Rebane's Ruminations

Democrats’ Newspeak – 13jan22

George Rebane

George Orwell and Mao Zedong both knew that a person can only think thoughts supported by his language, a cogito-linguistic principle first introduced as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Orwell introduced it to broad audiences in the form of Newspeak in his 1984 classic.  Newspeak was a continuously revised and government mandated English that systematically removed/revised words that supported thinking about rebellion or anything antigovernmental.  It worked very effectively in the novel, and motivated Mao's attempt to replicate a Newspeak version of Chinese to a large illiterate population after communists took power in 1949.  Mao began by reducing published Chinese to 2,000 carefully chosen ideographs (out of more than 800,000), the recognition of these would make a citizen compliantly literate and able to read government issued dicta and ‘news’.

Democrats and other would-be autocrats worldwide have been envious of this method of thought control effected by the bureaucratic elites of collectivist governments.  And in the last few years we have seen America’s progressives begin implementing the 21^st century version of Newspeak.  A more sophisticated and harder to detect aspect of Newspeak is to reduce the information carrying capacity of the language.  This is achieved by contracting authorized word usage and making the meaning of surviving words more ambiguous.  (Languages expand their information carrying capacity by introducing new words to identify new things and capture more nuanced meanings so as to efficiently communicate them – think of ‘the cat caught a mouse’ vs ‘the domesticated furry, four-legged predator with claws caught a mouse’.)

A recent ratcheting of Newspeak is found in Gov Newsom’s new spate of laws for California, as described in Terry McLaughlin’s column in the 13jan22 Union (here).  Starting this year, the word ‘alien’ will be struck from government materials (as already picked up by the lamestream media), to be replaced by ‘non-citizen’ and ‘immigrant’ to describe people in America who are not citizens.  With these newly restricted usages, the reader cannot distinguish between, say, a legal tourist or business-person, and anyone illegally in the country; or a recently arrived person under a legal two-party agreement, and anyone who came here in violation of our laws.

Again, the Democrats’ motivation here is clear – not only make it hard to distinguish but also to think about illegal aliens flooding through porous borders to weaken America’s traditional culture, its sovereign nation-statehood, and to ensconce a growing electorate that will ultimately guarantee a one-party monopoly in the United States.  And Newspeak, promoted widely through our government and academic institutions, co-operating corporatists, and unionized public schools, makes it all possible.  As an exit exercise, consider also the new meanings of ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘insurrection’, ‘the rich’, ‘nazi’, ‘socialist’, ‘violence’, … . To confirm the success of this insidious program, just have a conversation with anyone under 30 years old.

As former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker observed in ‘The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’, “We are facing nothing less than a concerted, sustained and comprehensive effort to re-educate Americans in service of a radical ideological agenda.”

The Covid testing fiasco grows

George Rebane

Now there are not enough tests, and the desired rapid tests are really unreliable, and regardless of test results, it is probably safer to let Omicron spread than mess with it, if you’re not in one of those vulnerable classes, and more to come.  All this on top of the simple fact that making decisions on just ‘test positivity’ has always been a non-starter (as I’ve shown in these pages).

Today we read in the 11jan22 WSJ (here) that the popular home rapid tests may be even more unreliable in detecting Delta and other non-Omicron variants of the disease.  And timing is very important in when the test is taken – don’t do it too early, let the symptoms cook for a couple or three days (then what do you do?), and don’t be eager to believe negative test results, and … .

The best sensitivities of ‘properly applied’ tests yield sensitivities of 85-95% - that’s the probability of getting a ‘test positive’ given you have the disease.  This, of course, means that out of every 100 diseased and infectious individuals, the test will come back negative for 5 to 15 of them.  These are then free to party or attend other sardine-packed events or transports.  The specificity of tests are not even mentioned; apparently they are of no concern.  You may recall that a test’s specificity is the probability getting ‘test negative’, given you don’t have the disease.  Test specificities are usually lower than sensitivities.  That means that tests also quarantine a lot more people than actually have the malady.

Then there’s the whole question of managing the spread of Covid.  In ‘Slow the spread?  Speeding it may be safer’ the authors present data and argue that “the Omicron variant is spreading across the globe, but so far the strain appears to be less deadly than its predecessors. That’s good news, but here’s a risk that policy makers in every country should appreciate: Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a supervariant that is more infectious, more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. That would be a man-made disaster.”

