Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 11apr21 (updated 14apr21)

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.

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.

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

In the recent 'Dark Days Diary' (here) I highlighted a short dissertation on the spread of communism by a former KGB agent.  As we have pointed out here and he confirms, the spread of that evil ideology is made possible by its acolytes initially gaining control of a target nation’s public educational system.  This is from the Marxist-Leninist playbook – ‘let me educate one generation of your youth to assure communism’s triumph.’  In the United States we are now educating the third generation with a curriculum that ranges between pure trash and collectivist propaganda.  And this is done in our public K-12 schools and also academe, which has for the most part eliminated all dissenting voices and thought on their campuses.

The onerous task is being carried out by teachers’ unions and faculty associations which have wholeheartedly embraced the goal of a socialist world order.  Their success can be measured by the fraction of our graduates who are profoundly ignorant of their American heritage and equally lacking skill sets which enable their entry into a productive workforce.  A disturbing share of them find work with government as the employer of last resort.  There they immediately fit in with the correctly thinking and compliant deep state extension of the Democratic Party, doing its work no matter who currently happens to control Congress or reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

For the Left, this fortuitous outcome is to a large extent the fault of our ‘go along to get along’ Republicans.  Over the years they as the conservators of our Constitution have shown little interest to understand and backbone to resist the nation’s ratcheting of anti-American public policies.  The Republicans appear to measure their political progress by how good they feel when grumbling and griping about the Left to their likeminded constituents in cloistered gatherings.  These pity-party nodding sessions motivate only a trickling of attendees, if that, to take an active stance to counter the encroach of socialism in their communities.  The rank and file Republican returns to his homestead to continue living a productive and non-contentious life minding his own business.

The only plausible road back (from beyond the tipping point to the Great Divide) is to regain local control of educating our children.  Rebane Doctrine has long taught that to do this is to change education policy so that in the public funding of education, the money follows the students, and parents determine where the students are schooled.  This calls for a restructuring of our education industry into a more open market, capitalistic format, and away from the rank socialist structure of today.  In the main, K-12 education should be available to parents in the same manner as is the choice of a college education.  This means that schools would become transparent for-profit institutions that make their performance (quality of their product) accessible to their clients.  Overall, given today’s cost of education, such a change would significantly reduce costs, and increase the relevance and quality of the delivered education.

Our leftwing knows that Sapir-Whorf’s theory of language enabling thought (q.v.) is correct as was made public by Orwell and put in practice on a national scale by Mao et al.  Today’s public educated true believers can neither conceive the existence of alternative ways to organize a beneficial society, nor understand where our nation’s present path is taking us (e.g. evidence of that abounds in these pages).

No one knows the truth of all this more than does our Democratic Party which has viewed their support of socialized education as required maintenance of their private manufactory of an ever increasing horde of compliant constituents and unquestioning voters.  The last thing our Left will tolerate is letting parents decide where their children will be schooled. 

He is Risen!

George Rebane

Hearing that strong assertion, the Christian answers joyfully, ‘He is risen indeed!’

For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all Creation.

This has now become RR's annual message celebrating Easter.

Dark Days Diary – 2apr21

George Rebane

Various knowledgeable authors are trying to warn us of how the accelerating Cold War 2.0 with China (and Russia) can quickly spiral out of control into WW3.  The latest alert came last month with the release of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War.  This fictional novel spins a very detailed and realistic tale that outlines the road to an international disaster.  This road was laid out under Obama and the Biden administration continues paving it today.  What the two former military authors – Elliot Ackerman (former Obama national security advisor) and retired admiral James Stavridis (former CINC NATO) – don’t explicitly take into account is the rampart politicization of our armed forces into a doctrinaire and woke military.

Decorated marine veteran and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute Mackubin Owens spells out our military disaster in the making in ‘War goes woke’.  There he details how the Pentagon’s transformed (under Obama) command structure has been subverted to the task of implementing “diversity over military effectiveness”.  It has also changed stripes by focusing on identity politics, dedicating itself to “eradicating ‘extremism’ and ‘domestic terrorism’ ideologies from the ranks, as well as all ‘racists, bigots, homophobes and bullies’.”  All this falls under the Biden administration’s adoption of the Democratic Party’s far-left anti-American goal of eliminating the US as the world’s white hat hegemon.

