Rebane's Ruminations

In a country of wimps and wooses

George Rebane

We’ve been on travel over the last couple of weeks, doing a ‘southeast’ tour that started in Washington DC and worked its way down the coast to Miami, and then up the gulf coast visiting friends along the way.  We are currently in New Orleans and will finish in Houston after seeing our niece and her family in San Antonio (another set of California expatriates).  There is a lot to report on what we’ve seen in all the states we’ve been in, especially as it comes to how the country continues its pandemic response.  The bottom line of all that we’ve witnessed is that 1) there is no consistency in what people are doing and 2) the state-to-state public policies.  How/when/where people wear masks and socially distance varies all over the place.  No one seems to be sure of anything, except that they must comply to whatever insane diktats of their governor or mayor they believe to be in effect.  I am sad to report that in the large we Americans are a bunch of subservient wimps and wooses demonstrating over-abundant cautious behaviors - timid, compliant, and confused - that were more appropriate to serfs than a population of informed and independent minded citizens of a free country.  That kind of responses the Left appears to have successfully beaten out of us – ‘I don’t know why I’m doing it other than following orders.’  

Neil Patel of the Daily Caller is one of several national journalists who observes the same degradation of our citizens, and in his ‘Masks In Cars — What’s Behind America’s COVID-19 Insanity?’ writes –

If you wanted to teach a class on how to cause confusion and distrust, you would follow the U.S. government’s coronavirus playbook. A lot has been written about the historically low levels of trust Americans have in their leaders and institutions. There’s been less analysis on what happens when a government has no faith in its own citizens. We are seeing the results today. From the start of the pandemic, health authorities have chosen gamesmanship over honesty. This has resulted in muddled and inconsistent messaging from national leaders. The end result is a broken country of citizens at one another’s throats. Mask fights, deboarding flights and, of course, the crazy people driving around alone in their cars with masks on all stem, at least in part, from a government that refused to treat Americans like adults who could handle the truth.

Sandbox - 26apr21

[Sparse postings are due to our being on travel now.  We'll report on that later.  Am still planning to compile a growing list of liberal/progressive public policies, initiatives, laws, regulations, taxes, tributes, fees, ... that should demonstrate to all but the most mentally deficient that Democrats and their various auxiliaries (e.g. BLM, Antifa) are hell-bent on making America into a neo-Marxist state.  It was quite a revelation that their grassroots constituents have no idea of this, and, instead, take umbrage at anyone suggesting such as being a rightwing conspiracy theorist.  To them, no one is a Marxist, save they wear their hammer & sickle sweater in public.  gjr]

Scattershots – 21apr21 (updated 1may21)

George Rebane

In a democracy it's never the minority, but always the lightly read majority that votes in the tyrant.

“… scientific evidence supporting facemasks’ efficacy is lacking, adverse physiological, psychological and health effects are established.”  So reports our NIH here.  And it’s federal law that you have to wear a face mask during your entire flight when traveling.  Another righthand/lefthand confusion by government that no liberal in the land notices as they back more and more things an ever larger government will do to us.  The rest of us see it for what it is – perennially expanding state power and control.

Rebane’s “far right ideology” continues to be a characteristic of my political demeanor that is oft cited, yet unsubstantiated, by local liberals.  Now don’t get me wrong, I may have no problem being characterized with that label if I or my detractors knew the tenets of a far right ideology, tenets which I share as demonstrated by my published credo and extensive oeuvre of socio-political commentaries.  I am truly interested in getting some liberal of sufficient intellect to offer up a cogent list (it doesn’t have to be long) of evidence that places me in their concept of the far right of our political spectrum.

[1may21 update]  Not one of our leftwing worthies would/could? step up to the plate and give even one substantive example of my ‘far right’ attributes.  This, of course, speaks to the larger problem shared by our semantically simplistic Left.  They have no idea what are the definitions of the everyday words they use, like  ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘white nationalist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘rightwinger’, …, and now ‘far right’.  To them it is all part of the approved narrative passed to them from their thought leaders – it’s completely acceptable in their circles to simply parrot, as long as you parrot the proper words.  And speaking of semantically simplistic, to them such terms as ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’ have binary meanings.  If a person or country does not explicitly subscribe to ALL the attributes that define a socialist, then neither he nor the jurisdiction is socialist.  The same goes for socialism; it’s all or none – nothing is seen to progress toward socialism until its final attribute is in place and verified.

