountered.  gjr]

Updating Beliefs, Knowledge, and Facts

George Rebane

I’m working on a piece that describes in a more formal and specific sense how people can have their own opinions AND facts, given that they all formulate or update them from the same body of newly arrived evidence.  How can that be?  The answer to that question also goes a long way toward an understanding of how the gulf formed between the polarized factions in our land, and sadly, the difficulty in attempting to bring the two (or more) sides together to a new common understanding, or at least to a workable common ground.

The answer lies in the manner we humans approximate Bayesian inference and reasoning.  Along the way in my studies I stumbled upon a form (there are many) of the Bayes formula that I had to rederive years ago, and surprisingly, since then I have seen used in very few instances.  This formula from Bayes theory is so deliciously intuitive and straightforward to understand, that I thought a quick intro to it in the context of updating everyday beliefs and knowledge would be helpful to the layman, or at least provide some amusement before it disappears into the memory hole.

Before diving in, let’s all appreciate that every piece of knowledge or tenet of our belief system is represented by a probability distribution, whether or not we realize it.  These distributions quantify everything from ‘certain knowledge’ (probability = 1), to items that are more iffy (probability between 0 and 1), and all the way to the ‘impossible’ (probability = 0).  Most people believe with certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, however, most people will know the time of the sunrise only to within a range of values to which they attach an unquantified subjective probability.  The events ‘sun will rise’ vs ‘sun will not rise’ are mutually exclusive with the first having probability of occurrence equaling one (unity, the certain event), and the second having probability zero (the impossible event) – well, there is a very small probability that the sun will not rise tomorrow, but let’s not quibble here.  So these are discrete events described by a simple discrete probability distribution consisting of a one and a zero characterizing our knowledge of these mutually exclusive events.

Dark Days Diary – 21 feb21

George Rebane

Litmus test for liberal mentality.  There is a very reliable test to identify a person sporting a well-developed liberal persuasion.  It can be administered within the comfortable confines of a casual conversation about almost anything socio-political.  A few questions about the person’s viewpoint or perspective, which can then be mildly challenged, will quickly reveal if that person ever considers that there may exist prima facie reasoned and valid viewpoints other than his.  If such a rejection turns out to be the case, the likelihood is very high that you are talking to a liberal.  If your discussant responds with a reasoned defense of his position, especially one that identifies well-formed weaknesses in the counter-position, then the likelihood is low that you are in the presence of a liberal.  In these pages we have years of such evidence.  As an example, a most prominent liberal commenter continues repeating the same pejorative assessment of Donald Trump with the surety that his viewpoint is the only one brought down the mountain on stone tablets.  The counter-arguments don’t exist, since for him they have been invisible.

The country’s disastrous response to the Covid pandemic continues unabated.  Established medicines that would have greatly or even wholly mitigated the health impact of C19 were abolished by the Left from public access during Trump’s administration in order to enable policies that maximized body counts and the destruction of our economy, and established government controls that may have become ensconced destructors of our liberties.

The ‘party of science’ did everything unscientific that was possible to spread unfounded fear across the land, and it continues to this day.  As examples, the early banishment of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin along with mandated draconian lockdowns guaranteed the distress we all have witnessed.  Re-evaluating the effectiveness of HCQ and IVM, our FDA, NIH, and CDC have now begrudgingly permitted their qualified use in treating C19.  (e.g. here)

Right Wing Watchers

George Rebane

For some time now a hard-left commenter signing himself as ‘Nevada County Right Wing Watch’ has been visiting these pages and leaving a trail of his intelligence, understanding, and thoughts.  He claims to be part of an extensive organization, apparently one of several reported in the news that are doing their best to intimidate and shut down all wrong thought in the country.  It’s hard to tell how authentic all this is.  But it’s very easy to tell from both the news and as corroborated on this blog, that the communication between the polarized sides is extremely asymmetrical.  The Left wants to silence the Right.  The Right wants an open forum debate on ideas, happenings, history, economics, etc.

A microcosm of this activity has been recorded in RR’s comment streams for the last 14 years, and in recent years the exchange has become more intense.  During this time the leftwingers come here to repeatedly tell us that our views are grossly in error, evil, and that no one cares what we think – and yet they come.  All of them appear to think that the conservetarian ideas promoted by me and others are unique, constrained to a tiny group in these foothills, and only represent fringe far-right thought.  They have no idea of the existence of the tens of millions of every-day Americans with whom we are ideological soulmates.  From the content of their comments, it’s clear they think that if only they could silence RR, then such wrong thinking would be eliminated from the land.