Has Bumblebrain Biden yet to do anything to benefit our country?  The daily answer to this standing question continues as a loud NO!  His $2T “infrastructure” travesty is the latest evidence that the man is an amalgam of dumb and evil.  The proposed amount to fix roads and bridges is 5% of the total, and a stretch to 15% if all possible items can be collected under the ‘infrastructure’ rubric.  His daily dose of big lies now doubles down on dunning Georgia’s excellent new election law, and telling America that his massive tax hikes on corporations and the ‘rich’ will not impact anyone earning under $400K.

All of that follows the socialists’ eternal belief, now embedded as Democratic dogma, that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior.  A more insidious fiction that the Democrats have consistently told main street is that taxing corporations does not impact jobs, salaries, investment, the supply of goods and services, locating facilities, and consumer prices.  The more than obvious fact is that they adversely impact all of these, especially to extent that corporations cannot pass on to their customers the full tax burden in the prices they charge.  The socialists’ eternally skewed understanding of economics totally blinds them to the existential reality that corporations don’t pay taxes, their workers and customers do.  The government’s bamboozle has always been to wave the ‘We’ll tax the rich corporations instead of you’ flag to divert the nation’s double dummies.  Under Biden, this subterfuge is now on steroids.

And then we have Bumblebrain’s border chaos.  The Big Lie that walls don’t work and that it is America’s moral duty to invite all the world’s dissatisfied to illegally enter our country continues to be heralded daily.  This policy has already created untold suffering and death among the throngs of invited aliens migrating through cartel-infested deserts in their desperation to reach the promised land with all the free stuff promised by our anti-American left.  The full cost to America from such illegal migrations is yet to tallied, and when it is again attempted, the numbers will be buried by the lamestream under a hundred false guises, and those who did the accounting vilified.

And all this is just a peek at some of what’s going down during these dark days.

[Later]  KGB defector Yury Bezmenov lays out the entire Rebane Doctrine story on the methodology of communism’s advancement in this 13.5 minute video recorded some years back.  This important piece of education was brought to us by one of this blog’s regular and more erudite readers.  I highlight it here because it clearly reveals what our Left has done to America since the Great Society gained traction after the Vietnam War.  What is important to note is that we can all see happening around us that which Bezmenov outlines from the KGB playbook.  And with the recent outing of socialism and socialist thought during the last decade, anyone who is paying attention can see that we are well beyond the tipping point if we continue as one nation headed for a collectivist autocracy.  There is neither time nor will to educate a new generation that will counter today's incontrovertible true believers.

For me, listening to Bezmenov takes me back to the years of my political awakening around the age of 12.  Before that I was taught and knew that communism was the world’s primary evil, but I took great comfort in the belief that we had successfully escaped it, because it was there and we were here.  Then listening to the political conversations of my parents and (Estonian) elders, it was they along with all east Europeans refugees who already knew and had witnessed what Bezmenov lays out.  The fact of the matter was that communism was not to be constrained in lands remote from America, but that it was an ideological disease which could easily morph, spread, devastate, and kill.  The ample evidence of that as I grew up ended my childhood sanguinity, and made me sensitive to how little our fellow Americans understood about the wiles of metastasizing collectivism.

Farewell Unity (updated 3apr21)

[This commentary appears as an op-ed column in the 3apr21 Union (here).  Unfortunately, a typo survived in the submitted version.  The sentence "Today, our country is divided into two distinct ideological camps that each total at least half of Americans."  The word 'each' does not belong.  Here I have also appended an abstract that summarizes the extended prose which some have found to be too challenging. gjr]

George Rebane

The calls for unity over the last years have fallen on deaf ears, most likely because they sound neither sincere nor feasible.  There is no need to recount the history of our country’s polarization, now widened to a chasm.  Those who care and have kept track know it, and the rest of our neighbors don’t appear to concern themselves much about the shared animosity that is firmly entrenched in our public square.  Yet we continue to hear virtuous sounding appeals, almost all from the Left, to adopt the plaintive ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ uttered by the once-famous philosopher Rodney King.

