Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 22jun21

[ (Critical Race Theory) isn’t really education at all, not in the sense in which the term has been understood in the post-Enlightenment era. It is closer to pre-Enlightenment religious instruction: the imparting of doctrinal truth with the practical aim of saving souls and reordering the world. Hence its migration from college campuses to K-12 schools, where its practitioners expect to find supple and more-suggestible minds. They have taken to heart the old Jesuit maxim about the first seven years of life. – Gerard Baker in the 22jun21 WSJ (here)]

The Joys of Juneteenth

George Rebane

As most Americans know, today we are a nation fractured into tribes of various victimized and victimizer identity groups.  This new social order started gelling in the national consciousness under Barack Obama, hardened during Trump’s contended presidency, and is on schedule to become a fully petrified structure of America’s society under the pro-Marxist policies of the Biden/Harris/Pelosi presidency.

A contributing policy for realizing that anti-American future will require a constant and heightened flow of reminders in the public news, entertainment, sports, and social media for which our lamestream is now experienced and fully prepared to support.  To that end, and as of today, we have started adding national holidays to remind everyone of our history’s warts, each of which will be designed to maintain the sense of ongoing victimhood for every tribe to which an individual can claim membership and find meaning.

Biden signed into law ‘Juneteenth’, the newest federal holiday that will annually celebrate June 19^th as the real day of freedom from slavery for the nation’s blacks.  It will fly in the face of our historical July 4^th Independence Day which has already been losing its luster in the minds of the various progressive cohorts.

And now we may look forward to other aggrieved groups with heightened consciousness, in the name of equity arising to remind us of their milestones and demand that more days be set aside for their particular observations, celebrations, and remembrance.  I can see our Latino, Asian, women, LGTBQ, …, and European (aka white supremacist) contingencies, all demanding equal recognition and opportunity to remind us of America’s historical blights and blemishes, to provide frequent recounts throughout the year that the only thing exceptional about the United States is its provenance of evil.

So, we start with Juneteenth today to celebrate when the blacks of Galveston, Texas were told that they were no longer slaves on 19 June 1865.

Our Latinos can claim the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848 that made Mexico cede most of today’s American west to the US.  February 2^nd would be a day of remembrance and mourning the beginning of an epoch during which Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics were relegated to second-class citizenship as newly minted Americans.  (It would also serve to keep the fires of Reconquista burning.)

Asian-Americans will demand December 17^th as their special day of recognition and liberation from second-class status, and a time to remind all of ongoing discrimination against Asians.  On 17 December 1943 Congress passed the Magnuson Act which did away with all exclusion acts that primarily focused on denying Asians immigration rights, which began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Women of all shades, shapes, and biological origins will want to have August 18^th be designated a federal holiday.  For it was on 18 August 1920 that women’s suffrage ended with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment.  It will be a day of marches and speeches reminding us, not only of the past, but of the here and now when women still have to fight ‘glass ceilings’, unequal pay, and the right to be masters of their own bodies.

And of course, the LGTBQ tribe will want its annual place of pride in the federal sun.  They can militate for September 21^st as a national holiday, for it was on 21 September 1996 that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) was passed by Congress and became effective.  This started a period (1996-2020) during which SCOTUS passed five landmark rulings to the benefit of our LGBTQ group.

We can go on, but let’s just finish with a new national observance of the evils of European culture in America.  Actually, this federal holiday will not be demanded by Americans of European descent.  Instead, it will be established by a woke Congress as a day to recognize and never forget that white supremacy continues as the nation’s foremost threat and abiding enemy.  It is the ever-present possibility of a white supremacist insurrection against which our government must always be prepared to defend with new laws, regulations, processes, procedures, and agencies.  That day of national vigilance will receive an appropriate name like ‘Democracy Preservation Day’ or ‘Insurrection Day’, and will, of course, be celebrated on January 6^th, during which we will be regaled and reminded by demogauges of all stripes of how close we came to ‘losing our democracy’ on 6 January 2021.

Critical race theory lurks in schools (addended)

[Terry McLaughlin is a regular columnist for The Union.  This column, posted here by permission, appears in the 17jun21 Union and its online edition (here).  This piece is the first of a three part series.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Parents are becoming aware of the use of critical race theory in their children’s instruction, particularly as distance learning has given them a window into their classrooms.

Since the California Department of Education in March adopted an ethnic studies curriculum based upon critical race theory, (the fourth version, after more than 100,000 earlier objections), we have seen parents sending open letters to schools and passionately speaking up in protest at school board meetings across California and the nation.