In the following I present a couple of extracted comment threads from recent posts to give readers a clearer picture of the virulence experienced here and, no doubt, elsewhere.  We start with the contribution of our ever-vigilant Right Wing Watcher in a comment thread under ‘$15/hr Dumbth on the March’.

$15/hr Dumbth on the March

You always get less of what you tax more.  Eternal Truth #461

George Rebane

For some years now RR has chronicled and mourned America’s decline in intellectual resources and critical thinking skills.  This national dash to dumbth continues (nay, accelerates) as a purposeful process by progressives who have carefully husbanded public education at ALL levels for the last half century to achieve today’s new lows in pedagogy.  Various writers and academics have observed this process for some decades now – Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) are some earlier works that come to mind.

Most recently we have a comprehensive essay – ‘The Decline of Intelligence in the West’ - by educational theorist and literary critic David Solway that cites the work of many psychologists and cognitive scientists who have documented our “plummet in cognitive abilities” over the course of these years.  These assessments come from a broad range of socio-political ideologues – e.g. Gruber’s on-target assertions on “the stupidity of the American voter” that would help pass Obamacare as his next step toward socialism.

Consideration of this descent is not an idle undertaking for those who want to sustain America’s achievements and support its continuing ascent in the 21^st century as the world’s ‘shining city on a hill’.  Denying the data, as Solway points out, hastens our decline, and serves the aims of globalists yearning for a post-national America.  Science historian Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture (2000) observes that “a society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.”  This truth is embraced by autocratic elites everywhere, and our cynical central planners daily devise and implement stratagems to keep America maximally dysfunctional, knowing how that concentrates power in government.  Our Founders’ realization of this was summarized in Jefferson’s immortal ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

Today we see an example of such a stratagem about to be run by the American voter one more time – the next rise in federally mandated wage controls in the imposition of the $15/hr minimum wage.  Without going through the catalog of damages this will do to the poorest already in and those seeking to enter our workforce, I want to point out that almost no one in the country knows how and when America came to accept a minimum wage.  That is one of the many parts of our history that has been wiped from our schools’ curricula in their dispensation of dumbth.

Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recounts (here) the “racially discriminatory roots” of America’s minimum wage laws born in the 1930s, and of today’s Pelosi-led progressive prevarications designed to bamboozle the ignorant and free into supporting the Dems’ $15 vote buying scheme.  For openers, the minimum wage does NOT provide the breadth of economic benefit to the claimed target populations of women and the poor.  But it will kill more jobs (1.4M according to the CBO) and remove another tranche of entry-level rungs of the economic ladder from those who need it the most.

But the most politically damaging part of the governments’ minimum wages is the history of their introduction and implementation.  As Riley recounts, minimum wages were introduced to the country’s North in the attempt to stem the migration of blacks from the economically bleak agricultural South.  The North’s black-excluding unions lobbied Congress where compliant “lawmakers complained openly about the ‘superabundance’ and ‘large aggregation of Negro labor’, and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.”  They knew that “low-income minorities stand to lose the most from lifting the wage floor because they are overrepresented among less-skilled and less-experienced workers.”  And Team Pelosi, with Bumblebrain in the wheelhouse now, have not forgotten the benefits of that policy tool.

Perhaps most damning of today’s progressive narrative would be to recall JFK’s attempt in the Senate to protect New England industry by promoting minimum wages that would price blacks out of the low end of the labor markets.  There in 1957 the young senator and soon our future president lectured a NAACP official, stating, “Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete, … and when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”

We conclude with an apropos picture of America’s dumbth on the march.  This is the Democrats’ siren song to their incomprehensively loyal African-American constituencies with carefully cultured deficits in history and economics.

California Catastrophe Chronicles – 17feb21 (updated 19feb21)

George Rebane

It’s time to start a new feature on RR now that the country’s market-mangling socialists-in-denial are in charge, both in super-majority California, and now in Washington DC.  Add to that the other Democrat-dominated states that look to California to ‘lead the way’ with the march to Marxism, and you’re looking at a perfect coast-to-coast public policy pandemic.  Hard to figure how things could get worse.  I’d like to differentiate what these Chronicles will cover from the postings and comments under our Dark Days Diary, which will draw topics from the rest of the country, and possibly the world (e.g. Biden’s geo-strategic, trade, immigration, and environmental policies).  But here let’s stick to California’s self-inflicted auto da fe.