Most of us know that there is more to getting along than having the desire.  People who have a long history of distrust and distaste for the other need first to share some objective or purpose for breaching the chasm before anyone will start looking for workable paths through that common ground.  Today, our country is divided into two distinct ideological camps that total at least half of Americans.  The remainder are those indifferent, ignorant, or claiming to be ‘above politics’.  As the late Charles Krauthammer reminded us, no one in a liberal free society should be above politics, for it is only in that arena that we discover and practice the means to stay together.  In short, all communal life is bonded with the glue of politics, often understood as “the art of the possible”.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York, made famous the shibboleth that you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.  After two generations of leftward bound public education, the reality of that wisdom has long passed by the board.  In our divided land people now hold not only their own opinions, but also their own facts, history, logic, causality, sense of justice, fairness, equity, equality, racism, …, all which define their worlds and worldviews.  Moreover, their windows on the world are distinct in the sense that they are chosen to confirm and vindicate their worldviews.

All serious, as opposed to specious, calls for unity should begin with a clear definition of the kind of world we want to achieve in common.  As a conservetarian, the world order I want for my children is made up of liberal and sovereign nation-states living and trading in peace, working together on big projects such as reaching for the stars, while learning best practices of governance from each other.  I also want America to remain the shining city on the hill with an inviting culture that honors our best traditions, rewards meritocracy, promotes the individual, prudently regulated capitalism, and opportunity for all its citizens under a constitutionally minimalist government.  Today the general contours of such a future are shared by at least half of Americans, those who gather on our country’s Right.

However, our neighbors of the Left work feverishly for a diametrically opposite world order, one in which humanity is joined under a strong and over-arching global government run by elites, and which has collected the former nation-states into well-ordered and compliant ‘socialist republics’.  In these, individualism is curbed in favor of cooperative class membership.  Peace among the classes is maintained through tightly regulated principles of equity used to enforce equal outcomes for all classes regardless of their contributions to the common weal.  In such a world, Marxist collectivism is the guiding principle for correct thought and public policy – ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’

Our Left sees a sovereign capitalist America as the main obstacle to such a world order.  Therefore, the political business at hand for them is to fundamentally transform America into a compliant peerage on the world’s geo-strategic stage.  And that must be achieved in a post-constitutional America through domestic policies designed to demonstrate collectivist leadership by visibly abolishing what the Left has identified as our country’s systemic racism and a culture of white supremacy.  The monitored metrics for this achievement will be class equity and correct thought in all aspects of public life.

Given these radically opposite futures that today divide us, any serious call for reunification as a nation, in my humble opinion, must first and foremost recognize and address the need to define a single America acceptable to the great majority of us.  All else is smoke and subterfuge to distract us on our current road to autocracy.  Without that we bid farewell to unity, and then what?

[Abstract]  To achieve national unity requires a three step process that we don’t recognize today.  To begin, finding ‘common ground’ (Step2) is sought for the purpose of defining and launching a mutually cooperative effort (Step3) to achieve a mutually agreed objective (Step1) – in the present case, the reestablishment of a preferably unified America.  Without the parties’ embrace of such a shared future, seeking common ground, let alone participating in a cooperative effort, is utterly futile.  The above commentary argues that since we literally have no hope of agreeing on a shared future (Step1), then prematurely issuing calls for unification through attempts to find common ground (Step2) is a useless exercise that serves only more cynical agendas such as virtue signaling.  

Scattershots – 28mar21 (updated 1apr21)

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

I have to get a few things down for the record.  There is so much absolute crap coming out of the Biden administration that it’s really impossible to log all of it.

Dark Days Diary – 25mar21

The day our elected officials hid the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine, it confirmed they would kill us to beat President Trump.  Never forget the evil we are fighting.  Racy Sicilian echoing RR

George Rebane

Dr Scott W Atlas, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, asks ‘Science, Politics, and COVID: Will Truth Prevail?’ in the Feb2021 issue of the Imprimis.  My short answer takeaway is NO.  The C19 public information cesspool has become so soiled and sullied over the last year that it is easy to believe over 90% of Americans have little or no idea of what the true course of the pandemic has been and what ‘science’ has really had to say about the public response policies implemented across the land.  Dr Atlas, an internationally recognized expert in the relevant fields required to make sense of what’s been going on, writes –

First, I have been shocked at the unprecedented exertion of power by the government since last March—issuing unilateral decrees, ordering the closure of businesses, churches, and schools, restricting personal movement, mandating behavior, and suspending indefinitely basic freedoms. Second, I was and remain stunned—almost frightened—at the acquiescence of the American people to such destructive, arbitrary, and wholly unscientific rules, restrictions, and mandates.