This all has to do with some very sophisticated technical notions of factors affecting dispersion known as ‘antigenic drift’ and ‘antigenic shift’.  Drift is a slow mechanism by which a virus changes, which then allows a host’s immune system to successfully suppress viruses which have only slightly modified themselves from the successfully vaxxed or naturally inhibited variants.  Letting drift occur – i.e. speeding dispersion – has a higher probability of stopping all such variants before they find ways to change even more into versions for which there is no effective vaccine.

Shift then is the process by which the virus can pile up multiple changes to its genome and then emerge as having gone through a “discontinuous quantum leap from one antigen (or set of antigens) to a very different antigen (or set of antigens). New viral strains—such as those that jump from one species to another—tend to emerge from antigenic shift.”

This is bad because “vaccinated and naturally immune people can revamp their immune response to new viral strains created by antigenic drift. Yet social distancing and masking increase the risk of vaccine-resistant strains from antigenic shift by minimizing opportunities for the vaccinated and naturally immune to tailor their immune responses through periodic exposures to incrementally ‘drifted’ variants.”

This reality is complex stuff, and you’ll hear nothing about it from the government’s Faucis and Walenskys.  All that comes down to us are articles of faith about more testing being somehow better than less testing.  But two years into C19, and no one has yet to state a cogent or coherent objective for widespread testing.  Most certainly no reasonable case has been made that testing somehow reduces the virulence, morbidity, or mortality of Covid.  So there you have it.  The testing confusion grows, and the world’s population has abandoned all critical thought and become lemmings led to the altar of testing to worship a rite, the blessings of which no one is aware.  Today we do testing simply for the sake of testing because it makes us feel good.  Sometimes placebos work.

Check your PG&E bill (updated 11jan22)

George Rebane

PG&E continues to provide its customers with added dimensions of its incompetence as the power utility of northern California.  We have covered the litany of its poor performance in these pages, and now add another to the list.  The December bill arrived with a blatant and obvious overcharge for electricity not delivered.  During the last series of snowstorms along with thousands of PG&E customers in the foothills, we too lost our power for eleven days.  It went off at 1215 27dec21 and came back on at 1600 6jan22.  Our bill (below) showed that they continued our electric service unabated on 27dec21 through 29dec21.

We have one of those ‘smart meters’ that are now standard in PG&E’s service area.  It is supposed to automatically report power usage to their accounting and power management systems.  There they have a computer algo that takes this data and massages it into the above graphic along with the billed amount using a complex formula of time-dependent rates.  Obviously, their data gathering system and/or algo is faulty, and this blatant revelation strongly implies that they may have been overcharging their customers for some time now.

So check your electricity bill, and if yours is also in error, do something more than just bitching to the PG&E billing department.  Write a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission and demand that they get PG&E to account for the performance of their metering and billing system, and prove that they have not been screwing up for who knows how many months/years.  It is implausible that such an error is a onetime affair that was caused by the storm.  (Note that the algo did not revert to some constant default usage level, but actually varied the post-shutdown daily usage.)

I ascribe the problem to the ongoing cadre of ignorant, incompetent, and slothful dunces that populate PG&E’s management ranks.  Their hardworking field crews are capable, hardworking, and fully acknowledge that they have to be the public face of an organization that has had a rotten head shed for years.  The PUC should hold them to account for this and numerous other sins too many to list.

[11jan22 update]  Jo Ann called PG&E and went online to our account.  The nice lady at the other end apologized that the bills they send out continue to have bogus indications of power usage, and that they are working very hard to fix it.  She further assured us, and showed us the appropriate page online where the usage numbers for the power outage period had cross hatches below them, indicating that these were not the actual numbers to be used to calculate our bill.  She was very accommodating and informative about their problem and their consumers’ misapprehensions.  In the future we should ignore the bill they send us and log in to our account online to see the actual data that goes into calculating out bill.  What a way to run a railroad.