The Futility of Searching for Common Ground

George Rebane

My original ‘Quo tendimus?’ piece (here) was published in the 20apr21 Union (here) retitled ‘Where exactly are we headed?’, I guess, to make it more accessible to the newspaper’s readership who are classed not capable of googling the original Latin.  The article immediately drew the vitriol, ire, and personal invective from a long list of local liberals, not one of them having understood the thrust of my offer of a new approach for finding common ground which may help us start back on the road to unity.  None showed the ability or propensity to discuss the presented ideas.

They all exhibited what has become the common denominator for the worldview of the nation’s main street Left (aka Democrats).  None of them are aware of the ideological sentiments of the political leadership that today dictate the Democrats’ policies in economics, education, foreign policy, workplace, environment, … .  Citing the names of such thought leaders and identifying example pro-Marxist policies for these light readers is like water off a duck – these cannot serve as substance for them because they know not how such policies have historically ushered in socialist autocracies.

So they accuse me, and anyone else with a similar portfolio, as providing no backing for our characterizing the Left’s desired destination for social order and the government required to implement and maintain it.  The short of it is that a conversation with them cannot be started even at this low level of reason.  One must take these unwilling people back to a grade school that no longer exists and the return to which would be a gargantuan task.  (Here is how one parent of one of today’s exclusive woke grade schools reacted with an eloquence which was totally lost on the school’s leftwing administration.  H/T to reader.)

And yet, the road forward that we can travel together must be selected through a process such as I have outlined.  The argument is simple.  Once again, identify your destination social orders,  attempt to compromise on one that you both would tolerate.  At this point you can begin sorting out the kind of public policies that would bring about and maintain such a social order.  If you are still fortunate to agree on a feasible set of those, only then can you select a road that you can walk together toward your mutually agreed on destination.  And until then you can do nothing other than continue drawing apart as you shout epithets at each other across the widening chasm.

Our liberal and more zealous progressives understand none of this.  While they quack like socialists, walk like socialists, they all still consider being labeled a socialist as some kind of petty political name-calling.  They simply resent being identified as collectivists, which messaging is carefully managed by the Democrat Party and its lamestream media. The bottom line here is that these people still consider themselves to be middle roaders, as they promote and support all the trappings of a collectivist leviathan government.  Hence, the ongoing futility of searching for common ground that must preamble unity.

On a totally separate matter, I continue to note the reaction and participation of local conservatives cum Republicans in such debates.  These people are chronically absent from the public forum’s political frays that are a necessary feature of democratic republics, especially as constituted by peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds and practices.  Our local Republican Party does literally nothing to support those few of us locals who daily engage in the national debate with collectivists, those who want to fundamentally transform America.  The rightwingers are absent from the fray, year after year spending time in cliquish enclaves, echoing their sentiments to each other, while hoping that somehow the great political outdoors will discover their number and cloistered apologetics, and spontaneously morph into good constitutional conservatives.

Critical Race Theory and the March of Marxism

[CRT is the most putrid piece of anti-American pedagogy to infect our institutions in at least the last 100 years.  Thanks to the Democratic Party, it is now rampant as it metastasizes the minds of our lightly read neighbors, products of schools that for years have focused their students on America’s sins.  Today CRT is being rapidly incorporated into California’s public schools, government agencies, and politically compliant corporatist enterprises.  Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo recently gave a speech at Hillsdale College on ‘Critical Race Theory: What it Is and How to Fight It’ which was published in the March 2021 Imprimis.  It is the most cogent, clear, and concise description of CRT and its current spread across our land.  It is reprinted here by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  gjr]

Christopher F. Rufo

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

Quo tendimus? (updated 20apr21)