The curriculum presents the view that our legal, economic and social institutions are inherently racist. Critical race theory advocates for, among other things, “liberating” students from capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the second version of the curriculum, much to the dismay of critical race advisers, some of whom resigned.

The 100,000 objections resulted in some of the most egregious material being removed from successive versions of the curriculum, such as convicted murderers of police being portrayed as positive role models and a benign narrative presented about Pol Pot, whose regime murdered as many as 30 percent of Cambodians.

Documents from the Santa Clara County Office of Education, obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo, indicate a series of teacher-training sessions were held on deploying ethnic studies in the classroom. The leaders encouraged teachers to hide materials from parents. One panelist said, “We have to be extra careful about what is being said, since we can’t just say something controversial now that we’re in people’s homes {with remote learning}.”

In Missouri, a teacher encouraged other teachers to remove from school websites accessible to parents any classroom materials that promote ideas such as “white privilege.”

Attendees at a training session in Wake County, North Carolina, received a handout that read, “You can’t let parents deter you from the work.”

Media and supporters have given us the impression that critical race theory is a harmless idea which, as described by a CNN columnist, “seeks to understand and address inequality and racism.” But if these ideas are harmless, why are some teachers and school officials attempting to hide the content from parents? What kind of education program suggests materials be hidden from parents?

In California, apparently even mathematics “upholds capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.” This statement is from “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction,” a set of six instruction books for California math teachers.

The workbooks offer “critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms.” Examples given of white supremacy in math include when “students are tracked,” when “the focus is on getting the right answer,” when “students are required to show their work,” or when “control of classrooms is valued over students’ agency over their learning.”

There are some ideas of value within the 82 pages of workbook No.1, such as addressing errors by students not as failure but as an opportunity to expand upon their understanding of the math concept. But these methods would be of value to all students, regardless of race, economic status, or ability.

Yet the workbook’s focus is clearly and repetitively on how “white supremacy culture shows up in the math classroom.”

Are these workbooks being used to train your child’s teacher? Check it out at https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

Disguising her voice for fear of retaliation, a California public school teacher recently called a radio program to lament about how she was required by school administrators to attend a critical race theory seminar, and was told that “facts, data, and the scientific method are white concepts.”

“So,” she said, “if you use facts and data to disprove an argument against an oppressed person, you are proving you are racist because facts and data are the result of whiteness.”

As part of her training, this teacher was given a 20-page handout published by Epoch Education, a training center in Oakland. The first page instructed her to “Express skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy”.

The document included articles about white privilege and how racism will never end. The Epoch Education website displays a video narrated by program specialist Nicole Kukral from the San Juan Unified School District, east of Sacramento, in which she explains how she created an “equity audit rubric” for use by California districts to evaluate social studies curriculum being considered for adoption.

Kukral instructs teachers to evaluate history textbooks in a positive light only if the narrators were “people of color and other diverse communities.” There seems to be no concern regarding whether the history is accurate, only that history told by western white men should be considered suspect.

The fourth version of critical race theory curriculum is riddled with inaccuracies and omits facts that are at variance with its narrative of oppression, imperialism, white supremacy, and exploitation.

Nonetheless, the California Department of Education approved this version, one which The Wall Street Journal calls “radical indoctrination.” Has this curriculum been implemented in your child’s school district?

Gov. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign into law Assembly Bill 331, which would make it a requirement of graduation for every public high school student in California.

Left to their own devices, children are naturally color blind. We are desecrating the legacy of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King with curriculum that teaches our kids to judge themselves and each other based upon the color of their skin — the very definition of racism.

Ms McLaughlin lives in Grass Valley.

[Addendum]  "A question needs to be put to the left in America. If your adversaries in politics are indeed fascists, racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and bigots, as you describe them, why would, or should, such people accept and embrace your rule over them—simply because you managed to rack up a plurality of ballots in an election? Free elections to decide who governs are, it is said, the central sacrament of democracy. But why should people who are described with every synonym for "deplorable" not reject the politics of compromise and instead work constantly to overthrow the rule of people who so detest them?"    Patrick J. Buchanan (more here)

The Most Atrocious Tax of All (updated 18jun21)

‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

The country’s Democratic radical Left and Team Biden are prepared to expand asset taxes and introduce unrealized capital gains as another taxable form of ‘income’.  If they are successful, this will be the final nail in the coffin of American capitalism, the demonstrated most efficient way to generate and distribute wealth ever devised.

