Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 3jul20

[Alex Berenson on the real skinny behind Covid-19 reporting.  Short book and very much worth a read if you’re interested in debating the pandemic, how it’s reported, and various response policies (here).  Apologies for letting the last sandbox languish a bit too long; we're working through a family medical emergency here.  gjr]

Western academe’s sunset years

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 July 2020.]

The current insanity sweeping the western world that started with the George Floyd killing is now way past that outrage and moved on to much bigger objectives.  The event served as a trigger to launch the ready and waiting socialist and anti-capitalist factions to start their push toward a global collectivist world by first weakening or doing away with sovereign nation-states that have cultures built up over the centuries which today are the glue that unify their populations.  The socialist elites and their fielded militants in the streets have identified several critical weak points in the ties that bind nations.  One of them involves the flawed histories that each developed western nation has, which includes their role in colonizing the third world and fighting religious wars among themselves.

All of these pursuits are ample demonstrations that violate today’s standards of political correctness, social mores and values, treating all peoples and races equally and with appropriate respect for their indigenous cultures.  Western nations did little of that when they conquered and colonized the more backward civilizations of Africa, the Americas, and southern Asia.  All of that history is used by the global Left to indict today’s mostly white and European-derived countries of everything ranging from ‘cultural appropriation’ to genocide.

The west’s public educational systems have long been co-opted by progressive cadres injecting leftist principles at all levels of curriculum.  The generations of the so-educated are now primed as they doubt their own worth to humanity, and are ready to adopt a more virtuous course forward that demands fundamental changes in each nation’s basic and foundational institutions.  The ‘evidence’ for this ongoing stratagem overwhelms us daily every time we tune into mainstream media outlets.

Cultural cohesion, it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

The country is well along its increasingly insane path to the long sought and much promised fundamental transformation.  As our recent commentaries and many excellent reader contributions in the related comment streams attest, the well-funded madness is growing by the day.  The latest expansions involve initiatives to completely erase and remake America’s history, moving from tearing down our national totems to closing museums which house the artifacts and tell the soon to be forbidden stories of our ‘evil past’.  Our public K-12 schools and academe have long prepared for these events, and produced the millions of mindless moilers now making mayhem in our cities and towns.

What I want to point out here is that in their expanding rage they are co-opting a Rebane Doctrine tenet, namely, society is best organized when people exercise their natural right to live among others who share their values, mores, customs, traditions, language, worldview, …, in short, abide with those who share a common culture.  Expressing the desire to do so is not evil per se, as the Left has been telling us all along.

On this road to revolution the Left is visibly reversing itself, and now not only approves of society living within a cohesive culture, but will define such a command culture for all to accept, with no exceptions.  The specifics of such command cultures have been most evident under communist regimes which force their morally imperative diktats onto the masses under the banners of ‘common good’.  In our major governmental and private institutions, including our post-capitalist corporations, these cultural strictures are already solidly ensconced and perfidiously policed to identify, shun and/or oust the non-conformists and historically tainted.

Today a wrong word or an ideological imperfection discovered in your record, no matter its vintage, is more than enough to get you fired, career ruined, or even qualify to be investigated for some bespoke civil or criminal infraction.  In the early days of the revolution, no provision for appealing the verdicts of the righteous mob is made.  Only later, as the revolution matures into the instruments of power will our new masters establish the traditional institutions to isolate and redeem those wearing the indelible mark of the identified deplorables.  We have seen that happen with the Soviet Gulag, the Cambodian and Vietnamese re-education camps, and the wholesale forced labor incarcerations of hundreds of millions carried out by the Chinese communists during their cultural revolutions, and who currently house their culturally incorrigible Uighurs in massive prison complexes. (more here)

My point is that finally the Left has also accepted and declared its mandate for a culturally cohesive society that will be conformed for the common good.  America’s Right has always promoted the existence of divers culturally cohesive communities living in harmony – e.g. the Quakers, Amish, Mormons, … .  The methods we have historically used to separate such communities have not always been civil, and some have had definite racist motivations – e.g. against African-Americans and the Irish.  Nevertheless, the criterion has been maintenance of cultural conformity and not the genocide of the expelled culture.  In the last century we also learned that anyone of any genetic make-up can and has been accepted into any given culture.  In sum, ‘race’, however it’s defined, is no longer a relevant factor for cultural membership.

