Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox – 28may23

[KIA – War Between States 620,000; WW2 405,399; WW1 116,516; Vietnam War 58,209; Korean War 36,516; American Revolution 25,000; War of 1812 20,000; Mexican-American War 13,283; War on Terror 7,075; Spanish-American War 2,446 (more here).  For what did all these Americans put on a uniform and die?  gjr]

Scattershots – 27may23

George Rebane

State Farm Insurance pulls out of California.  Another one of the country’s largest insurance firms will no longer write new policies in the once golden state where wildfire risk continues high and the state’s regulatory and tax environment makes the cost of rebuilding a house prohibitive at the permitted premium levels.  Bottom line – we have done it to ourselves again by electing certifiable idiots to represent us in Sacramento.  Tragically things will not change peacefully since these policies don’t affect the state’s takers directly, and there are enough ignorant makers to maintain the voting block required to keep the legislature and administrative bureaucrats firmly in Democrat hands.

Dropout Derby time again?  Back in the 2019 election season, leading up to the 2020 election, we had 26 Democrat hopefuls vying for the presidency.  Knowing that sooner or later the slings and arrows of inevitably outrageous fortune would reduce that number to a manageable few, we introduced Dropout Derby to these pages (here and here).  Readers were invited to record and submit the order in which the candidates would drop out of the race.  Eight of us chose to enter the competition that ran for several months into 2020 with the eventual winner being Estonian Fox.  (In memoriam we sadly note that three of the participants are no longer with us.)  Given the number of Democrats lining up to relieve Bumblebrain from having to attempt another disastrous four years, I consider starting another Dropout Derby given sufficient interest and substantial number of declared candidates.

All cultures are not of the same worth/value to anyone living on this planet.  However, the progressive mindset has taught us otherwise.  Evidence for the inequality of cultures abounds, as measured along any attribute, and is confirmed daily in the news media – yes, even in the leftwing outlets.  RR has made this point for years in its arguments on how to maintain the sanctity of our sovereignty (more here and here).  Now the latest confirmation comes from the cohort of Sudanese immigrants rampaging through the chambers of the Minneapolis City Council (here).  As pointed out before, it doesn’t take much of cohesive plurality in a minority for it to start impacting public policy.

America’s Mass Suicide in Progress

[The following is a recent commentary by Victor Davis Hanson, an academic and national intellect familiar to RR readers.  In it he again summarizes the socio-political travesties that America’s Left, abetted by our foreign enemies, daily visits upon our people most of whom ill-prepared by their schooling to understand, let alone resist, these propagandized assaults.  VDH’s commentary was first posted on townhall.com.  gjr]

Victor Davis Hanson

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice.

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges.

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign - while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely "Russian disinformation." That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multi-year audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden's purported tax irregularities.

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden's appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar "reparations" payout to the state's Black residents.

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have.

One of the reparations board leaders asserts Blacks might be willing to accept an "installment" plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a "travel alert" advising Blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' announcement of a presidential bid.

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis - all outside Florida - have the highest Black murder rates in the nation.

Florida by contrast, with a Black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of Black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP's board of directors is himself a Florida resident!

Black Lives Matter has just announced it lost millions of dollars in investments and ran up huge deficits. The culprit was its former corrupt leadership.

Its extravagant spending, plush homes, and family hangers-on have nearly bankrupted the advocacy group. It cannot account for the millions of dollars in corporate guilt and protection money it leveraged following the George Floyd riots in 2020.

In New York, a threatening subway career criminal with 42 prior arrests was subdued by a bystander and died during the confrontation. The criminal is now deified. The would-be Samaritan is charged with felony manslaughter.

The deceased's uncle is vocal about his late nephew's confrontation. But he himself was just arrested with stolen property and armed with a knife. He was mysteriously still roaming the streets despite 70 prior arrests and current active arrest warrants.

In almost every American city and town, biological males, with enormous advantages in size and musculoskeletal mass, routinely win women's sporting competitions.

They are systematically destroying decades of progress that sought to ensure parity between men and women's sports.

Corporate America has joined this cultural revolution hysteria. Companies are apparently now hellbent on destroying their brands, profits, and net worth.

Under pressure from the LGBTQ activists, the Los Angeles Dodgers reinvited the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to celebrate Pride night at Dodger Stadium.

Catholics and Christians had objected to the invitation because the group's notoriety hinges on its sexualized and often pornographic mockery of Catholic ritual, the Holy Trinity, and Christian faith.