Income – The valuable return or yield from any kind of property, patent, service, etc. received in negotiable instruments, such as nominal dollars, that is spendable in an exchange for goods, services, or labor.  (Passive unrealized appreciation of any asset is NOT income.)

It boggles the sensible mind to hear that government has become so rapacious that it now wants to install a new, game-changing layer of taxes to perennially start taking more of what you have already earned and paid taxes on.  This atrocious taxing scheme comes in two parts.  They will apply one tax rate on the mark-to-market value of assets you already own, and another tax rate on your annual income augmented by the annual unrealized appreciation of those assets.  In other words, they will also perniciously count as income a fictitious amount of money that you never received or spent.

It is this malign definition of income that gave rise to the recent ‘news’ of billionaires paying miniscule tax rates of the order of 1% that came to light after their tax returns were hacked and distributed by the Left.  Where did such small tax rates come from when we know that the top 1% earners pay 40% of the nation’s income taxes?  The answer is easy when you slip in the new Democrat definition of income to include the appreciation of what they already own and have paid taxes on.  Using the accepted definition of income (see above), a wealthy high earner may pay at, say, a 30% rate on such income.  If his income last year was $10M, then his tax bill was $3M.  But if he was a billionaire worth, say, $10B, and his assets appreciated 10%, then Democrats want to call the unrealized $1B gain as ‘income’ and make his tax bill 30% of $1,010,000,000 or $303,000,000.  And if he only paid $3M, then the Left and their lamestream scream that billionaires tax rate is only 0.3% = 3,000,000/1,010,000,000.  And you can hear the envy chorus of the nation’s double dummies holler ‘Yeah, make him pay his fair share like I do!’

Scattershots – 14jun21 (updated 20jun21)

George Rebane

Kamala Harris has been Bumblebrain’s presumptive replacement before 2022.  The thought was that Biden would resign due to health or family or some other reason, Kamala would step in and then be the reigning incumbent ready for a full term in 2024.  It all made sense before the Dems and the country were exposed to Kackling Kamala who has made a fool of herself since inauguration as reflected by the new lows in her approval rating (here).  Now Bumblebrain, even with all of his G7 gaffes (here and here), looks better than his erstwhile VP, which puts the Dems in a quandary.  Everyone knows Joe ‘the Gaffe’ Biden will not be prepared for a second term even if he does finish his first term.  I think the Dems’ new problem is that, given three more years of Kackling Kamala, she also will be unelectable in 2024.  So everyone now is quietly looking for a Plan B.

[15jun21 update]  Democrats don’t have a lock on butt stupid.  That was proved by Republicans, 203 of whom voted for a House bill – ‘See the Crisis Act’ - that would require Kamala to visit the border before she goes on any other travels. (more here)  Such a proscription by one branch of our government on another is not only politically infeasible, it’s also blatantly unconstitutional.  I have no idea why so many Republicans signed on to this political stunt that had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, and made them look like idiots for the attempt.  Both parties have their lapses from sanity, it’s only the relative frequency of these lapses that make the Democrats clear winners in the competition.

[19jun21 update]  ‘Tax break’ and ‘tax loophole’ – where did these terms come from?  This question struck me this morning as we were reading the morning newspapers (at our house these are The Union and WSJ).  After little noodling and discussion, we came to the conclusion that these terms cement in our national understanding the notion that our earnings first and foremost belong to the government.  They may justifiably be taxed or retrieved by the government, at its pleasure and to any extent.  ‘Break’ is meant to convey the meaning of a dispensation and reduction of the tribute that was previously remitted by a large now-favored cohort of taxpayers.  With a tax break they now get to enjoy an interlude or break from having to pay their formerly full fare to the IRS.  Note that tax break is a sometime thing, it is not a permanent reduction in our tax policy and may be revoked without prejudice by the government at any time.  The money is still theirs, you’re just getting a temporary break.

Now a tax loophole is something completely opposite – it is a lawful means of reducing taxes, discovered individually, and valid for an indefinite period until some activist or government worthy successfully militates for closing it.  By its label, a ‘loophole’ connotes something sordid, sneaky, and less than upright.  People taking advantage of tax loopholes, no matter how legal, are assigned to inhabit the nether regions of our ethical society.  A society in which good people would not stoop so low as to busy themselves going through the small print of our tax code to ferret out ways in which only they can reduce their tax and not pay their ‘fair share’.  When found, such loopholes are seldom shared for the same reasons successful investment algorithms are not shared.  But the idea is the same as for tax break – in exercising a loophole, you are denying government its just deserts from your earnings and assets.