George Rebane

[My ‘Farewell Unity’ commentary was also published in the 3apr21 Union (here). Its lengthy comment stream made clear again that most liberals had trouble understanding my proposition for finding common ground.  Nevertheless, the piece has since then garnered considerable interest.  This week the newspaper printed on separate days not one, not two, but three op-ed columns by liberals delivering most revealing critiques of the future Americas desired by both sides – ‘Path to unity in America’(13apr21) by Elliot Schneiderman, ‘A point of near unity’(15apr21) by Paul Hauck, and ‘Finding Unity in America’(16apr21) by Nory Fussel.  When “retired scientist” Schneiderman took me to task, I responded with the piece below, prematurely, it turned out, since I was not aware of the subsequent op-eds by Hauck and Fussel.  I address the latter two in the addendum to this post.  Perhaps all this interest provides hope that the conversation toward unity, which I outline below, will start here or elsewhere.  20apr21 update - an edited form of this commentary was published here in the 20apr21 Union.  More here.]

I was halfway heartened to read ‘left-leaning neighbor’ Elliot Schneiderman’s 12apr21 ‘Path to unity in America’ response to my 3ap21 ‘Farewell Unity’ column.  It appears both of us support a future America that is persistently hailed by our Right, and seldom if ever described by our Left.  In fact, Elliot takes exception to the neo-Marxist future that I describe, and the one to which the current administration and the Democrat leadership publicly subscribe.  These disparate visions of America are well documented by the commentariats of both sides.  Elliot writes -

George quite wrongly states that “our neighbors on the left work feverishly for” this Marxist global government world view. I’m on our country’s left and will have none of it, I don’t personally know a single American that would ascribe (sic) to it, and I am convinced that the vast majority of our country’s left do not ascribe (sic) to it.

This remarkable view from the Left is easily explained by the recorded half-century decline of our progressive schools that have assiduously omitted any mention of such historic realities.  And it is easily confirmed through conversations with a sampling of your left-leaning neighbors, especially the ones cited by Elliot.

Scattershots – 11apr21 (updated 17apr21)

George Rebane

The attack on Georgia’s new voter law is turning out to be a national disgrace.  The evidence is clear – it is not the launch of Jim Crow 2.0, neither does is suppress black voter turnout.  As many have shown, in the 40 states that have similar election laws, the ratios of black voter turnouts have been higher than those of white voters.  Yet the Biden administration is doubling down on their Big Lie about Georgia, with all of it being picked up and echoed by the lamestream.  Most revealing is how the corporatist CEOs are falling in line to support the leftwing narrative.  As always, the Democrats’ African-American constituents don’t have a clue about any of this, and continue their plantation lives blaming the whole thing on ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’.  

JFK was elected on an historical Big Lie – the non-existent 1960 “missile gap”.  In fact, the missile gap did exist, as subsequent post-USSR revelations attest, but was definitely in favor of the US.  Nikita Khrushchev had very few long-range ballistic missiles that could hit North American targets, and for that reason he got Castro to permit him to secretly station Soviet mid-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.  As history has shown, it was basically dumb luck that kept the world from a global nuclear exchange, and not anything that Kennedy and his military planners did back in October 1962.  (more here)  LBJ followed suit four years later with his own Big Lie about the Gulf of Tonkin ‘attack’ that got us bigtime into Vietnam.  The upshot of Vietnam was Jimmy Carter’s military standdown that invited Brezhnev into starting WW3 in Europe.  The Soviet leaders knew that the USSR economy was on its last legs in being able to maintain par force with America and NATO; for the communists in 1980 it was now or never.  And it was Reagan who convinced Brezhnev and then Gorbachev that ‘never’ was their best option.

The Left's response to the above Big Lies is to point at Bush2 getting us to invade Iraq after 9/11 because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.  That was true because Saddam used his Soviet-era WMDs on his own people.  There are a number of explanations as to why none were found when the Americans finally got to search the country.  (e.g. where did Syria subsequently and suddenly get the WMDs to use on its people?)  But Bush2 didn't tell a Big Lie, because both our and EU intelligence sources confirmed the existence of Iraq's WMDs, and all western leaders accepted that report even if they all didn't agree on how to respond.  This debate continues to this day.