As these pages record, it’s his second point that has concerned me over the years since the Obama administration.  In the large, we Americans no longer act as inheritors of the greatest legacy of liberty and freedoms bequeathed in human history by our more stout-hearted forebears.  We have become a population of state-succored serfs, compliantly accepting every government instituted ratchet that incrementally proscribes our spirit as a liberty-loving people.

Given the social goals of the Democrat Party and its newly adopted radical leftwing political posture, I fault the Republican Party for letting down America with its ongoing sanguine acceptance of the socialist/communist diktats issued by the Left.  The relinquishing of its position as the active and visible leader of the nation’s political opposition has left a power vacuum that can and will be filled by ad hoc factions of conservative and libertarian Americans with nowhere else to turn.  This is leading us in a potentially dangerous direction as Dr Atlas concludes –

With social media acting as the arbiter of allowable discussion, and with continued censorship and cancellation of those with views challenging the “accepted narrative,” the United States is on the verge of losing its cherished freedoms. It is not at all clear whether our democratic republic will survive—but it is clear it will not survive unless more people begin to step up in defense of freedom of thought and speech.

I urge you to read the entire piece and then contact your local and national political critters.  If you’re a Democrat, ask them to review the history of collectivist regimes and the equal opportunity misery they have instituted over their nations.  And if you’re a Republican, tell your representatives to read the party’s platform, then get off their collective asses and provide some active leadership that will rally Main Street to recognize and resist our headlong rush to autocracy.  In short, since our Left is cutting the Right no slack, tell them to tell it like it is, and cut the ‘go along to get along’ crap.

Sandbox - 24mar21

[Seeing what Bumblebrain has been able to accomplish in his first 100 days, can you imagine the damage that he can do if he becomes a two-term president, as he is "signaling" to his team and certain Dem leaders (more here)?  My money is still on his not completing his first term.  There's only so much patience Kamala is willing to put up with, unless she giggles herself into political oblivion.  gjr]

Working the Unity Myth (updated 25mar21)

George Rebane

Today’s Left seeks to suppress and supplant the legacy, history, and practice of Western culture as an evil instantiation of racism and white supremacy.

One of Jo Ann’s recent Union articles (here) addressed the futile attempts in the Left’s ongoing calls for unity, supposedly addressed to people like her – conservative, Christian women who pay very close attention to national affairs and are active in their communities. (more here)  The piece garnered a record reader response in print, online, and snail-mailed letters.  One heartfelt, well-written and long letter from a liberal woman gave Jo Ann kudos and concluded with a strong appeal for all of us to come together.  It is the ongoing flood of appeals like that, appeals that imply coming together is something as simple as throwing an attitudinal switch, that motivates the present reflection.

Scattershots – 15mar2021 (updated 19mar21)

George Rebane

The Ides of March.  2065 years ago, if I recall correctly, it was a very bad day for Julius Caesar – ‘Et tu Brute!’ and all that.  Bummer.

Speaking of inhumane acts, Sen Chris Murphy (D-CT) contrasted treatment of illegal aliens under Trump and Biden, and stated unequivocally that “Building a wall is the most inhumane policy.”  When you consider that statement in the context of the now invited hordes surging north, hordes that contain thousands of exploited unaccompanied children, then a statement like that is either evil or comes from the mouth of a blithering idiot.  To confirm this assessment, Murphy went on to declare that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens “will save lives”, for which there is not a shred of evidence.

The Connecticut senator is not alone in dispersing such messages and working feverishly to ensconce them into public policies.  To me that just adds to the evidence that we would not err much if we gingerly treated all Democrats as we would the clinically insane.