For openers, the smart/productive ones are either gone or still going.  Our progressives have been denying this easily verifiable fact for the last few years.  They’ll have a more difficult time hanging on to their myths when the new census numbers reduce California’s House districts by at least one.

Sacramento demonstrates its incompetency by the hour.  We still can’t get the C19 vaccines distributed in a timely manner to the venues that need them.  Our leftwing bureaucrats (they’re all leftwing) have pissed away a confirmed $30B of federal pandemic relief dollars to criminals, fraudsters, and convicts residing in our jails, and even across the country.  By some estimates, that amount may reach $100B before the monies are accounted. (more here)

And then there are the majority of Californians who can’t quite put it all together.  When presented with Republican and Democrat public policies, the Republican policies win hands down.  This is subsequently demonstrated when such policies are put to a vote by our electorate instead of quietly run through Sacramento’s sausage mill.  But when the same voters look at politicians on the stump, they have a hard time saying no to the scumbags who promise everything and deliver none of it.

This phenomenon is expressed in other mainly large urban areas.  It is most likely due to the growth of national dumbth (topic of an upcoming post) as recognized by a growing group of academics, psychologists, and commentators.  Yes Virginia, national dumbth is real, ubiquitous, and not just an isolated tenet of Rebane Doctrine.

[19feb21 update]  The recall roars onward.  California Assemblyman Kevin Kiley emailed – “The latest signature count is 1,689,000, and "alarmed party leaders" are panicking, making all hands on deck calls to try to head off this extraordinary citizens’ movement.”  The linked Politico article makes for interesting reading about the political dynamics now in a frenzy over the Newsom recall initiative.  The odds of replacing our idiot governor are now a solid smidgen above the chance of a snowball in hell.

Scattershots – 16feb21 (updated 18feb21)

George Rebane

Recalling Gov Gavin Nuisance.  The 'Recall Newsom 2020', and similar movements, reported last week that they had exceeded the 1.5M signatures needed to put the recall proposition on the ballot of a special election that would be scheduled for sometime this fall.  Many thinking Californians and millions across the country agree that Gavin has been a disaster for the state – for openers, bungling the C19 response and exacerbating policies that have accelerated our Great Exodus.  Almost everything he touches turns to crap.  These signature counts have been reported by NBC (here), FN (here), and Newsweek (here).  But that news don’t make no never mind to leftwing columnists like our Union’s George Boardman who confidently reports (here) that only 600K signatures have been collected.  Who still says that you can’t have your very own facts to support your own opinions?

[update]  A correspondent writes me that, “After two months of elected officials across the country saying that there is no need to verify signatures from the 2020 election, one politician is clinging to this very process to salvage his career. Governor Gavin Newsom of California is now seeking to ensure that all of the signatures collected in the effort to oust him be verified thoroughly. What changed? Is the integrity of one public vote more important than another?”

[17feb21 update]  Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk show host, dead at 70.  RIP.

Recall Newsom numbers.  From the comments below, George Boardman’s quietly outdated number claims are deemed correct by none other than the indominatable Steven Frisch himself.  Frisch asserts that Boardman’s couching of “…backers have submitted less (sic) than 600,000 of the 1.5 million valid signatures they need…” makes it clear to readers that to date the signature gatherers are woefully short of the number needed by St Patrick’s Day.  What he seems to ignore is that Boardman’s hopeful report was based on cited data collected and validated by 6 January 2021.  At that time the statewide cumulative summary consisted of 723,886 signatures received by the SecState, of those 485,650 signatures were put through a validation process, and of those 410,087 signatures or 84.44% were accepted as valid.  Over a week ago the various ‘Recall Newsom’ organizations reported that over 1.5M signatures had been collected.  If that validation rate holds, then last week’s expected number of valid signatures numbered about 1,266,600.

All this means that a total of at least 1,776,410 signatures need to be collected to meet the 1.5M valid signatures requirement.  And I'd bet the ranch that today there are at a minimum several hundred false flag leftwing activists out there filling petitions with invalid signatures.

[18feb21 update]  To put a ribbon on my take of Mr Boardman’s column, IMHO he wrote the usual gleeful leftwinger's report of another insipient and pending failure of California’s GOP.  To get the desired message across, he cited a grossly dated summary of gathered and validated ‘recall Newsom’ signatures - a very dynamic process, especially in its closing months - that appeared to intend a miscommunication.  Believing Boardman’s prognosis, the lightly-read reader of his column would walk away thinking that no way in hell could the Repubs get enough signatures to put the governor’s recall on the ballot.  At a minimum, such commentary cum reporting was not valid in any sense of the word.