Sandbox - 9jan22

[Apologies for such a big interval between fresh sand.  Too many other good topics to address directly.  gjr]

Dark Days Diary – 8jan22 (undated 12jan22)

George Rebane

The shameful declines of Scientific American and NPR.  In days of yore, both media outlets were posterchildren of professional and responsible journalism.  And during the last twenty years both have embarked on a shameful decline that shows no signs of stopping.  SA, published continuously since the 1840s, served as the periodic and apolitical compendium of scientific advances served up for the intelligent reader.  No longer.  Today it has subverted to a progressive propaganda organ that sees all aspects of science as being race-based, and promotes a fundamental change to scientific enquiry founded on Marxist class/racist principles (here).  We have already covered the decline of what is now National Propaganda Radio which serves as the publicly funded ($100M annually) voice of the Democratic Party, tilting daily more to its radically woke wing (here).  What pisses me to the gills is the amount of its taxpayer funding that the Republicans have been silent about for years.

Comparative corruption in global governance.  In an ongoing discussion with a friend and correspondent who is a retired international banker, we have focused on the existence of corruption in almost all governments, and which countries do better than others to actively control corruption.  My friend spent many years stationed in various countries and experienced first hand their inner workings which were very much in evidence through their baking and financial institutions.  Costa Rica is the standout anti-corruption posterchild in the otherwise terminally corrupt gaggle of Latin American nations.  Many thousands of American expatriates have retired to Costa Rica, and now call it their home while maintaining their US citizenship.  The chart below (compiled by the World Bank in its Worldwide Governance Indicators) provides a basis for that emigration over the years.  I am surprised to see that the US rated so high, given its recent decline from the rule of law (and constitutionalism), and the growth of an obviously corrupt ‘deep state’ bureaucracy.

[9jan22 update]  ‘More Good News on Ivermectin’ and more evidence that the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic cost millions of preventable deaths.  So have the physicians and researchers of “the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) been calling for widespread adoption of Ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19.”  History will record that what has happened in the last two years across the globe has been one of greatest politically motivated mass murders on record.  And those complicit can never admit to their perfidy in promoting the proscription of this effective, readily available, and demonstrably safe medicine, for the adjudication of their criminality would require the empaneling of a Nürnberg-like court, and this will never happen.  Nevertheless, the record of this unrequited tragedy should always remain available.  Dark days indeed.

[10jan22 update]  Our housecleaner closed down after 30 years in the business.  She and her excellent crew have been part of our extended family for half of those years.  In her letter to us she cited the reasons for quitting as the usual litany of California’s war against entrepreneurship and capitalism – taxes, stifling regulations from all levels, varying Covid mandates, government checks for not working, and so on.  And sadly, she was not able to give us a reference to another local housecleaning business.  The reason?  In Nevada County she was the last holdout against the state’s anti-business winds, all of the other reputable housecleaners preceded her in pulling the plug.  More signs of the times.

North Carolina Lt Gov Mark Robinson on reparations.  This two minute video (here) of his last year’s speech to the state’s GOP is guaranteed to moisten your eyes and send chills down your spine, unless you are a Democrat doing plantation maintenance in the country’s urban areas.

[12jan22 update]  Government of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.  More information continues to be made public about the large-scale perfidy promoted by various agencies of the federal government and gratuitously integrated into the radical progressive policies in practice and promoted by the Democratic Party through its control of the administration and Congress.  Project Veritas has obtained documents that shed more light on what our government has done in promoting overseas gain-of-function research and suppression of the demonstrated benefits of Hydrochloroquine and Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid in all its phases.  This lends further credence to the allegations that senior government officials like Dr Fauci have purposively misled the American public and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions across the world.  H/T to reader.  (More here and here)

 

The “Insurrection” one year on

George Rebane

Calling and pursuing the 6jan21 Capitol riot as an ‘insurrection’ is the new litmus test for identifying those of the Left in America.

Countless leftwing naïfs across the country – e.g. Tom Durkin (here) in the 6jan22 Union – are decrying the “death of democracy”, which supposedly started with what they call a rightwing insurrection last January.  What happened then was anything but an insurrection planned and executed to destroy American democracy and replace its government.  Look up the definition of ‘insurrection’ and read some history on real insurrections.  In the meantime we may take these 'insurrections' as coming from the semantically challenged and politically agendized.