Along the same lines, the Dems now consider introducing a federal wealth tax to help pay for their disastrous $1.9T American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (breakdown here).  The so-called stimulus has very little to do with the Covid relief it was supposed to provide.  But paying for it with a wealth tax is beyond stupid.  Wealth taxes have not worked where they have been tried.  Europe had a fling with them and discovered that not only did such taxes not yield the desired revenues, it additionally drove away capital to more friendly shores, reduced jobs, and slowed economic growth.  So again, what would you call people like Sen Warren (D-MA) who reject such decades long and widespread evidence, and continue with plans to install such a disaster in America? (more here)

The $1.9T stimulus is going to shove a one-time $1,400 check into the shorts of millions of our fellow countrymen.  Talking to a local as I was waiting my turn at the Safeway deli counter, I was regaled by the wondrous things that his greatly anticipated check would make possible.  He was clearly a Biden voter who approved of such rewards for his loyalty in the voting booth.  This made me think about the difference between a politician offering money to a prospective voter to pay for his upcoming vote, to the same politician promising to pay cash money to the voter after voting him into office.  Is there really a difference in how those two kinds of votes are bought?  And what is the difference of such cash payments and a politician’s promise to pass legislation that will grow the economy, and thereby enrich all according to how they participate in the economy?

[17mar21 update]  Is Biden performing on green screen or edited CGI?  If so, have we entered a whole new era of bamboozling the public?  The video clearly shows Biden’s hand in front of one of the reporters’ mics, which from the rest of the (apparently composed) image should still be at least a couple of feet in front of him as he approaches. (more here)

The world has passed peak oil usage according to the International Energy Agency forecast. (here)  The post-pandemic usage of fossil fuels is projected to start going down as we convert to alternative ‘sustainable’ sources of energy.  The main factor in this reduction is the switch to electrically powered vehicles (EVs).  The IEA has not told us what the production pathway is to get the needed electricity to power the ever more higher count of EVs used for transportation.  Wind, water, and solar sources are still a long way off from satisfying the world's hunger for energy.

[18mar21 update] Today’s Union op-ed features a stellar local example of progressive thought in ‘What’s wrong with women’s rights?’ by Tom Durkin.  Among other women related issues Mr Durkin addresses abortion with, “Let’s get one thing straight. Anti-abortionists are not pro-life. They are just pro-birth. Once an unwanted child is born, anti-choice advocates lose interest — and responsibility — for the lives they claim to have saved. Way too often, unwanted children grow up in abuse, poverty and neglect. Where are the pro-lifers for these children?”  From this we are to understand that the anti-abortionists are responsible for the squalid conditions which led to women getting pregnant, and then have their un-aborted child grow up in the same squalor to a life of ignorance, crime, drugs, … .  All of this coming to pass on decades-long Democrat-controlled urban plantations that are perpetuated purposely for political power.  Now if this kind of argument does not represent evil or more evidence for leftwing idiocy (not ignorance), it’s hard to conceive what else would qualify.  From a careful examination of his nearby visage we may conclude in Mr Durkin’s favor that the gentleman most likely is not evil.

[19mar21 update]  Bumblebrain’s bungles jes’ keep on a’truckin’.  Never mind his problems climbing the stairs to board AF-1.  The only thing remarkable about that was the stone silence from his lamestream lackies who never noticed anything awry.  But the biggie was Team Biden confronting the Chinese in Alaska.  SecState Blinken confirmed that he is a naïf in the field of international diplomacy.  He and his team actually believed that they could get China to act contrite, kick their instep, and mutter ‘Well, aw schucks’ after Blinken gave them a sophomoric lecture on all their baddies re the Uighurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China Sea, … .  China responded by outlining our lamestream’s own anti-Trump talking points to highlight our systemic racism, wanton killing of blacks, persecuting immigrants at our borders, … .  In short, any casual RR contributor could have easily predicted the disastrous reaction to Team Biden and accurately scripted the Chinese response.  But to the new flock of incompetents that Bumblebrain has assembled, it was all a surprise.  The guys from Beijing are getting an early cut on ol’ Joe’s jib – exciting times ahead.  (more here)

Bumblebrain’s Bungles – 14mar21

George Rebane

Here’s an exercise in critical thinking that’s been circling the backwaters of my brainbone.  Most of the nation has debated Biden’s mental capacity and come down on this side or that.  And during this time a lot of new evidence keeps coming in on the policies he’s intitiated and how he’s handling his office.  So, if we are to surmise that one of four mutually independent characterizations (i.e. hypotheses) of his administration is true, how do we incorporate the newly arriving evidence to update our belief across the four Biden cases.  Let me define these as follows.