The supposedly courageous group would never dare extend its street-theater blasphemy to other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus.

The Dodgers apparently do not care that Greater Los Angeles may be home to 6 million Mexican American citizens and resident Hispanic immigrants. Most are Catholic and many were avid Dodger fans.

Anheuser-Busch has nearly destroyed its best-selling Bud Light brand by hiring transgender performance-art activist Dylan Mulvaney to hawk the brand - and his own transitioning - to America's working classes.

The Disney corporation, for decades, has enjoyed multibillion-dollar concessions and a veritable 40-square mile private fiefdom gifted from the taxpayers of Florida.

No matter. Disney has rebranded it films, amusement parks, and television offerings to reflect radical transgender, gay, and race advocacies.

The results so far are billion-dollar losses in Disney stock, subscribers, and viewers.

A woke CNN has all but destroyed its once-global audience. It now has fewer viewers than certain popular podcasts.

All these implosions are not just shocking but surreal. Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide - to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?

Reckless Reparations

George Rebane

We as a nation-state have now reached the nadir of cohesion that keeps a society together and working to serve its collective needs.  This has been achieved through the introduction of a reparations policy for the nation’s black population, the cohort of Americans whose ancestors may have been enslaved by whites during the early decades of our republic.  The reparations in the form of cash payments collected from non-blacks are supposed assuage the alleged race-based suffering by blacks and cleanse some of the guilt that still burdens those who may have had slave-owning ancestors.

As many have made clear, the enforcement of such a policy is not only impossible, but its attempt will definitely contribute to the growing forces that will finally rend our country into a collection of warring tribes.  Such paths to internecine conflict are well known and have been practiced countless times before – they always end with blood.

I don’t understand how such a large number of Americans today can support this kind of forcible wealth transfer that will forever differentiate us both legally and fiscally.  Both sides will proudly carry their memberships in the ranks of the givers and takers.  The givers will always be seen as the descendants of racists (if not racists per se), indicted and found guilty of the alleged systemic racism running rampant across the land.  The takers will be confirmed as having one more race-based benefit that adds to the trillions in wealth already having been distributed to them (since the start of Great Society), and undeserved due to their outsized and ongoing contributions to the nation’s crime, educational decline, family break-up, and drug problems.  These endemic societal ills in the black community will not be diminished by any imaginable sums they will be paid by the ridiculously lavish amounts now being contemplated by Democrats in Sacramento.

The factors that contribute to the utter foolishness and insanity of instituting such a wealth transfer program are outlined in Victor Davis Hanson’s ‘Reckless Reparations Reckoning’.

Hopelessness Confirmed Again (updated 21may23)

George Rebane

The release and concurrent suppression of the Durham report confirms once more that we are way past any hope of rapprochement of America’s great divide.  In short, our split is now permanent, all it awaits is for serendipity to finally resolve its form, structure, and shot heard round the world.  At least two thirds of our electorate and almost all of our youth have no idea what America once was and how it became the bright shining city on the hill that still continues to beckon the unending millions from their shithole homelands.

Our dominant political party is the Democratic Party that is run by an amalgam of anti-American collectivists surrounded by the pre-educated and dismally ignorant.  The country is now structured so its institutions of education, communication, and entertainment mutually support any set of lies that the Democratic Party wants to put forth as its reality du jour.  Durham’s well documented report citing the established record of FBI corruption is already enshrouded in a limbo that makes it invisible to most Americans, even if they wished to show an interest.  For all intents and purposes, the Durham findings will be erased within a few weeks (if that) from whatever collective memory that it has recently awakened.

What puts paid to this conclusion is the ineptitude of the Republican Party which has yet to demonstrate its ability to communicate with ‘the other half’.  This political party has made itself so ineffective that it doesn’t matter how they perform at the polls, the party exhibits no sense that our government’s deep state is a morass of intertwined bureaucracies dedicated to expanding its own powers and feeding itself from the public trough.

Today the Right has the supportive testimony of tens of the nation’s top legal scholars who confirm the government’s fraudulent actions detailed by Durham.  Names of people behaving criminally can be named and brought to account.  But don’t hold your breath that the Republicans will take any such direct actions against those demonstrably culpable.  All we can expect out of them is high sounding platitudes about how the Democrats violated the fundamental principles upon which our republic rests, principles unknown to the indifferent and uncaring millions.