For other perspectives on the 6jan21 riot attended by rightwingers and Trump supporters, I call your attention to two WSJ pieces – ‘Democracy Isn’t Dying’ and ‘Stop Calling Jan.6 an Insurrection’.  From such perspectives we can reasonably conclude that 1/6 now conveniently serves the Left's agenda to define our division, and also to divide us further.

Victor Davis Hanson ties a nice bow on what the Democrats are actually pursuing in Washington and nation wide in his ‘Who are the Real Insurrectionists?’  It is clear to all who pay attention that the Dems have only one tune to play for their 2022 chances with an obviously debilitated and failing administration.

Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.  As a result, the Left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when they expect to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when they fear losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.  A cynic might suggest that they praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.  (emphasis added)

The Beta-Rho Sham? (Addended)

George Rebane

Here’s a little something from my financial engineering toy box that one or two RR readers may find interesting.  The discussion is a tiny bit technical, but the pictures should be accessible to all.  Most investors know that a stock’s beta (Greek β) is a number that indicates how well the security tracks its market, say, the SP500.  And rho (Greek ρ) measures the correlation between, say, the price series of two stock’s – the way they both zig and zag together, or how much one zigs while the other zags.  I’ll try to keep this short.

From august sources like Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) by nobelists Markowitz and Sharpe, we learn that if a stock’s β equals one, then it more or less goes up and down in similar percent changes with the market.  If β > 1, then the stock’s swings have a greater percentage than the market’s; and if β < 1, then the stock’s swings behave in a more reserved manner than do the market’s.  Riskier stocks have the bigger swings, and more conservative stocks have the smaller swings.  The referenced formula (here) for beta reflects this with its inclusion of the standard deviation of the price swings.

As stated above, ρ measures in how tight of a formation two stocks will fly.  The range of ρ is between +1 and -1, with the positive values indicating tighter formations, and ρ = 1 denoting a perfectly tight formation matching each other’s zigs and zags.  A small or zero ρ means that the stocks pretty much act independently of each other.  In designing your investment portfolio from a selected shortlist of stocks, MPT teaches that you should try to avoid stocks that pair with high ρ values.  Doing probabilistic math recommends that you pick stocks that pair with the lowest ρ values possible to give you a low volatility (i.e. low risk) portfolio.

Now after you understand all that, we’re going to throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing, a little bit of information you will not hear from your well-paid wealth advisor who manages your portfolio.  (Drum roll please.)  Betas and rhos, calculated from past performance, are pretty much worthless measures of securities performance for portfolio design.  Why?  Well, that answer depends on what is known as the investor’s ‘investment horizon’.  That’s the period into the future over which the investment plan is supposed to hold with numbers such as expected portfolio appreciation, its most likely upper and lower limits, and so forth.

Scattershots – 3jan22 (updated 7jan22)

 

George Rebane

Eight days with no power on Hind Tit Rd.  We have received the same lame information-less message five times from PG&E, telling us that they have access to our area and are starting to assess the outage to see what must be done to restore power.  Not even a hint of any schedule or estimate of how long we have to stay hunkered down.  We're a stone's throw from the Rood Center, and there is total access to our ridge, the outage up here is no doubt due to some problem at a local distribution facility, which you’d think would be easier to fix than having to wait until trees are cleared from the road and downed power lines are restrung.  At every turn they demonstrate another function or task of which they are incapable.  But hey, their outage map is looking better today than yesterday.  Some day it’ll be our turn.

The next worry on everyone’s mind is propane or gasoline for their generators.  Gasoline appears to be available – we trade at Robinson’s and they are doing their job with their fuels.  My supplier is Amerigas, with whom I’ve been a 45-year customer.  They have promised to resupply me before the sun sets on Wednesday.  Most people have already run out or are about to with not even a promise of their next delivery.  Calling a propane company today will have you listening to some very irritating elevator music for almost an hour or so until you go to Plan B.  Amerigas’ online account management is up, and they confirmed my delivery schedule in writing (of which I took a screen image) for what good that will do.  In any event, many others are really faring poorly.   It’s amazing how many people – especially the elderly and infirm - are stuck in their homes with no preparation at all for when the grid goes down.  Grandson-in-law Shawn, owner of Estey Electric, has been doing yeoman’s work during these las days with his crews and coordinating Project Haart teams of volunteers to do everything from getting generators going, bringing food and fuel, and clearing driveways.  These people are a blessing to the community.