‘Some people can be fooled all of the time, and all people can be fooled only some of the time, but most people can be fooled most of the time.’  I recall constructing that shibboleth for one of my past posts.  Giving it more thought now makes it illuminate how the majority of our electorate is constantly bamboozled by the lamestream media as revealed by various polls.  It is also easy to confirm by comparing coverage and interpretations of undisputed facts (almost all government sourced) and related issues reported by the lamestream and the admittedly rightwing outlets.  The asymmetry is in that much of today’s news never sees the light of day on the pages of NYT, WaPo, et al, and the programs of CNN, MSNBC, et al. And what they do report is more often than not contextually false.  This observation alone explains away why such a large contingent of Americans willfully swallow, tolerate, and repeat the growing body of woke insanities du jour – they know no better.

[20jun21 update]  The impending passage of SR1 – the Senate’s version of the horrendous House HR1 – would change the scope of our constitutional federalism and permanently ensconce the nationwide means for voter fraud and irregularities to benefit Democrats.  That party has been issuing a constant stream of lies claiming that the states’ various voter integrity projects will deny the vote to minorities.  The facts from recent elections tell a totally different story.  In sum, there is no evidence that requirements like voter ID, pre-registration, and election day proximal voting periods have ever reduced minority voter turnout or lower shares of voting by registered voters.  This makes no nevermind to the Left that keeps repeating the same lies day after day.  Write your senators to oppose SR1.

Sandbox – 11jun21

[There are a couple of House bills that will break up Amazon and other big tech companies.  “One of the proposed measures, titled the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, seeks to require structural separation of Amazon and other big technology companies to break up their businesses. It would make it unlawful for a covered online platform to own a business that “utilizes the covered platform for the sale or provision of products or services” or that sells services as a condition for access to the platform. The platform company also couldn’t own businesses that create conflicts of interest, such as by creating the ‘incentive and ability’ for the platform to advantage its own products over competitors.”  This would change the face of online businesses; thoughts?  gjr]

Inflation – Up close and personal

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”  Milton Friedman

George Rebane

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And what inflation brings."  (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)  And more specifically we need to be forewarned that inflation is like “the fog, that comes on little cat feet”, and then surreptitiously consumes our plans for the future.

Most people know that the government, through our Federal Reserve, controls the “quantity of money” which pursues available goods and services in our economy.  Fewer know that inflation is really an additional tax on your assets, which for their procurement you already have paid taxes on the inflated income.  Inflation is then another tax, more insidious and mostly invisible that takes buying power out of our pockets and transfers it into the hands of government politicians and their bureaucrats.  And it is they who get the benefits of ‘new money’, because those who get to spend it first, spend it with the value of the ‘old money’ before dilution sets in and the markets react.  By the time you get it, prices have already reflected the additional dollars chasing the same goods and services.

The blame for the return of inflation is ours.  It is we who voted in the conmen who promised us all kinds of goodies that would cost us nothing – it was always the other guy who would foot the bill.  And we have kept doing it year after year.

The other tax that inflation brings is the usual tax that doesn’t even need to be raised, at least for a while until we’re convinced that our government needs to make even more “investments” in our behalf.  The usual tax bill, not only goes up in nominal dollars, but also increases in the so-called ‘bracket creep’ which puts our inflated dollar amounts into the next higher rate categories.

In the final analysis, as we have said here for years, the dollar must be destroyed in order to satisfy all the obligations – now amounting to over $100T – that must be repaid in nominal dollar amounts.  That means that the dollar’s buying power has to be reduced essentially to zero in order to legally satisfy and defraud our creditors, many of whom are actually ourselves.  The ONLY thing that will save the dollar is an economy that grows at a rate which keeps the current debt levels at a low relative amount to our economy.  Elsewhere in these pages I calculated this annual growth rate to be at least 5%, and that means at least 5% GDP growth year after year with no end in sight.  No economy of our size has ever achieved such a steady state of high growth, and there’s no hope of our achieving it with socialists – who are rock apes when it comes to economics – in charge of our national weal.