BTW, the most recent report from the 'recall Newsom' organizations cite collected signatures well above 1.5M, with the intention to bring that total to 2M so as to insure that more than the required 1.4M+change signatures are available for validation by CA's SOS.  We shall see.

Sandbox -15feb21

[There was a graveside service for Brother ToddJ this afternoon at Greenwook Memorial Gardens in Grass Valley.  About 50 of us attended the 2pm gathering conducted under a light rainfall.  A pastor officiated and several of Todd's relatives and friends gave their remembrances.  A couple of current public personages were also in attendance.  It was a warm and homey gathering, and a very befitting recognition for one of our formerly prominent local citizens. RIP.  gjr]

Ruminations – 13feb21 (updated 17feb21)

A happy finish gilds everything, however unfitting the means may have been.  Which explains why at times it should be the rule to offend the rules, when it is not possible by other methods to attain a happy ending.  Gracian #66

George Rebane

‘My way or the highway!’ were the responses to the 13feb21 column by my favorite conservative Union columnist (here) wondering how Biden’s calls to unify would work as the country's Left continues to vilify the tens of millions on the Right who voted for Trump.  The strong answer from our locals echo their national response, and confirms that there is no middle ground.

‘On second thought, no witnesses needed.’  After they sobered up, that was the Dems’ second cut this morning at wanting to call witnesses.  The Repubs’ first witness would have been Mrs  Pelosi answering questions of what/when she knew about the Capitol riot and a whole lot of other stuff.  Her testimony would have resulted in either Perjury City (and an orange jumpsuit) or blowing the Dems case, not only for this impeachment, but also for every little lie and dirty trick that went down over the last four years.  No, no, no, can’t let that bird sing.

Our Supes have been pretty spineless during Newsom’s insane lockdown diktats.  There has been no science or logic to back up statewide and local policies to, say, prevent indoor eating at restaurants.  Other neighboring counties – e.g. Yuba and Placer – already have indoor eating as brave restaurateurs allow their customers to decide on their aversion to C19 risk.  In Nevada County our eateries cower compliantly under the leadership of county officials who dare not raise a peep against almighty Sacramento.  Well, today we read Board Chair Dan Miller will put on the next agenda an item “to further discuss state restrictions.”  I guess we’ll now inch forward one vertebrae at a time.

California mistakenly gave convicts over $30B federal C19 relief dollars.  That according to Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-6^th district) who stated today that further evidence has emerged indicating that a lot of that money wound up in the hands of LA and Bay area gangs which they have used to buy guns.  Any past increase in criminal gun violence has always been used to launch the next leftwing assault on the 2^nd Amendment to roll back gun rights for law abiding citizens.  That is beyond progressive logic, but simply a continuing scam to eliminate civilian arms.  Great Divide.

[14feb21 update]  More Covid fraud exposed.  For most of the past year RR has examined the C19 pandemic in detail with analytical models and numerous cited sources.  As reported, my own findings have always indicated that there has been something funny going on in the feds’ C19 reporting and recommended response policies – things didn’t tie, and most certainly did not follow cited science.  The scope of and responses to the whole pandemic seemed to be politically motivated and manipulated.  Early on I also examined the 'excess deaths' aspect of C19 and found them to be minimal as did others (here).  Recently more detailed analyses of CDC releases expose how the institution has played fast and loose with its reporting of C19 cases and deaths.  A summary of the findings are here, and a detailed report of how the data was manipulated can be downloaded here. (H/T to reader)

[15feb21 update]  Equity on parade.  So, the guy who made $8/hr will now get $15.  The guy making $11 gets $15, and the guy who made $15 gets $15.  And as a result, that hard worker is on the bottom again.  (And don’t even start me on the well-known principle that a rising minimum wage floats all prices.)

Covid deaths as you like them.  A regular reader sent the following graphic that he dug up on the CDC website (here).  He makes a cogent argument that IF these reported numbers of simple body counts are true, then there are indeed ‘excess deaths’ (from the projected norm) that can be plausibly attributed to C19.  At this point of (C19 and other) stats flying this way and that, it is hard to determine what to believe, since both journalism and govt agencies have now succumbed to publishing injections of political propaganda.  But for completeness, you are invited to make up your own mind.