(In my native land, Estonians were for centuries considered genetically inferior and culturally corrupt in turn by their German, Swedish, and Russian conquerors.  We were treated as slaves and then serfs by our masters who even imposed ‘first night’s rights’ on newly married brides in order to ‘improve the breed’.  It was not until the mid-19^th century that Estonian culture came to be recognized, and was then able to work its way into peerage among established European cultures.)

So where are we on the adoption of culturally coherent communities?  Well, both sides have now declared their in-principle preference for them.  The big difference is that the Right wants Americans to have the ability to establish such communities according to their own desires and in places where similarly minded people can move to join together in various locales/regions across this land.  The Left wants to impose its new one-size-fits-all politically correct culture on everybody in America.  It wants to organize our transformed society on the historically failed models of its collectivist forebears, with the claim that this time we’ll do it right, embodying all the inclusiveness, social justice, and equality that were the watchwords used to sell the great unwashed on previous versions of socialism cum communism cum tyranny.  So once again it has started with ‘we’ll take from the greedy and racist rich and give to those who can’t or won’t’, all that’s required is unquestioning conformity.

And it has already started with Job One – the utter destruction of America as we have known it – now going on in a neighborhood near you.

Letters from the Revolution – 27jun20 (updated)

'Can the country confront its current problems with its traditional can-do spirit?  We have barely four months to figure out how.'  A.H.A.

George Rebane

‘America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution’, so argues Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (married to Niall Ferguson, internationally prominent socio-political historian not to be confused with the recently notorious epidemiologist of C19 fame, Neil Ferguson).  We have twice before met this brave and eloquent lady in these pages (here and here).

In her timely essay she brings together many of the ideas promoted in these pages for years, and which also adorn the corpus of my credo and form major tenets of Rebane Doctrine – all of which are anathema to our command/control collectivists now carefully coordinating their socio-political assets as they foment the coming revolution.

An alarming report in her piece is the confirmation of the absolute volatility of public opinion and its being totally unmoored from reason and critical thought. (see also here)  Recounting the rush of politicians and corporatists to join the rioting revolutionaries Ms Ali recounts –

By the middle of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public figures who had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Please reread the assessment of a thoroughly politicized scientist, who today abound in the public forum.

She goes on to view the changes in what may be termed the aggregate American mind.  We used to be a nation that prided and practiced distributed self-government at the local level, solving our own problems as they arose with our own solutions.  This seminal and differentiating characteristic of Americans was noticed as early as in the 1830s by European visitors.

This country is only 244 years old, but it may be showing signs of age. Time was, Americans were renowned for their can-do, problem-solving attitude. Europeans, as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were inclined to leave problems to central authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans traditionally solved problems locally, sitting together in town halls and voluntary associations. Some of that spirit still exists, even if we now have to meet on Zoom. But the old question—“How can we figure this out?”—is threatened with replacement by “Why can’t the government figure this out for us?”

That last appeal is the common denominator that gathers all of our leftists who then also grouse when their problems are not solved by technocrats in some distant capital.  Furthest from their minds, and now from the minds of the mostly mindless masses is the fundamental tenet that government itself is the most likely, if not certain, first cause and/or amplifier of the problem.  Today von Mises’ counsel to government – ‘First, do nothing!’ – is considered a reprehensible expression of lese majeste to big government socialists.

More sinister and on the mark is Ms Ali’s fearless finger when she asserts, “The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power.”  According to Rebane Doctrine, this forms one of the many accessible litmus tests to identify corrupt and evil politicians and their fielded demogauges.

Right now the biggest danger to our republic lies in the leftward rush of the Democrat Party, and their unquestioned embrace of socialism as the stepping stone to a more perfect world.  In this regard Ali expresses our common hope –

One way or another, the Democratic Party has to find a way of throwing out the socialists who are destroying it. … The Republicans, too, have to change their ways. They have to reconnect with young people. They have to address the concerns of Hispanics. And they have to listen to African-Americans, who most certainly do not want to see the police in their neighborhoods replaced by woke community organizers.

What no one, including Ms Ali, wants to address is how the Republicans can penetrate three generations of anti-American, anti-capitalist indoctrination of our young and younger cohort that is daily reinforced by the lamestream media.  But making headway in that quarter they must, for the fraction of young people currently attracted toward conservetarian ideals is too small to make a significant impact in the voting booth.  Meanwhile, the ranks of today’s young social-luddites swell and sway with every new serving of misguided bombast from the White House.  Nevertheless, the Great Divide, with or without a revolution, it’s a’comin’.