The Evil Party – more lives lost to the Left (updated 21jun21)

The fact that Joe Biden is even considering opening our southern border to a group of unvetted illegal aliens in a massive caravan – in the middle of a pandemic, while millions of Americans are unemployed – tells you everything you need to know about Democrats’ priorities.  - Anonymous

George Rebane

In voices hushed by the evil Democratic Party and their lamestream mouthpieces, evidence continues to pile in that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IMT) are effective preventatives and curatives for Covid-19 (more here and here).  Both are worldwide established pharmaceuticals that have been in constant use for various diseases for decades.  HCQ was initially approved by the FDA for treating C19.  Then approval was withdrawn due to a politicized study that itself was later shown to be faulty.  Since then, additional studies have been performed, cited, and censored showing the benefits of both drugs.

The latest is a study of patients already on ventilators who received HCQ in combination with Azithromycin (AZ).  The results showed patients receiving HCQ/AZ had a survival rate almost three times that of those who were denied the treatment.  Other studies that were not recognized in the US showed that both HCQ and IMT were also effective as treatments for C19 in the pre-ventilator stages of the disease.  There are countless reports of both drugs being used quietly by healthcare workers in unpublished subrosa protocols to save the lives of their patients.

When these performance stats are applied to the millions of C19 patients who have died over the past year plus (600,000 in the US alone), then the extent of this evil is revealed, and begins to compare itself to the order of magnitude of the Holocaust and other politically motivated genocides.  The political motivation in our country was TDS – denying President Trump any credit for his successful policies fighting the C19 pandemic.  In this light, our Democrats and their proto-communist factions are directly culpable for the readily preventable deaths of uncounted tens of thousands of Americans.

To our Left, these political sacrifices are merely the “few eggs that must be cracked to make their (socialist) omelet” - with a nod to Josif Vissarionovich.  And there are many more such cracked eggs to come as they continue their unabated fundamental transformation of America.

[21jun21 update]  “New Study Links Ivermectin to ‘Large Reductions’ in COVID-19 Deaths”  The number of lives that could have been saved by the anti-Trump Left not proscribing Ivermectin easily reaches into the hundreds of thousands.  However Teams Pelosi/Schumer/Biden abetted by Team Fauci were perfectly willing to sacrifice these thousands of lives to maintain their narrative driving toward victory in an election year.  For them there was no doubt that the end would justify any horrendous means available.  And as in any communist and/or third world country, no one will be held accountable – ongoing existential evil in our midst.

Toward Reunification, One More Time (updated 13jun21)

George Rebane

[This commentary appeared here in the 5jun21 op-ed pages of The Union.  The response in the newspaper’s online edition comment stream was as predicted (by publisher Don Rogers among others), and I expand on this in the addendum below.]

In my last two Other Voices columns – ‘Farewell Unity’ (2apr21), ‘Where exactly are we going?’ (19apr21) - I apparently miscommunicated the outlined steps to reunify our politically polarized land.  Liberal readers misunderstood that I was inviting our neighbors of the Left to abandon their desiderata for a fundamentally transformed America, and simply adopt those that we of the Right embrace.  Nowhere did I make such a proposal.

My main point was and still is that we should not start on the road to reunification with the much ballyhooed, premature, and therefore misguided search for ‘common ground’.  As it continues to be demonstrated by calls from both sides, that approach has been a futile undertaking over the last few years.  I offered a three-step sequence toward reunification that must start with an heroic effort to meld elements of our distinct ideas for a future America into a compromised list of shared attributes for governance and social policies.

If we can successfully come up with such a collection of ideas, then that list of mutually acceptable and shared attributes will naturally give us the basis for a common ground from which to attempt the concluding step.  The recommended sequence is concluded by both sides joining in the effort to forge a unified format for America’s future, concurrently with the process by which such an envisioned America shall come to pass.  By this I mean that the outlined structure and the process to achieve it, must necessarily be put in place through, say, a productive give-and-take convention of the parties, so that both sides see the same end and also the means to achieve it as a feasible political enterprise to take place in the out years.

The nearby diagram attempts to convey this graphically.  In its examination, it’s important not to get hung up on the descriptions of each side’s currently desired America.  They are included here only to illustrate that it is these disputed objectives, as perceived by the other, that are the underlying causes for our polarization.  If such a reunification process is actually attempted by our Democrats and Republicans, then each will bring to the table their own descriptions of their desired America which will serve as a starting point.  Finally, even this approach does not guarantee success.  Nevertheless, if we cannot agree to work for a common America, then a Great Divide, achieved peacefully or through violence, is in our future.

[Addendum]  A quick perusal of The Union's comment stream to this commentary reveals that the most recent tranche of liberal readers replicate the cognitive deficits exhibited by the readers of my two preceding columns that introduced a more productive process toward possible reunification than the one that starts with finding common ground which has been fruitlessly bandied around by politicians and in the national press.