Kudos to the Supes for getting Nevada County declared a disaster area.  Can anyone actually tell if that designation has yet to benefit us?

[4jan22 update]  California’s incompetence on parade – dumping untold amounts of water into the Pacific Ocean.  H/T to reader for the links (here and here) that tell the story of the Democrats’ eternal incompetence when it comes to governance and regulating public affairs.  In the last two years we have pissed away a 7-year water supply from our reservoirs in a state blessed with abundant water that comes to us interspersed with dry years – a centuries old climate phenomenon in this part of the West (that’s why God invented reservoirs).  But again, ‘the fault dear reader is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are the terminally ignorant voters.’ (with apologies to The Bard.)

"I've got a few bones to pick with recent columns", so writes Mr Richard Borlik in the 30dec21 Union.  He does a good job outlining all the left-leaning and politically correct (cum woke) editorial and news pieces to which The Union is prone.  And kudos to the newspaper for having the balls to publish such a forthright criticism of its editorial and news policies.

[7jan22 update]  How far we are apart.  A longtime RR reader and commenter, well-known to our regulars, is a dedicated leftwinger as evidenced by years of his comments on various subjects that decorate these pages.  He recently put another shot across my bow in a discussion thread by not only refusing to read a citation I gave him, but pre-emptively declaring that its author is a “totally non credible source”, not to be believed or trusted.  I was advised to “try again.”  The author, Victor Davis Hanson, is a noted historian and scholar (Stanford professor) who is nationally known, and who many Americans consider a national treasure.  He is also acknowledged as an astute observer of the country’s socio-political scene, and has an extensive contribution of published books, scholarly papers, and articles regularly appearing in prominent publications.  He is also interviewed frequently by a spectrum of media outlets for his views on current events, which he is uniquely able to connect with historical perspectives.  No one has ever accused or shown VDH to fly loose with his assessments or falsify any factual content in his writings.  Nevertheless, dedicated leftists abhor him because he is intellectually unassailable, and his presentations devastate the progressive narrative and established public policies.  If people like VDH are not accepted by the Left, then there truly is no possibility of dialogue.

Predicting 2022 (updated 1jan22)

George Rebane

2022 will be another pivotal year in a growing string of such recent years.  Most predictions, save the premature happy dancing by Republicans, range between dour and cataclysmic.  A reader gives us a taste of that by pointing to James Howard Kunstler’s entry in Clusterfuck Nation with his ‘Forecast 2022 – Dumpster Fire Blazing on the Frontier of a Dark Age’.  So here are some of my prognostications with an invite for readers to add their own.  Please try to submit your entries before the first week of 2022 becomes history.

Since we know predicting is hard, especially about the future, and very little is certain, I will attach some quantitative probabilities to my efforts, and invite others to do the same.  We can then even determine who wins the 2022 Nostradamus Award, as I demonstrate in the coda.

1. Bumblebrain will not be president on 1 January 2023 (0.5); will not be president on 21 January 2025 (0.4); will serve out his full term (0.1).
2. Kamala will resign before 2022 election (0.6).
3. Covid will revert from pandemic to declared endemic (like the flu) status before 4 July 2022 (0.7).
4. Republicans will win the House in 2022 (0.8).
5. Republicans will win the Senate in 2022 (0.7).
6. Russia will invade Ukraine in 2022 (0.55).
7. China will invade Taiwan in 2022 (0.25).
8. Fed declared inflation will exceed 10% in 2022 (0.25).
9. Republicans will win at least 14 House seats from California (0.8).
10. The 25^th Amendment will be used to designate a new Vice President before the 2024 election (0.75).

More later, maybe.

Such a list of probability tagged predictions may be scored simply by taking the average of the ‘correct’ probabilities – i.e. probabilities that associate with the cases that come to pass.  For instance, in my list, if everything comes to pass with with Biden serving out a full term, Kamala does not resign, and China does not invade Taiwan, then my Nostradamus score – which ranges between 0 and 1 - would be (0.1+0.4+0.7+0.8+0.7+0.55+0.75+0.25+0.8+0.75)/10 = 0.58.

Jo Ann and I wish all of our readers and correspondents a productive and healthy new year.