[update]  Appealing to the reasonable middle in America continues to be a fool’s errand still promoted by the intellectual Right (and on which I find myself).  The Left knows better.  That cohort of middle-roaders that so enamors our lightly read, good-hearted neighbors is almost non-existent.  Good estimates seeking out these people are able to calculate that they number at most about 6% of American adults.  The remainder of the permanently polarized, mostly leftwingers and their gimme constituents, significantly outnumber the rightwing true believers.  “In April, the Washington Post published an article titled ‘The Coming Republican Demographic Disaster’ (where it) discusses one of the most notable trends in American politics over the past decade: Republican candidates do consistently worse with people of color, and the proportion of non-white voters in the American electorate is increasing. This could be bad news for the Republican party. If its candidates do not improve their appeal among non-white voters, their chances of winning future elections will decline sharply in the coming decades.”  These non-whites have demonstrated for decades that they are politically beyond any reasonable reach.  I find it sad to see that nationally prominent talking heads, such as those like Dan Henninger at the WSJ, continue to spout hopeful platitudes claiming that if the Republicans can only reach the middle, then they will prevail.  Not even close.  The real question is ‘what does it take to piss off a Democrat voter?’  No one knows.  (more here)

Scattershots – 25jun20 (updated 27jun20)

"Black people are being murdered and brutalized by police with near impunity." ACLU manifesto

George Rebane

Big Lies.  The demonic Democrats are hands down the purveyors of significant and impactive big lies that are issued daily by their political leadership and their lamestream media.  (see above tagline)  When lies in the public forum are considered, the attributes of ‘significance’ and ‘impactive’ should be paramount in assessing their belonging in the Big Lie category.  Significance describes the ability of the lie to grasp the public’s attention, and impactive describes the lie’s ability to affect public behavior and/or attitudes, e.g. voting, demonstrating, rioting, polling responses, … .  Using these criteria for a Big Lie, the ones told by Trump are few and far in between (as opposed to the almost 20K counted by TDS sufferers).  However, those issuing under the various banners of the Left are literally a daily occurrence (e.g. yesterday’s whopper by Pelosi that Republicans are guilty of George Floyd’s death).

‘Time to examine the entire police culture’ proposes David Davidson-Methot in the 25jun20 Union.  He makes a quiet and compelling argument that bad apples in police departments come about in two ways.  First, through faulty screening processes and police union induced departmental omerta, we let innately bad people wear a badge.  But perhaps more importantly, the environment, defined by its leadership and culture, in which people work (the ‘barrel’) is often the wholesale producer of bad apples.  Mr Davidson-Methot cites ‘The Stanford Experiment’ conducted by Dr Philip Zimbardo that launched an entire field of behavioral research yielding results with impressive predictive power of how good apples turn into bad apples in bad barrels – e.g. the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal.  Bottom line here is that to fix real incidences of police brutality, don’t defund or abolish police departments, examine and fix departmental cultures and replace leaderships where necessary.  It’s an approach worthy of public debate as Congress continues in deadlock on the issue.  In the meantime, ‘No, Police Racism Isn’t an Epidemic’ as correctly argues Jason Riley in the 23jun20 WSJ.

No country had an effective and anticipatory pandemic response plan to combat the C19 virus.  So documents Holman Jenkins (here) in the 23jun20 WSJ, that summarizes evidence now gathered from all over the world.  I include this here as more examples of Democrat Big Lies claiming that President Trump uniquely mishandled America’s response and caused the avoidable loss of tens of thousands of lives.  That just ain’t so, no matter how often and intensely Team Pelosi and her lamestream trumpets repeat the lie, and thereby making it a Big Lie due to its clearly significant and impactive effect, as is evident in the polls of respondents many (most?) of whom know nothing of viral infections, epidemic spreading, transmission vectors, herd immunity, … , or simpler put, can’t reliably identify the Atlantic Ocean on a map.  And the demonic Dems count on it.