Again, our liberals show they have no understanding of the direction Biden’s policies and the congressional Democrats are taking the country.  They vehemently deny that it is toward socialism, and some in turn accuse Republicans of promoting fascism as our future.  None of these worthies give a hint that they understand the definitions of either ideology.

I need to point out that predictably Steven Frisch, the local Left’s leading intellectual light, also made his appearance.  And a very disappointing effort it was.  He had no idea what to make of my column, instead he took the opportunity for what he thought would be another personal detraction that would confirm his followers’ rejection of my recommended approach.  His words –

Thought I would leave this little post by George from over at his blog here for people to consider as they think about his system for finding a "Unified Format for America's Future"...."Over the last week or so, the evil party has done everything it could to divide us further and pander to their ultra-left faction and black constituents by hammering the centenary of the Tulsa massacre over every possible channel and at every possible event. After dredging up the terrible details of that riot of the whites, these were repeated ad nauseum over the days as it awakened and drew predictable expressions of rage from the Left and black leaders. Does anyone think that this kind "racial catharsis" has left us more united? " --yep, George Rebane.

He was quoting from my intro to ‘Sandbox – 2jun21’ in which I took Biden and the country’s lamestream media to task for their obvious use of the Tulsa Massacre to further divide America.  And Frisch, again displaying his extremely limited knowledge of national dialogues, thinks that I am somehow again a misguided lonely and deranged voice in the wilderness.  He has no idea of the number of columnists and conservative academics who measured Biden to a similar standard.  My own opinion was closely matched by black academic Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute from whose linked column I used his “racial catharsis” to characterize the reporting on the Tulsa centenary.

So yes, given this level of ignorance amplified vitriol, there is no indication that any rational approach to reunification will be accepted by the Left.

[13jun21 update]  The comment stream to this piece in the online Union has grown considerably, it now numbers above 150.  What I need to point out here is that no leftwing Union reader has yet to understand and critique the 3-step process to unification that I detail.  Almost all the comments are regurgitations of baseless ad hominems against me and RR.  The sad reflection on the hopelessness of starting a productive national dialogue on ANY issue is that the vituperations don’t even provide any specifics to substantiate their naked assessments and name-calling.  The apologetics to support contentions on this website are voluminous and rich with citations.  The Left’s demonstrated intellectual capacity appears not able to undertake a reasoned debate on any of it.  As a group, they are innocent of even the most basic definitions required to understand and engage.  This is USA in 2021.

The Blessings of Inequality

George Rebane

We are in the age of trading equality for equity.  Why?  Because equality at the start of any road quickly leads to inequality among the travelers - given equal opportunities, some get further ahead than others.  That’s how it has been, is now, and always will be the human condition.  To the socialist such results are anathema.  To them an enlightened governance will use force as needed to assure that society advances in a tight equitable cohort in which no one is left too far behind, and no one gets ahead too far.  And the governing elites will decide and manage what is ‘too far’.

As history has shown elsewhere and also in our land, policies that impose such equities produce stagnating economies in which the lot of the citizenry is uniform misery that takes many forms as individual freedoms are pruned over time.

Over the last 250 years, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the west, we have witnessed an enormous blossoming in the quality of life (QoL) for all classes.  These range from fewer and less menial jobs with shorter hours, better living conditions with more stuff, an explosion of arts and entertainments, and longer lives during which to enjoy all these blessings.  Moreover, these betterments have inevitably spread across the world, raising billions of people out of droll and desperate lives that their ancestors suffered for centuries.

A closer look at how this all came about immediately reveals the role of inequality that sprung up in the new middle classes which were enabled by ever more liberal governments that inherited western culture.  In the 19^th century trade and industry allowed those who could and would to quickly leap ahead of their more sanguine and status quo satisfied neighbors in growing their assets.  The last two centuries contain countless stories of single-generation leaps from abject poverty to undreamed of wealth by entrepreneurs who took risks investing their time, health, money, and comfort to bring something new and useful to market.

And all of them knew that what they introduced would initially garner resistance and criticism in the marketplace.  Their driving hope was always that there would be a cohort of potential customers with the means and curiosity to give the new product or service a try, for these also would be taking a risk to buy something that might not work.  But it was always those having sufficient money set aside who could take that risk to enjoy and/or incorporate the new thing into their lives or businesses.

Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

Why promote a minimalist government – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”  Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

Anyone notice how student debt is propagandized as an act of nature that afflicts students who were innocent of getting into financial straits?  Even FN is bamboozled by the Dems and the almost hysterical reporting in the lamestream on this issue.  Those poor students played no part in voluntarily signing up for those loans.  No siree, they were struck down as if by a dreaded disease, blindsided into a terrible state of affairs, sorta like getting Covid or having your house devastated by Katrina.  And now the national response to those fiscally innocents wailing about their wallets has to be another vote buying dip into the public purse to forgive their debts.  And, oh yes, Trump is guilty for not having done it last year.  And here's the solution sent by a reader.

Biden’s spending spree is definitely designed to swing the nation’s double dummies into believing that he is the one who is reviving an already revived and ready-to-roar economy.  Again, the purpose is to buy some near-term votes for the 2022 election with a handful of good quarterly bumps to the GDP.  What the lightly reads neither understand nor pay attention to is what this massive near-term spending portends.  Even liberal economists agree that these initial spurts will guarantee that the rest of the 20s will be mired in ‘a future of secular stagnation’.  The next 8 to 10 years will then see GPD growth under 2%, hearkening back to the Jimmy Carter years.  The anti-American Dems are all for that because it will mean that the US will not have the money to properly fund its military against China and Russia, and to complete securing our southern border against all who will cross it illegally to a waiting basket of welfare benefits not available to American citizens.  The policy is designed to keep America divided with an increasing cohort of Democrat voters who will guarantee that we will become a socialist-bound one-party state, you know, sorta like California. (more here)

[8jun21 update]  The Dems and their constituents – both lightly read and dismally educated – are in terminal denial that America’s Left has put the country on the road to Marxism.  This strong belief is repeated continuously on their lamestream media, even though evidence ignored pours in daily.  The latest can be seen in their grassroots being convinced to pine for new and stronger measures of censorship to established for national media.   In the 8jun21 Union (here), local leftwinger Linda Schuyler Horning (“Fox News was established to launch its assault on American democracy.”) calls for re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine and formation of a new federal Truth Commission to specify and filter what you and I can consume from the news and entertainment media.  In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz writes, “What emerges from Dangerous Ideas is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd.” (more here)  As I said, the evidence abounds for our current march to authoritarian Marxism, and maybe worse.

Sandbox - 2jun21

[Over the last week or so, the evil party has done everything it could to divide us further and pander to their ultra-left faction and black constituents by hammering the centenary of the Tulsa massacre over every possible channel and at every possible event.  After dredging up the terrible details of that riot of the whites, these were repeated ad nauseum over the days as it awakened and drew predictable expressions of rage from the Left and black leaders.  Does anyone think that this kind "racial catharsis" has left us more united?  (more here) gjr]

The Evil Party Marches On (updated 4jun21)

George Rebane

You can fool some people most of the time; you can fool most people some of the time; and today you can also fool most of the people most of the time.

As ensconced in communist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the new Democratic Party has thoroughly embraced its dictum ‘Accuse others of what you are guilty.’  Nowhere has this been more profoundly demonstrated than over the last decade as the Democrats have started their short march to socialism.  The notion of socialism was anathema in post-war American politics as demonstrated by almost daily reports of ruinous suppression of all human rights and freedoms that our Cold War enemies were imposing on their citizens.  Now, going on three generations of the Left’s dominance in public classrooms, the nature of socialism has been obfuscated in the American mind so that at least half of our citizens view it as another viable form of governance that we should perhaps try.

All this has been built on a complex façade of lies designed to install a political monopoly based on constantly customized collective ideologies du jour from the Democrat Party that cascade through the various channels of the now propagandized lamestream media.  A partial list of these very large, significant, and nationally consequential lies includes –

1. Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election;
2. Democrats are not taking America into socialism cum Marxism;
3. C19 from a Wuhan virology lab has been a baseless rightwing conspiracy;
4. HCQ and IVT are not useful for fighting C19;
5. Today China is not America’s mortal enemy;
6. Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon;
7. Our Mexican border is closed and secure;
8. There is no human crisis at our southern border;
9. Raising taxes and regulations does not impact economic behavior;
10. The 6jan21 Capitol invasion was a planned insurrection to topple government;
11. BLM is a protest movement and not a Marxist political organization;
12. America continues plagued by systemic racism; no progress made since 1964;
13. America’s Left and its corporatist allies have not rolled back 1A rights and practiced cancel culture;
14. The systematic destruction of black families and perpetuation of urban ghettos is the Republicans’ fault;
15. Rolling back 2A rights from law abiding citizens will eliminate ‘gun violence’ such as ghetto murders and mass shootings;
16. Police have been purposefully murdering blacks;
17. America’s colleges don’t have racist admissions policies and welcome free speech;
18. The biggest existential threat to America is climate change;
19. There is a scientific consensus that preventable manmade global warming is occurring;
20. The great American experiment was founded on the racist principle, promotion, and practice of slavery; today Critical Race Theory correctly teaches that America is still a racist country, and its teaching is not anti-American propaganda.