[21may23 update]  All the conservative and right leaning outlets are telling their audiences that the Durham report revealed so much dirt about how the FBI operates, that it has now “embarrassed” the agency and its leftwing proponents who touted the agency’s findings about the Russia conspiracy, Hillary’s email servers, and Hunter’s laptop, among other intentional misdeeds.  Nothing could be further from reality.

As I pointed out in the above commentary – ‘Our dominant political party …’ – no such embarrassment is experienced by any of the agents who have supported FBI’s malfeasance of the last seven or so years.  Instead, almost all of them continue to deny Durham’s findings as one big “nothing burger”, and many of them remain stalwart promoters of the original lies.  This is blanketed daily to their audiences.  They evince not a even a smidgen of shame about the record of their reportage, as they double down on their ongoing campaign of lies.

However, it is the conservative media, led by outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, et al, that are misleading their audiences to believe that the liars have now been exposed, shamed, or feel any embarrassment about what they reported and continue to report even today.  Embarrassment can only be experienced by those who are contrite about their previous behavior.  Unfortunately, such actors are missing in America.

Sandbox – 11may23

[According to recent surveys 49% of Americans find socialism to be an acceptable way to organize society, including the United States.  The nation’s Left, led by the patently corrupt Democratic Party, has taken over our country’s educational institutions.  With the advent of woke, DEI, critical race theory, and other harbingers of neo-Marxism, there is no more effective resistance in the land against an advancing collectivist tyranny.  The Right’s opposition, led by the Republican Party, consists of toothless self-satisfied organizations happy to repeat the same pabulum commentaries to their shrinking flocks.  gjr]

Ruminations – 10may23 (updated)

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”  W. Churchill

George Rebane

The tyrant’s last refuge of legitimacy on the world stage is that his brand of governance provides the best prosperity for those under his heel.  When it comes to the legitimacy of China and its CCP, we read, “for decades China’s biggest fear was a Taiwanese declaration of independence producing a crisis for which Beijing had no good options. Yet now the regime is telling us its legitimacy will have to rest on reclaiming Taiwan because, with the prosperity machine sputtering, the ruling Communists have no other good answers for why they still rule.”  So conquest of an economically better performing neighbor is now legitimate. (more here)

Today’s debt ceiling derby is going nowhere.  GOP wants to reduce spending as part of the package, and the Dems want to continue spending under a “clean bill” that will only raise our borrowing limit with no spending limits.  Neither side will give in, even to the GOP proposal that we should only borrow enough to match the percent growth of our GDP.  The Dem proposal would blow this cap by raising our debt to 110% of GDP.  And the Repubs don’t do much better with their current budget which will raise our debt to 106% of GDP.  So go figger.  In the meantime ol’ Forked Tongue Joe promises to consider spending cuts after the GOP accepts his clean-bill demand.  Speaker McCarthy should check with Joe Manchin’s office on the pipeline deal.

DEI in academe has gone Kafkaesque.  Scott Gerber, a prominent law professor at Ohio Northern University, has been summarily dismissed for having a “lack of collegiality” in his public opposition to the school’s woke policy of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  No specifics have been given on the charge other than Professor Gerber’s views on the practice of DEI “are not part of our diversity, belonging, and inclusion plan.”  As in Kafka’s The Trial (1925), Gerber was accosted by armed police and campus security while in the middle of teaching a class, and marched out to the astonishment of all who witnessed the event.  The book tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested, prosecuted and killed by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.  (more here)

[update] Again we await a new “trove of evidence against the Biden crime family.”  PJ Media report (here) that this latest trove of “bombshell evidence” was to be released today by Rep James Comer chair of the House Oversight Committee investigating the source of all the Biden family millions.  But it appears that this bombshell was just another in the long line of evidentiary duds as the sun sets tonight and all is quiet on the lamestream media front, not even a fizzle of it in the New York Post.

Sandbox – 30apr23

[So now outfits that collect and search internet content want to start charging AI companies that make chatbots for the data they use to train their LLMs.  Companies like Google and Amazon get this data for ‘free’ – actually, what it costs them to scrape it from the web – as it is provided also for free by billions of online consumers.  The conundrum is that the very large data repositories don’t want to drive away the AI-based search engines by making their training datasets too expensive.  Until now the whole purpose of those freely accessible datasets has been to have third-party search results point to the data that the Googles and Amazons make available.  And since it costs tens of millions of dollars in power and processing time to make a functioning LLM, everyone involved already has skin in the game.  If it ain’t broke, … .  gjr]