Republicans suppress votes is another Democrat Big Lie that flies in the face of data unreported in the lamestream.  This Big Lie forms an important barricade to keep the country’s African-Americans on the Democrat plantation.  Karl Rove’s ‘Botch the Vote, Then Cry Suppression’ in the 25jun20 WSJ details the vote tallies and jurisdictional political leaderships of the ‘suppressed areas’ claimed by Democrats and their platoons of black demogauges.  The bottom line is that, contrary to votes being suppressed, blacks voted in record numbers in the cited counties all run by Democrats for years.  What the Big Lie fails to tell people is that voting procedures and processes (many of them botched) are run locally at the county level, and their allegations of suppression occurred in Democrat led counties.  Instead, the Big Lie consumer is supposed to walk away with the belief that Republicans at both federal and local levels have successfully conspired to keep blacks from voting.

[update]  ... and the beat goes on.  " 'Today, it seems there is less of a bias against conservatives and rather a bias for conservatives.'  During the course of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on consumer protection and commerce, Chairwoman Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) actually claimed that Facebook and Twitter favor conservatives, despite mountains of evidence that conservatives are more likely to get banned, flagged, or 'fact checked' by the social media giants." (more here)

[27jun20 update]  Commenter ‘Robert Cross’ in his 236pm comment below (I had to dig it out of Typepad’s spam folder) does a marvelous job illustrating how we talk past each other.  He opens his screed with the claim that I’m “deflecting” the Left’s count of 20K Trump lies, when I directly address it and compare these to the Dems’ Big Lies, which comparison he neither acknowledges nor addresses.  And his piece de resistance is that my pointing out the difference between the types of Trump’s v the Dems’ lies is a prime cause of and my contribution to the country’s polarization.  He thus once again reinforces the Left’s looming march toward censorship and 1A abrogation, in that only one side’s interpretation should be heard in the public forum, and all other opinions are deplorably divisive and therefore should be either withheld or suppressed.

Sandbox - 24jun20

[In the intro to the last Sandbox, my invitation to readers to discuss the dollar-value of human life went over like a turd in a punchbowl.  It appears that the best approach to discussing the value of human lives is just to bloviate with a lot of virtue signalling thrown in.  That's supposed to divert the reader from discovering that the writer has no idea what he's talking about.  Public policies are supposed to be made with some regard to a broadly agreed on dollar-value of a human life, but only, I guess, if the public gives a damn.  Oh well.  gjr]

Letters from the Revolution – 23jun20

George Rebane

It is only the reality of force that makes peaceful diplomacy possible.

As our buildings burn, more black lives end that don’t make no nevermind, as China continues to build its muscle to rule its ‘near abroad’, Germany bitches about America not doing more to defend its carefully cloistered butt, and Democrats are busy readying Bumblebrain for prime time, the nation’s cops continue to compete with our politicians for the Cringe Cup while BLM and Antifa thugs rule our city centers.

The revolution has long left behind its George Floyd Memorial Starting Gate.  From the ongoing body counts and mounting casualties in our cities, you have to be a real idiot to keep believing that all this destruction still has anything to do with regaining civil rights denied.  No siree, all eyes are now on a much bigger prize, one that has been waiting in the wings ever since the Wall came down in 1989 - now we are fully advancing onto the ramparts of socialism.  Just ask Bernie, AOC, Warren, Harris, …, ask any of them.  Ask even the members of Team Nancy who are doing their best to hang on to the tiger they know they are riding.

It is all coming about so quickly, just as we have warned readers for years.  And I don’t claim rocket science for that prognostication, only a little more than a casual reading of history and watching what has been going on since WW2.

To date no one is even attempting to talk them down or demonstrate that our traditional culture has the wherewithal to resist the mobs who demand more today than they did yesterday.  The tagline to this missive is something totally beyond the ken of peaceful progressives who passively consume every bit from the wisdom of the demanding signs.  They have no clue of what they condone.  I’d like to conclude that the conservatives do know what lies at the end of the road now traveled, but they (we) have somehow misplaced their (our) gumption.  I have no idea for what the rest of us are waiting – that somehow it will all quiet down and everyone will again play nice.  Well, they haven’t for years, so Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ has never worked (least of all in his life).

It doesn’t matter whether we attempt negotiations with America’s anti-American thugs, or the Chinese, when your opponent realizes that your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is capitulation, then diplomacy fails.  It was ever thus.  The only thing that makes sense attempting to talk down a crisis is that your opponent knows you have a BATNA with balls.  And even that doesn’t guarantee a peaceful stand-down.  For you negotiators out there, that requires a ZOPA (zone of possible agreement) that has something to offer.  (ZOPA is the set of all deals that are at least as good for each party in a negotiation as their respective BATNAs.)