And finally, perhaps the biggest, most damaging, and enduring lie is that the solution to the all of humanity’s problems requires our embrace of collectivist governance at its most comprehensive scale possible.  There, the admitted goal is achieving a Marxist-Leninist society populated by the “communist Man”, at which time government will naturally dissolve as the then altruistic humanity marches joyously into a future of eternal peace and plenty.  (A similar list is always invited from our left-leaning readers.)

Memorial Day – 31 May 2021

George Rebane

Most but not all died to save America from a calamitous tyranny; many have also died for America to remain as the world’s white hat hegemon.  On this day we gratefully remember and honor them all.

‘The Soul of Black Conservatism’

George Rebane

Scholar and commentator Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute has written a biography of economist Thomas Sowell, one of the country’s most celebrated conservative academics and intellectuals.  Progressives accuse Sowell’s perspectives on race in America as “going against the grain of fellow African-Americans.”  That on its face is wrong, as Riley points out in Sowell’s own words during a Charlie Rose interview - “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.” (more here)

A main thesis of Sowellian thought on race is that successful racial/ethnic groups in America have assumed their places in our pluralistic society by relying on their own resources and means, and not waiting for the dominant culture to provide them special dispensations to smooth the ‘E pluribus unum’ road to assimilated equality.  “If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes of self-reliance”.

Sowell has also maintained that “government has a role to play in social mobility, albeit a limited one, and incentives matter”, but he remains worried about “handouts that ask little or nothing of the recipient, and thus risk creating dependency”.  Thanks to the Democrats’ imbued plantation mentality on the nation’s blacks, that kind of dependency has now been created and etched in stone as the foundational principle of modern black politics – white supremacists have taken the blacks’ share of the common weal, and through the practice of ‘systemic racism’ deny blacks the ability to garner their fair share of the nation’s riches.  Hence, America must be fundamentally transformed so that a more comprehensive and encompassing government can then use its gun to force an equitable redistribution.  The Left teaches that is the only way to achieve social justice in the land.

As a concluding thought, Rebane Doctrine holds that to the extent that systemic racism can be shown to exist in America, it is practiced and maintained by the country’s elitist Left (both black and white) with the unwitting support of their purposely under-educated legions of urban African-Americans.  Our main street whites have long been indifferent to the racial make-up of their neighbors, team mates, fellow workers, and even spouses.  Nowhere has this been more demonstrated than in our post-war military.  A litmus test for the end of such racism will be a time when we no longer require organizations, institutions, and agencies to have race-specific names, race-based memberships, and that provide race-based dispensations.

Scattershots – 24may21 (updated 31may21)

If "being shot is a risk police officers take with the job", then isn't being shot a risk criminals take when breaking the law?

George Rebane

Tomorrow our Left will celebrate the life of George Floyd on the anniversary of his death last year in the custody of the Minneapolis police.  The ‘celebration’ itself is a specious undertaking of political propaganda at its most blunt delivery while cloaked in the highest level of obfuscation for the nation’s hoi polloi.  Mr Floyd was a career petty criminal and drug addict, in and out of jails, who devoted his life to victimizing fellow blacks.  His unfortunate death at the hands of white police officers set in motion a perfect storm that has been used by Democrats, cum socialists and communists, to convince the country’s lightly read that America remains a deeply racist country with persecuted minorities, especially our African-Americans, whose lot has not improved since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Huckster Al Sharpton will feature prominently in the coming kabuki, as will President Biden’s White House meeting with the Floyd family to assure all the country’s blacks it is America’s racist Right that has deprived them of their ‘fair share’, and has kept them suffering on the plantation all these decades.

Victor Davis Hanson (here) and Bret Weinstein (here) whose essays have both hit it “outta da park” according to a longtime commenter, who again joins with RR’s cohort of other astute commenters who regularly bring to our readers’ attention significant commentaries that reveal and characterize these historic times, during which our country is rent and the world order is changing.  These pages have featured both writers over the years, and again their recent contributions do not disappoint.