[1jan22 update]  I just want to emphasize the reason for my #6 and #7 predictions.  Everyone in the world save America’s Democrat-prone electorate knows that the Team Biden is the weakest, most feckless, incompetent, and ignorant leadership the US has installed in the last 50 years (yes, even beating out the peanut farmer).  For either of Putin or Xi to invade would be a win for them ou two counts.  First, whatever our response, Americans tend to support their president during times of crisis.  That will assure a continuance in power of the weak and feckless Democrats.  Second, they get to achieve the next notch in their geo-strategic goals with the new territory they will then control.  What’s not to like in creating another crisis that Bumblebrain can’t handle?

Ignorance that passeth all understanding

George Rebane

The Biden administration in attempts to climb out of its shithole of bad policies has the latest excuse for the inflation surge – it’s the fault of American businesses, big and small.  You see, they all got together and decided to start raising prices at the same time.  Another capitalist conspiracy if there ever was one according to our socialists cum communists (that has been their message for over a century now).  It is incomprehensible how the simple economic principle of supply/demand and its effect on prices (and economic behaviors) continues to elude them.

This aspect of their profound ignorance ranks right up there with the Left’s eternal shibboleth that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior.  Where are their intellectual luminaries like Cass Sunstein, of Nudge (2008) and Noise (2021) fame, when Bumblebrain and his redheaded shill put out such garbage for national consumption?  It has never taken much between the ears to understand why socialism and widespread misery correlate so well - more socialism, more misery.  Assemble just a handful of their tortured tenets on human behavior, and you can not only write the economic histories of their disasters, but also predict the nature of the next disaster given their latest policy WIP.  Their BBB (Bring Back Blight) legislation, now in limbo, is a perfect redux of the Titanic’s last night at full speed in iceberg infested waters.

As part of the carefully intended and hidden blights in the BBB, consider that one of its many disastrous provisions calls for the feds to subsidize the nation’s journalists’ salaries.  The wraps would finally come off these lamestream lackies of the Democratic Party – they would finally be put on the payroll to write the ‘news’ as dictated by the DNC - so much for the sham of a free and impartial press. (more here) The American electorate is judged to be in such dire straits that the Left no longer needs to hide or deny such fundamental transformations of America.

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

In the last Dark Days Diary (here) I highlighted a short dissertation on the spread of communism by a former KGB agent.  As we have frequently pointed out, 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 insidious collectivist propaganda – e.g. Critical Race Theory.  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.

Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson makes the extensive case (here and here) that this 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 a 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 then 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 student, 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 believe in 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 making school choice possible and letting parents decide where their children will be schooled.

Sandbox - 27dec21

[Well, the old year is going out like a lion.  The whole county got plastered with its biggest snow storm in years, and there's more to come.  Power went out 1215 this morning, and our new 24KW powerbox has been humming along ever since.  Everybody will be ordering propane.  Time to hunker down, stay warm, and pray for RAIN.  gjr]

When Teenagers Worked

George Rebane

[This entry is posted as part of an occasional addition to RR’s My Story category as an expanding part of my autobiography.  It may be of limited interest to readers as a period piece describing part of an America that sadly is long gone.  It was an epoch that goes a long way to illustrate today’s generational differences in our culture, values, mores, and sense of nationhood.]

I was a teenager in the 1950s and we all had jobs in addition to home chores, school work, and after school activities (I played basketball).  We lived in the rural outskirts of Indianapolis before moving to California in 1957.  I did odd jobs for neighbors throughout the year and was much in demand because my dad and school shop classes had taught me to do almost everything required to build/repair a residential house.  But my first regular work was as a field hand for Jack Maschmeyer, my school bus driver who along with his wife Mary ran a small truck farm growing specialty crops a couple of miles from my house.

The farm work started in late April and lasted through September.  I got to Jack’s farm on my bike, and was there joined by three other teenagers.  The four of us made up the vetted and proven core team of field hands that enabled the Maschmeyers to run their operation.  Jack was a no-nonsense ‘Dutchman’ (WW1 veteran) who taught his charges carefully and put them through a probationary period before being welcomed as a permanent member.  While we did many stoop-labor tasks and harvested several kinds of crops (e.g. field tomatoes, cantaloupes, strawberries, …), our main work always included the daily cutting of about 5 acres of asparagus, an amazingly fast-growing plant – we would always hear the hiss from the field as we prepared to go home in the evening.  The white noise came from countless new spears pushing up through the dried husks of previously cut spears.