Rig for ram.

Reflections on Racism – no time to decide (updated)

George Rebane

A barren desert is now the middle ground separating Americans from their woke and fundamentally transformed brethren.

Racism has been an enduring theme on RR for years – e.g. back in 2010, through the years, and a more recent commentary in 2019.  With readers we have dissected it 20 ways from Sunday.  Even liberals have joined in.  Unfortunately, their contributions have been limited to calling the rest of us ‘racists’ without being able to even define the word.  From Lewis Carroll we read once again –

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just 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."

I recently visited Bob Crabb’s site to pay homage to his excellent cartoon (here) and return the favor of his visits to RR.  What caught my eye was Bob’s brief but meaningful commentary posted below his cartoon –

We are reaching the tipping point, and I don’t mean just tipping old confederate statues. Our competing ideologies have retreated to the far ends of the spectrum where any kind of compromise is seen as treachery. … Can cooler heads prevail? I’d like to think so, but when the extremes are obsessed with winning it all, it seems unlikely. … As I have said here before, it’s too bad that we are bent on destroying such a nice country.

Bob now perceives the tipping point that in my Great Divide screeds I claim we passed long ago.  But what I took to task was his claim that both “extremes are obsessed with winning it all”, which on its face is not true.  I then entered into a dialogue with some liberal worthies that turned out to be predictably unproductive, save that it illustrated the barren desert of our middle ground.  As I’ve mentioned before, and with no apologies to the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sides can and do have their own distinct and widely varying opinions, facts, histories, morals, ethics, systems of logic, and desiderata for the future.

Scattershots – 19jun20

“Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property.  Instead, if flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property.”  Yuval Noah Hariri

George Rebane

Sweden’s death committees have been working overtime.  Under their nationalized healthcare hordes of seniors diagnosed with C19 have been automatically consigned to “palliative care” – aka pump ‘em full of morphine until they die.  This little revelation comes out in conjunction with a heartfelt success story of a son who fought for his father’s life in the clutches of a calculating state (more here).  In our discussion of the ‘value of human life’ our leftwingers are in terminal denial that it is they and theirs who have always devalued human life, consigning lives to abortion (including post-partum), mental hospitals, eugenics experiments, gas chambers, and boxcars to faraway final solutions.  This is what we have to look forward if/when Democrats sweep the field.

Thomas Sowell writes ‘Charter Schools’ Enemies Block Black Success’ in which he outlines the outright evil wrought by leftwing politicians in denying blacks sure-fire ways to escape the carefully constructed leftwing plantations in America’s urban ghettos.  Charter schools have been enormously successful in closing the black-white academic gaps, and not because they “skim the cream” of the students as another one of the Democrats’ Big Lies that really impact the nation.  Admission to these schools in poor areas is by lottery, so Lady Luck draws a cross section of applicants who come from ALL segments of the black and brown communities.  NYC spends more than $20K (including federal monies paid by you) per student annually to deliver one of the nation’s worst educational products.  And union-funded lickspittle politicians are doing all they can to keep minority children under incompetent, uncaring teachers, crammed into classrooms in schools suffering from years of deferred maintenance under Democrat administrations.  And these idiots still claim the moral highground!

“The U.S. made outrage a form of social currency. Now we’re in the hyperinflationary phase.”. so argues Joseph Sternberg in his ‘A Wheelbarrow Full of Outrage’.  Sternberg correctly equates today’s ever-increasing demands of wokeness for more and more outrage, “outrage (that) has rapidly become so devalued that ordinary members of society can no longer leverage it for that most important good of all: social peace. A conspicuous feature of the recent protests in the U.S. is that no policy reform, no corporate initiative, no individual action is enough. Employers no longer know what form of progressive activism constitutes the “right” level of compensation for their idealistic employees. Commentators and academics no longer know which contributions to important public debates—which expenditures of their professional expertise and social capital—will be deemed acceptable.”  In this piece Sternberg also gives an operational definition of ‘wokeness’ which is a “type of performative progressive outrage used to boost one’s capital in the political marketplace.”