[12apr21 update]  Biden one-ups Obama’s “fundamental transformation” with his insane program to erase America as we know it.  Kevin McCullough writes (here) – “He’s attempting to undo American accountability in elections through his support of HR1. He’s attempting to undo our economic foundations with massive printing (read that: devaluing) of our currency. He’s attempting to destroy free enterprise and job growth with coming massive tax increases. He’s attempting to take away individual liberties with proposed mask mandates, and desired lockdowns. He supports any attempt to end the Senate filibuster—in order to push through horrific laws by the thinnest margins ever attempted. He’s attempting to overwhelm our security at our borders by encouraging 100’s of 1000’s of unverifiable persons of unknown origins to cross our borders without scrutiny nor penalty. He wants the police weakened. He is pledging to take guns away from law abiding owners. And he wants to pervert the justice system so dramatically that the Constitution becomes unrecognizable.”

[14apr21 update]  The typo in my ‘Farewell Unity’ column in the 2apr21 Union continues to draw the ire of local liberals, most recently today’s letter from a Ms Rachel Howard (here).  I had already posted the correction in these pages and on Union’s online edition, but that has made no never mind to our progressive neighbors.  What really needs pointing out repeatedly and often is how the Left responds to analyses like mine regarding the tragic condition of our national unity – Ex uno pluria.  For most of them, understanding that the first step toward a common ground that can launch a productive conversation requires understanding each other’s desiderata for our country’s future, this is an intellectual bridge too far.  Anyone who posits such a requirement by identifying potential targets of a transformed America is immediately vilified for, of all things, seeking to sow the seeds of disunity.

[17apr21 update]  Here’s a hit to The Union for bending over backward to tolerate broad-based bullshit, no matter how off-the-wall it is.  ‘Cancel culture and voting rights’ by Richard Stormsgaard gives us this sample – “Reagan ridiculed the concept of good government as advocated by Lincoln and Eisenhower. Gingrich wanted to flush government down the tub. Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser, advocated blowing up all of society. And by 2018, Donald Trump regularly attacked national security and military leaders for resisting his efforts to subdue all branches of government to his personal whims. … In all other Western liberal democracies, conservatives, liberals and laborites generally pursued the common good from their different perspectives, as was the case in the United States prior to the Reagan revolution.”  The remainder of his outpouring is an equal barrage of partisan allegation free of a single supporting statement that would give some substance to his naked claims.  And then there’s the revelation by another leftwing worthy, Jon Schwarz, telling his followers (here) that we’ve had it all wrong about which side enforces political correctness.  All along it’s really been the Republican Party and the Right.  I guess we’ve had a hard time seeing it through the lying lens of their lamestream media that continues denying the daily proto-Marxist machinations of the Democratic Party whose constiuents pull down historical statues, riot, loot and burn, and erase the names and history that don’t measure up to their narrative – i.e. political correctness.  Examples from the Right seem to be missing.

Corrupt climate change calamities.  Working separately, two prominent climate scientists have again assembled a considerable amount of science to expose the history of global warming hysteria, and its current expansion on steroids promoted and pushed by Biden Big Lie Machine.  I’m cobbling together the recent writings of Drs Steven Koonin of Caltech and Richard Lindzen of MIT.  Climate change was becoming a bit long of tooth as the raison d’etre for fundamentally transforming America into a socialist autocracy.  Along came Covid, a godsend on steroids for the Left’s command/control central planners.  But now those damn vaccines are making the people have wrong ideas again about risk and their freedoms, so it’s time to crank up the global warming catastrophe again.  The works of Koonin and Lindzen are timely calmatives that will be fiercely attacked in the lamestream and by every Democrat politician who can find a mic.

Sandbox - 10apr21

[Apologies.  Have no idea where the time went since the 24mar21 Sandbox.  Actually, I'm in the middle of presenting a series of seminars on numeracy and critical thinking, and working on the PowerPoints got me a bit absorbed.  Mea culpa.  gjr]

‘A Thousand Brains’

George Rebane

Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta, is the author of A Thousand Brains – A new theory of intelligence (2021).  To many, me included, Hawkins has been a national treasure since his first book On Intelligence (2004).  After inventing the Palm Pilot and becoming wealthy, Hawkins has devoted his life to brain research as it impacts our understanding of intelligence, consciousness, and our ability to create machines with these attributes.  In this enterprise he and his colleagues have devised a new understanding of how our brain’s architecture, specifically the neocortex, is able to perform all the wondrous functions which we all take for granted.