Billionaire Bill “has a master plan for battling climate change” and ending our dependency on carbon and other bad stuff.  He will reveal it all in his How to Avoid Climate Disaster that will be published this month.  Using a lot of “analysis”, Mr Gates has been able to reduce the whole thing to “a simple plan” that most of us should be able to understand.  He has started a couple of green venture funds with other very rich people, and, of course, he has a funded a sophisticated lobbying organization that can buy politicians by the dozens.  The latter to make sure that appropriate laws and regs get passed so that the venture funds make a lot of money investing in green start-ups protected from open markets by the government gun.  (more here)

The leftwing commenters to Jo Ann’s 13feb21 Union column have a hard time understanding her point about Biden’s call for national unity.  It was Biden who issued the call, not Jo Ann.  All she’s doing is asking how one can respond to such a call if the Left continues to call people like her bad names and accusing her of doing bad stuff in being a Republican who supported Trump.  Understanding that seems to be a bridge too far.

[17feb21 update]  NAACP sues Trump and Giuliani under guise of violating the 1871 KKK Act as reported in the 17feb21 WSJ.  That is another blatant exercise by the transformed leftwing civil rights group to enlarge the country’s division, keep reminding blacks that they continue as victims, and that they should remain on the plantation cared for by their elitist black political leaders who have learned to play the game.  (more here)

Texans are freezing their symbolic balls off.  The energy richest state of the Union has its energy generation and distribution grid and its energy market in general so badly mangled by its (Republican) state government kowtowing to federal mandates, that there is not enough functioning power generating capacity available as inclement weather knocks out their fair weather wind turbines.  Playing ball with the global warming Left invariably gets the bat shoved up your butt sideways as California already has demonstrated.  Global cooling – it’s a comin’.

 

‘Luxury Floating Real Estate’

George Rebane

Living on a huge manmade island may be the thing of the future for those who can afford it and want to escape from the ever more contested and politically roiling lands that cover about 29% of the Earth’s 197,000,000 sq mi surface.  The first of these islands is being built off the Bahamas by an outfit that calls itself The Blue Estate (here).  Multiples of such islands are planned to reside off Dubai in the Persian Gulf which are advertised to be miniature havens of German, Swiss, Italian, and Swedish culture.  The Blue Estate plan envisions an island measuring 1,500 by 1,000 meters as shown below.

The island’s size, modular construction, and high (130ft) free board, augmented by another 100+ foot extendable windwalls, we are told will assure the structure’s calm survival in the roughest of hurricanes.  The island will also have propulsion and guidance so that it can transit open ocean areas to avoid storms.

Yet to be explained is to what extent the island will be energy self-sufficient using solar, wind, and wave energy extraction technologies.  Its home area will be in international waters, minutes by air away from Miami and Bahamian towns.  Apparently, food and other consumables will be imported.

The community will also be economically self-sufficient by being home to clean commercial enterprises and the successfully retired.  The commercial activities will be heavily IT oriented with ample satellite connectivity.  I can envision that it might also be home to small R&D firms engaged in computer science, genomics, and similar areas.  Located in a tropical sea with abundant (300+ days/yr) sunshine, the island can also operate a sizeable nearby sea farm containing various flora supported by an underwater matrix which will give rise to a whole new ecosystem of rich sea life similar to what exist around oil drilling platforms and the Navy’s ‘kelp farm’ (off San Clemente Island) on which I worked years ago.

One of the potential attractions of such seaborne communities may be their ability to provide social stability through a discriminative selection of residents.  It is clear to me that some such island communities will emphasize cultural cohesion of their residents.  Offering such cohesive environments seems to be the goal of the planned Persian Gulf islands that will focus on providing culture-specific resort living and holidays.

As an entrepreneur and systems nerd, I am drawn to the dreaming and planning of such habitats, and in the present case could go on for pages contemplating different concepts and their supporting technical, commercial, environmental, educational, cultural, … support systems and institutions.  But to me the problem of having the seas support a considerable population of such islands in different parts of the world will come down to the solution of the inevitable political problems that will arise and need solutions that can be implemented globally.

Because these island communities will attract (and be limited to) the smart, productive, and ‘financially capable’ people, they will naturally become hotbeds of wealth generation.  And they will therefore become tax and tariff prey for the land-based political grifters who maintain their collectivist regimes by bamboozling their poor and huddled masses yearning to be free.  These people need state supplied succor that their political leaders will not allow them to generate for all the reasons we have discussed in these pages.