Corporations are not treating their employees fairly, so maintains the US senator from Ohio.  This leftist’s epiphany is that “The pandemic has laid bare how corporations treat employees not as essential to their success but as a cost to be minimized. One grocery store worker in Ohio told me recently, ‘I don’t feel essential. I feel expendable.’”  It’s heartwarming to see Sen Sherrod Brown glean an understanding that corporations have always viewed labor as a cost to be minimized.  Had not the Henry Fords of America realized and put this into practice, not very many people could afford cars, or vacuum cleaners, or toasters, or movies, or supermarkets, or … .  And yes Virginia, when you are working for someone else, you are exchanging the value of your labor for your wages.  And competition in America’s labor markets should always make workers feel expendable (as our product/services markets make their employers feel expendable).  That’s why you work more diligently, learn a more valuable skill, start a business, and in general not become incompetent in what you do, as we see demonstrated daily by public employees. (more here)

Sandbox - 18jun20

[The value of anything is highly subjective, always determined by a 'seller' and 'buyer' when they strike a deal.  Therefore the value of any given 'thing', e.g. human life, varies according to who is the human and who is the 'buyer'.  Any values set by third parties with no skin in the game are arbitrary and quickly circumvented by/in markets.  So consider the back window yellow diamond sign that reads 'Drive carefully, Baby inside', and another one reading 'Drive carefully, young PhD in neuro-science inside', or even one that reads 'Drive carefully, Community organizer inside'.  How would you rate the implied value of these lives?  to you? to society? gjr]

Springtime for our Great Divide

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2020.]

Where were you and what did you do in the spring of 2020?  The world has changed much during the last three months.  When we look back, we will remember this spring as the historical milestone when Americans finally realized that they are no longer one reconcilable people.  Where next we go from here is uncertain and up for grabs.  The only certainty we have going forward is the coming Great Divide.

Our country has been subjected to a perfect trifecta of national crises, all layered onto an ongoing campaign to discredit and destroy the duly elected president of our democratic republic.  Along with the rest of the world, we were blindsided by a viral pandemic which no one understood and for which no one had prepared.  America, along with most other developed countries, initiated a lockdown mandating that people not travel, stay home, and not work.  In consumer driven economies like ours, this caused economic collapse.  And while we were sequestered, hearing reports of Covid-19 deaths, and wondering how we would pay our rent and bills, we witnessed three separate killings of black persons by incompetent, inept, and poorly trained police.  And all of this during the most contentious presidential election year in living memory.

Hunker Down Diary – 16jun20

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  A. Lincoln

George Rebane

Yesterday was HD100 for the Rebanes, and Jo Ann announced that we are done hunkering down.  Truth be known, this will not be a sudden change in our collective behviors, we’ve been kinda easing out of our lockdown over the last few weeks.  And what’s more noteworthy is the historical change our country has embarked on since the killing of George Floyd.  We all will have a lot more to say about that as we witness the Antifa/BLM riots continue to be spawned from the many ‘peaceful protests’ that now fill the land.

The above timely graphic by RL ‘Bob’ Crabb, filched from the pages of the 16jun20 Union, is in my humble opinion, the pointedly most significant political cartoon that our own iconic observer of the country’s feats and follies has submitted.  I believe it qualifies for a Pulitzer.

Sandbox - 12jun20

[The dollar value of human lives was touched on in the last Sandbox.  I predict that this topic will be quickly forgotten by our leftwing readers, since it will be a debate to which they must needs arrive unarmed.  gjr]

Pandemics are a Systems Management Problem

George Rebane

[After working on my epidemic spread and testing models, I cobbled together this structured draft on 7 May 2020, and have put off posting it due to other more compelling analytical problems having to do with the pandemic.  Now that I’m seeing other systems professionals coming to the same conclusion – e.g. ‘How Control Theory Can Help Us Control Covid-19’ in the June issue of the IEEE Spectrum – it’s time to throw out my two cents worth, warts and all.]

Thesis: Managing the response to and recovery from a pandemic is a systems management problem, and NOT a crisis to be managed by healthcare clinicians whose proper role is to provide their specific expertise and counsel on the care of the infected as one element of a much more comprehensive response to an emergency that affects all elements of a society.