My son-in-law who is a senior AI researcher at Microsoft Research, sent me the book as part of our ongoing conversation that includes the art of the possible in intelligence studies and, of course, the Singularity.  For me Hawkins’ book was an immediate page-turner that jumped to the head of my list of books-in-progress.  The 257-page book is divided into three parts: A New Understanding of the Brain, Machine Intelligence, and Human Intelligence.

In the first part Hawkins builds on the work of famed neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, who revealed the structure of the neocortex (the new brain) as consisting of hundreds of thousands of cortical columns or cores, each of them with pretty much the same make-up of interconnected neurons which also have very select and important dendritic connections to other cores, often located on the other side of the brain.  The important concept here is that the cortical column is itself a tiny brain that is able to learn and retain ‘frames’ of perceived reality which it then assembles with other cores containing complementary frames to result in a voting process from which our experienced reality emerges.

These common components that make up the neocortex are ubiquitous in their functioning.  When those that get inputs from our visual subsystem, these become visual processors and generate our visual world; when connected to our auditory subsystem, they do auditory processing and create our world of sounds, and so on.  Hawkins’ exposition of how these cortical cores connect to our sensors, manipulanda (e.g. hands, feet), and parts of our ‘old brain’ is an absorbing read.  On every page, the reader’s brain is coming up with all sorts of alternative AI implementations that have now been introduced into his art of the possible.

And for me the stuff I learned in the first part makes the second part on machine intelligence very exciting.  The people at Numenta and other similar AI companies are all experimenting with synthesizing software and hardware structures that can mimic the functions of the cortical core, and then devising ingenious architectures that join thousands of these cores into new kinds of learning machines.  The commonly recognized holy grail among these enterprises is AGI – artificial generalized intelligence, of which today not even the most advanced forms of deep learning artificial neural nets are capable.  All of the ballyhooed AIs today are still one-tune bands, no matter how sophisticated tunes they are able to recognize and play.  None can efficiently construct their surrounding reality and transfer that knowledge (i.e. generalize) to operate in different environments or situations like any year-old human infant, or, for that matter, as can a lot of critters.

Socialist Semantics

“When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just when and what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things. ' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.”  (With apologies to Lewis Carroll.)

George Rebane

We talk past each other because we share no common logic, reasoning, history, facts, …, and yes, no common semantics.  One side demands to know what words mean during a dialogue or debate, the other side wants to avoid such revelations at all costs.  This has been clear since at least the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, because for the Left history is in a constant state of political and ideological revision.  The role of any given word today may have to change markedly tomorrow when responding to unforeseen events or opportunities.

We recognize socialism as one of the prominent limbs of collectivism, a form of that overarching ideology that readily can morph into communism or one of many less-formalized forms of totalitarianism.  The common denominator of all these is that the individual derives value only to the extent that he succumbs to and supports the regime in power, all others are cast into various groups of traitors, seditionists, insurrectionists, and other repressed kinds of ‘counter-revolutionaries’.  Today in America we see and already experience harbingers of such class categorizations by the ascendant Left and their lamestream media.

As examples, none on the Left can or will give the public any stable or even conditionally stable definitions of their workaday pejoratives like ‘racist’, ‘nationalist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘fascist’, ‘deplorables’, ‘sexist’, ‘misogynist’, … , and terms such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white nationalism’, ‘equality’, ‘equity’, ‘racial preference’, … , and of course ‘sedition’ and ‘insurrection’.