Cutting asparagus with speed and accuracy was the most skill-demanding job on a truck farm; a bad cutter was slow and usually destroyed the following day’s crop by imprecisely making broader thrusts with his V-bladed knife than was required to harvest the mature spear which had grown about a foot in the past 24 hours, and was packed cheek-by-jowl with the immature spears for tomorrow or the next day.  Jack hired no bad cutters; these came and went real fast when we had turnover.  Mary always sent us boys home with some produce, usually a bunch of freshly cut asparagus which my mom didn’t know how to cook – she boiled it to death, which was the Nordic way with most vegetables.

But the point I want to make here is that America’s society worked because teenagers also worked.  We did countless jobs that included paper routes, yard work of all kinds (this was before Mexican gardeners), house chores, clean-up and construction jobs, etc.  Suburban America’s yards looked good because the local teenagers kept them that way within win-win compacts with neighbors.  There was no concern for child labor laws, regulations, wage levels, age restrictions, workers comp and liability insurance, … .  The work contract was between the neighbor-in-need and the kid looking to work.  Relationships were struck that lasted for years, usually until the young person’s school required transitioning to more serious jobs like farm work or clerking in local stores (Jo Ann’s teenage jobs).

Christmas - 2021

Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.  Matthew 1:23

George Rebane

[This Christmas message first appeared here in 2019 and was repeated last year.  It still bears repeating.]

Another tumultuous year is ending with celebrations for peace and joy.  The Rebanes count themselves among the diminishing number of American Christians who still wish their family and friends, and RR readers of all persuasions a season of remembrance and reflection on what has been bestowed on this third planet, circling a modest star, making its way with billions of similar stars in a galaxy that populates this universe with uncounted trillions of other such galaxies.  Christmas still reminds many of us that we are among the blessed in our seeming insignificance.

Scattershots – 22dec21 (updated 29dec21)

George Rebane

Here’s the FDA approval of an Ivermectin wannabe that is touted by the conservative Daily Signal.  And here from Blaze is a more sobering look at the new pill therapeutics that discusses their problems and shortcomings, among them price.  Meanwhile IVM has all the proven requirements for an early stage pill to minimize subsequent Covid morbidity, and a medicine that is widely available, off-patent cheap, and doesn’t have the feared side effects of the recently rushed remedies from big pharma.

[24dec21 update]  Here is a gun culture that would give our totalitarians (aka Democrats) sanitary problems in their shorts.  And it's all made possible, as always, by the society's civilized culture; something that has been destroyed in America, the land of the formerly free.  (H/T to reader)

[26dec21 update]  Weather guessers (aka meteorologists) have no shame.  This becomes clear to anyone who attempts to use winter weather forecasts for planning purposes.  Their models are totally deficient in their attempts to predict impactive weather events like rain or snow.  Their unabashed predictions over the last five days for the imminent onset of heavy snow have witnessed a steady sequence of rollbacks without once diminishing the “100%” probabilities they continue to attribute the snows’ onsets that are only a few hours in the future.  Bottom line – no can do, but will continue publishing unabated bullshit hour after hour as the days pass.  So, the tribe that can’t hack getting major weather changes only hours away, still insist that their ‘science’ allows them to predict global temperatures 50 years from now to within one degree Celsius.  And then there are the millions of true believers out there eating it all up – don’t get me (re)started.