In such political landscapes those who can will escape to available locales with lower taxes, regulations, and abundant liberties.  This we see happening in today’s American migrations, and have witnessed for decades (centuries?) in Europe and Asia where the productive congregate in enclaves such as Singapore, Taiwan, and formerly Hong Kong.  Therefore, new political paradigms need to be discovered if the financially and culturally attractive island communities are to thrive and multiply.  Else the early ones will just be economically harvested to oblivion by the land-based stifling autocracies that see such free and enterprising enclaves as low-hanging fruit.

Much more to be said about all this.

States Galore – it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

After three weeks into the Biden administration and Democrat congressional majorities, we have all noticed the latest facet of how the evil party operates.  As Bill McGurn observes in the 9feb21 WSJ (here), “Democrats are happy to throw over any rule, custom, or convention that gets in their way.”  In these short weeks the examples of their modus operandi are legion and growing.  The biggest hoax pushed by Biden in his inauguration speech was that he would be “the unifier”.  Well, that turned out to be the biggest load of crap right out the gate.

These changes reach all the way from the vindictive second impeachment, through partisan ramming through of the humongous $1.9T ‘relief package’, to the butt stupid repeal of and effective EO to successfully fight the country’s other pandemic – our ongoing and tragic opioid addiction.  In the latter case Biden revoked Trump’s waiver of physicians having to get some extraneous training before being able to prescribe buprenorphine – an enormously effective treatment for opioid addiction that has demonstrated itself in several other countries, e.g. France, where it is widely dispensed to addicts.  To reinstate and expand the use of this therapeutic will require navigating a bureaucratic morass while people continue to die. (more here)

But in addition to violating the Byrd Rule that prevents packing budget ‘reconciliation’ with non-budget items that could not pass on their own merits, and moving toward eliminating the 60-vote filibuster, and eliminating the Electoral College, the biggest Democrat travesty is their intention to ideologically pack not only SCOTUS, but also the Senate.  The latter ploy would be achieved by making Washington DC into our 51^st state, guaranteeing the addition of two more perennially progressive leftwing senators.

What no one seems to understand yet is that this can of worms, once opened, can be enjoyed by both sides.  If politically proven partisan cities can easily be made into states by the party in power, then what will prevent the Republicans from doing the same when they again become top dogs in DC?  Why can they not then pick a city or two in America’s heartland that are reliably Republican, and make them into our newest states?  There must be some Democrat with a 3-digit IQ who has thought of that possibility.

So, if the Dems go ahead with this, the biggest rule change of all, then they must strongly believe that they are on the cusp of making the United States into a permanent one-party state, as we have long surmised in these pages.  Then today’s visibly burgeoning autocracies in the leftwing controlled federal government, heavily populated states (led, of course, by California), and large urban centers will compliantly meld into the national tyranny that half the country has feared during recent decades.

And the alternative to one-party tyranny will then be a destabilizing binge of making states galore until the whole thing collapses.

Sandbox – 9feb21

[OK, what is the Dems’ ‘logic’ in pursuing Trump’s second impeachment trial in the Senate? gjr]

That Which Must Not Be Known

George Rebane

In free societies merit and its reward will always seek a commensurate level.

As we enter the Biden years, America’s Left has a once in a lifetime opportunity to permanently tip the scales and guide the country into the Marxist future they have been seeking since the Bolshevik Revolution a century ago.  Following Lenin’s dictum in educating our young, our Left, in its co-opting of the Democratic Party, has had unfettered control for the last half-century of the country’s public education.  And by all available observables and measurables (e.g. National Center for Educational Statistics) they have now produced an America that in the large reflects what the late Steve Allen referred to as “national dumbth”.  Today merit has been replaced by mediocrity (more here). The best illustration of this is the political behavior of our least well-read neighbors who have shown themselves to be robotically compliant to the state and its corporatist manufactured reality.

The eternal goal of collectivist autocracies is to evolve humankind into an amalgamated society that will respond reliably to top-down rule.  A major tool for creating such a population has been the successful decoupling of merit and reward in the American mind.  This has been achieved by appeal to the siren songs of ‘social justice’ and ‘equity’, each having malleable and/or implied meanings that are fashioned daily to promote the latest state diktat.

The demonstrable aspect of the merit/reward principle in determining human behavior has some compelling corollaries -

1. Merit always has an open market price.
2. When reward for recognized merit is withheld, the level of delivered merit declines.
3. When reward for recognized merit is lavished, it invites an increased supply of merit.

This universal principle is totally counter to collectivist ideologies in general and today’s progressivist narrative in particular.  The command-and-control elites of autocratic governments understand the merit/reward relationship, and use it cynically in shaping public policies designed to hide its teachings.