H1 – Biden is mentally fit, politically strong, and in full charge/command of his office.

H2 – Biden is mentally fit, politically weak, and is an instrument of his party’s radical leftwing.

H3 – Biden is not mentally fit for the office, is politically weak, and is an instrument of his party’s radical leftwing.

H4 – Biden is not mentally fit for office and is being prepared for an early resignation.

Assigning beliefs (probability values summing to one) to these cases, we can now examine arriving evidence – e.g. his avoiding a press conference and spontaneous encounters with the press – and update our beliefs.  Once you determine how likely it is that the evidence supports each case/hypothesis, it’s real easy to update your beliefs.  With these four cases in mind, a piece of evidence E will let you assign four likelihood ratios L1 through L4, one for each case.

Sandbox - 13mar21

[Jo Ann and I got our second doses of the Moderna C19 vaccine yesterday in Yuba City.  Our overlords are contemplating having all kinds of new travel regulations that require proof of vaccination, or immunity, or studying critical race theory, or something similar.  I wonder if we all will have to start carrying government issued copies of our shot and indoctrination records with us at all times as the next level of controlling our behavior and whereabouts.  gjr]

Dark Days Diary – 13mar21

George Rebane

In less than 100 days of Biden’s administration, we have already gotten used to witnessing the next tragi-comic policy coming out in quick succession before the dust has settled from the previous one.  Bumblebrain is totally in the tank for the radical socialist/communist wing of the Democratic Party, and the Left’s fascist mobs are again loose on the streets burning businesses and government buildings while what’s left of the party’s leadership piously informs Americans daily that the nation’s greatest danger is from an insurrection mounted by right wing terrorists.  Evidence for this fear is a very visible fenced and razor-wired Festung Pelosi in which today sits our nation’s Capitol Building surrounded by thousands of armed soldiers.

The latest legislative atrocity to emerge from a one-party Congress and the pen of a barely-there president is the $1.9T ‘stimulus’ act.  Given how much of the last stimulus is yet to be spent (over $1T), this latest is historically the most blatant vote buying scam yet to come out of Washington.  It is another gargantuan fiscal folly launched this weekend that comes at the wrong time, for the wrong amount, and purposed primarily for pork.  As Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced yesterday, a detailed reading of the bill reveals that only about 9% of the monies will go for Covid relief, and even that amount will be spread out beyond 2021.

We are still looking for a single thing that Biden has done to benefit the country, and his promises for the future comprise are nothing short of a continuous pouring of sand into the gears of the nation’s economy and ongoing unconstitutional limits to our liberties.  The worst of these is keeping the nation’s union-ruled public schools closed.  Private schools have been open throughout the pandemic providing a deluge of data to corroborate the science that tells us open classrooms are not a danger to the students or the teachers.

And now the American Enterprise Institute reports (here) of the latest science demonstrating that keeping the schools closed has caused, and continues to cause, more damage to kids and families than if they were opened to operate normally.  The politicians who have backed school closures need to line up behind Gov Cuomo as the government’s executioners accounting for thousands of unnecessary deaths of both the old and the young.  The latter suffering horrendously from high rates of suicide, drug abuse, social crippling, and, of course, irredeemable dumbth.

Finally, I’ll end this entry by drawing your attention to Biden’s intention to get the government into the semiconductor manufacturing business, this, ostensibly, to alleviate the chip shortage that has come about because industry couldn’t follow the zigs and zags of the feds’ C19 response policies.  But instead of letting the markets straighten out the manufacturing and distribution problems, Bumblebrain thinks that injecting a bunch of socialist central planners into the mix will solve the problem.  No one on the Left has learned over the last century that government is the worst allocator of resources to solve ANY problem – shades of the USSR, post-war UK, Venezuela, Cuba, all of Africa, … .