Such use of slippery semantics by the Left occurs at all levels of our society ranging from the federal government all the way down to our local leftwing worthies who comment on RR.  Examples of these abound.  On one end, we refer you to today’s attempt by Biden to end-run Congress on gun control and the Second Amendment collected under the undefined rubric of ‘gun violence’.  Any reasonable view of his “six initial actions” (here) reveals that nowhere does he define or point to definitions of such key terms as ‘ghost guns’ and ‘assault weapon’, or the scope of his proposed nationalized ‘red flag’ law.  Everyone on both sides knows that the objective here is to enable another major ratchet on restricting the constructive use and ownership of firearms, therefore definitions always need to be malleable.

On the local level a leftwing worthy continues to echo (here) the Left’s Big Lie that the 6jan21 storming of the Capitol, enabled by an incompetently led and permissive cadre of Capitol Police, was an “insurrection”.  I countered with my habitual attempt to uncover the Left’s pernicious use of language by citing the classical definition of insurrection.  (See also the RR ‘Glossary & Semantics’ and ‘A Conservetarian Credo’.)  The only response that our leftwinger could muster was to accuse me of hiding behind semantics, the correct use of the English language – to wit, “… semantics, the weakest of all responses to be used only when you have nothing else to say.”  There was no need for anyone to say anything more in that case than to point out the man’s egregious use of language.  Yet, at a loss for a wider access to vocabulary, he then demanded what I would call the 6jan21 event at the Capitol.

Well, since there was no evidence whatsoever of any preparation or execution of actions to overturn our sitting government and replace it with one waiting in the wings, I would call the penetration of the building a spontaneous civil disobedience, a mob action, or even a directionless and chaotic riot by a frustrated crowd.  To confirm this, the investigations launched in response have not been able to find evidence for anything more sinister and/or organized that occurred on that day. Yet it was an event which daily our Democrats still attempt to inflame and divide Americans by equating it to the 7dec41 and 11sep01 ‘days of infamy’.  Here we see one more subversion of semantics by the Left, as they broadcast propaganda at its best and most effectively against intellectually defenseless people burdened by being educated in progressive public schools.

Scattershots – 7apr21 (updated 10apr21)

George Rebane

Crime rate spikes ignored by Democrats and their local lackies.  Notice that no one on the lamestream commentariat or in the Dem leadership has even breathed of the massive increases in serious crimes that have occurred across the country in response to their butt stupid policies to cut back on police support, both financial and political.  (google 'crime rate spikes')  All of this is part and parcel of the national decay that leftwing anti-Americans of all stripes are vigorously promoting.

Only the Dems’ leadership and the country’s Right know that the Dems’ progressive policies are designed for a socialist future.  The Left’s rank and file remain eternally bamboozled as to where their leaders are taking us.  They literally have no clue as to the nature of our intended destination (e.g. note leftwing commenters here and under my ‘Farewell Unity’ column in The Union).  I keep being told that there is no evidence that any such policies exist and/or are publicly promoted and planned.  These lightly read innocents have been taught to deny all such evidence, be it crime rates, border crisis, climate change regulations/taxes, infrastructure stimulus, or extended Covid lockdowns.  Now they upped the game with their characterization of the new Georgia voting law as being the return to Jim Crow, and then continuing to maintain that chorus of lies even in the face of broadcast side-by-side comparison of Georgia to other states, and the collected participation stats from past elections.  Their leadership knows that their constituencies are too comfortable to remove their heads from their eternally shady orifices (example here), so they and the lamestream keep repeating everything, only just a little bit louder.  Note also the op-ed participation of our local practitioners of fair and balanced journalism.

[10apr21 update]  At Crabb’s Colloquium there’s a lively debate about who in Georgia can offer water etc to people standing in line to vote (here).  There the local lefties all echo the lamestream in claiming that the state’s new voter suppression law contains a blanket prohibition for anyone offering such succor, and is not limited to those wishing to solicit or impact votes.  The legislators who drafted the law and the country’s Right all interpret the law correctly as intended, and claim no such prohibition absent solicitation for votes.  Our local Left instantly claims that anyone (like me) who expresses such erroneous thoughts is either ignorant or lying; for them there are no other alternatives.  For them ‘E pluribus unum’ always means that from the many other available and reasonable possibilities on any issue, there is only the one possibility which corresponds to the Left’s narrative du jour.