[27dec21 update] VDH's The Dying Citizen (2021) is a tour de force from a scholar and keen observer of the human condition that is not his first, nor will it be his last.  In Hanson's included essay on the progressivists' plan for global governance, I extract the following - "In sum, globalization rests on a few poorly examined laws: those who draft globalized rules for others have the resources to navigate around them.  Discussions of abstract cosmic challenges - achieving world peace, cooling the planet, lowering the seas, dismantling secure borders - are psychological ways to square the circle of failure to solve concrete problems at home from war to poverty.  Wealthy tech workers in San Francisco hold frequent conferences and symposia about addressing water, sewage, and disease in Africa, but the have demonstrated no ability to address California's own fetid city streets, which are home to over three hundred thousand homeless and rife with medieval diseases, refuse, excrement, and rodents.  In addressing such existential and age-old challenges, we are left where we started in Western civilization: the only means are transparent decentralized local governments, audited by a free and disinterested press and acting under the aegis of a constitutional, consensual republic, serving only at the pleasure of a voting citizenry." (emphasis added)

[29dec21 update]  To become an actuary is hard, so reports the 29dec21 WSJ in ‘Want to be an actuary?  Odds are you’ll fail the test.’  “Insurers need experts to calculate risks.  Among those number-crunchers’ riskiest endeavors are the tortuous exams for credentials.” Actuaries do all kinds of quantitative risk assessment work for insurance companies, M&A consultants, corporate investment activities, etc.  The two professional credentialed actuary levels are Associate and Fellow.  Passing multiple tests are required for each, the toughest being on probabilistics.  The tests are usually taken multiple times by successful candidates to get passing scores – even then only 15% of those attempting make it to Associate, 10% make it to Fellow.  Here’s one of the toughies on probabilistics.  “An urn contains 10 balls: 4 red and 6 blue. A second urn contains 16 red balls and an unknown number of blue balls. A single ball is drawn from each urn. The probability that both balls are the same color is 0.4720.  Calculate the number of blue balls in the second urn.”  Give it a try and post your answer in the comments.  I’ll post the correct answer after we see a few attempts (or not).

Covid Policies and Continued Testing (Addended; updated 22dec21)

George Rebane

Governments here in America and around the world are fumbling around with Covid response policies as every new variant is discovered and infection cases surge and retreat.  People continue to be assured that the public agencies and their political leaders are “following the science”, even when there is no evidence of such following presented or demonstrated.  But as we have all experienced, the government agencies, ‘experts’, and politicians are all over the place with their advice, prescriptions, and mandates.  It is clear that neither the national nor global collective knows how to properly respond to the pandemic (e.g. here)  More disturbing are the ongoing subterfuges that leak out in the media and online.  An extremely revealing and disturbing interview is by Tucker Carlson of Robert Kennedy Jr, author of the current best seller The Real Anthony Fauci (2021).  It has been pulled by YouTube and FN, but is still available on Bitchute here.

In my many-years experience with healthcare decision making, I have found that practitioners in the medical industry are profoundly ignorant of uncertainty, risk, utility, estimation, and in general critical interventions that are affected by uncertainties (i.e. depend on probabilistics).  This assessment applies especially to the physicians with whom the patient interacts.  These people are uniformly condescending or arrogantly hubristic in how they hide their ignorance of the maladies in question, and what is required for the lay patient to make a reasoned and understandable decision.

Perfidy aside, nowhere is such practice more visible to the technically trained than in the field of public health.  A current posterchild demonstrating this is how little and erroneously we are informed about Covid testing.  We are told that testing is somehow critical to reducing the spread of the disease – the more testing the better.  Tests are communicated to the layman as consisting of one uniform process that somehow reliably determines your infection status AND your ability to infect others.  Science tells us nothing could be further from the truth.

Ignorance of causes and effects should be usefully represented quantitatively.  Such ignorance is no excuse for avoiding quantitative decision support techniques.  For example, here is an AMA article that talks about test types, dependers, and whyfors, but gives you no information about the involved probabilistics (e.g test sensitivities and specificities) for decision making.  Today machines can be designed to incorporate more knowledge than any one or group of practitioners can manage in literally any specific domain of expertise.  As a consequence, where such technology is applied, AI-based decision support systems outperform their human counterparts every time – and this is specifically the case in medicine and healthcare.  Here is Nobelist Daniel Kahneman on AI bettering human decisions. (here and here)

Sandbox - 15dec21

[Bumblebrain again promises that the feds spending an extra $5T this decade under its BBB plan will be the best thing for the economy since "it will cost nothing" by taxing the bejeezus out of everyone in sight.  You really didn't believe that "only those making over $400K" did you?  What is it that makes all leftwingers terminally stupid about economics and as to how humans respond to armed confiscation?  Perhaps that mental deficiency is a prerequisite for becoming a leftwinger.  gjr]