1. Pandemics are very complex dynamic processes which are difficult to observe and even more difficult for lay people to grasp. Humans have come to understand natural processes through their synthesis of various systems that contain and also delimit (‘this is not that’) such natural processes – to function, nature does not need to define or compartmentalize itself into systems; however, to understand nature, humans do.
2. Managing pandemics is fundamentally not a medical problem, but instead a problem in the field of systems management and engineering. Devising public policies to control an epidemic within a target population, let alone a pandemic raging among disparate target populations is a problem requiring the use of tools from the systems sciences.
   • A farmer, expert in growing the food grocery stores sell, is not necessarily qualified to run a grocery store, let alone a grocery chain.
   • A CO2-cycle atmospheric scientist or a meteorologist versed in the analysis of weather patterns usually do not have the skills to develop and run climate models.
3. Healthcare professionals, including most epidemiologists, are not trained in the use of the highly math-based tools required to scientifically observe, estimate, identify, control, and optimize feasible public policies to respond to pandemics as cogent systems. Since politicians eschew science and technology for obvious reasons, we find policy decisions at all levels are made like sausages.  A simple yet fundamental example of such deficiencies, few if any healthcare professionals have concepts of error propagation and of system state and its role in grasping the dynamics of a system.
4. Once the health-related parameters of a contagious pathogen and its virulence are established, the healthcare professional joins with experts in other needed fields
   • – logistics, supply, facilities, personnel, manufacturing, transport, data acquisition and handling, decision theory, … - to join the team that provides the systems expert to develop realworld solutions that integrate expertise from multiple knowledge domains.
   • Workable solutions must satisfy multiple constraints and are usually formulated within a set of inter-related subsystem models that then integrate into a total pandemic response system which inputs time-late unreliable data, and outputs information for officials charged with making public policies to fight the pandemic.
   • A jurisdiction’s total response effort to a pandemic should be headed by a systems manager who understands, can structure, and is experienced in leading a multi-function task force.
5. Political jurisdictions, especially small ones, don’t understand this and count on people like county health officers (usually a hubristic physician) to be the prime resource to local electeds and their non-technical staffs, when instead, such healthcare personnel should be one of several sources of input to a systems management team to understand and integrate the incoming streams of disparate input data, and then provide the decision makers an understandable landscape of alternative actions along with their effectiveness and cost estimates.
6. Testing is a key element of C19 response,
   • yet no one, starting with the federal government, has been able to discuss, let alone describe, the decision support functions and processes of infection and immunity testing of target populations during the countless briefings given at all levels of government. Why? 
   • Because useful and effective testing is an element of a higher level estimation process that calls for skill sets that include probabilistics, estimation, and decision theory, skills prominently absent in the hubristic and mistake-prone medical industry.
7. Meanwhile, Nevada County has implemented a plan to loosen the local lockdown. How they will control the different phases of loosening is not known, especially what kind of feedback will they use to update policy decisions.
   • To my knowledge the county government has no internal resources who could counsel them on the critical systems aspects of selecting, let alone managing, a prudent policy to loosen our lockdown. In my years of interacting with and within various county government units (established and ad hoc), I can say unequivocally that I have yet to meet anyone there who is competent in any of the technical skill sets I have outlined above.  
   • This unrecognized deficit is not due to the dearth of appropriate expertise available to our county’s leadership – there is an abundance of it living within minutes of the Rood Center.
8. I am always curious to know the make-up of these local decision-making cadres, and today what factors are being included in the deliberations that represent our understanding the county’s C19 situation, factors upon which to base a plan. Dealing with government officials I have often found myself to be one of the very few burdened by such a curiosity.

Scattershots – 10jun20 (updated 13jun20)

George Rebane

Beware of people who need outliers to make their point, and then use these to cloud the big picture.

Food prices are soaring even though plants are coming back on line and distribution problems have been solved.  The producers’ argument is that worker safety requires reconfiguration of work spaces and the introduction of new automation.  The real answer is that this opportunity to permanently reduce labor costs can not be wasted.  Stand by for the next surge of systemic unemployment as the C19 pandemic wanes – keep an eye on the workforce participation rate that was already at a low of about 62% before the virus hit; can we return to that level?

‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Cops’ have been pulled by their distributors in fear of knee-bender mobs who have assumed the role of the country’s new thought police.  GWTW’s distributor HBO Max stated, “Gone With the Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”  America is retreating toward the Russia1918 and Germany1934. (more here)

Liberal thought leaders Dr William Galston, Brookings Institute Fellow, and VP-candidate-in-waiting Stacey Abrams base their messages on the beliefs of the ill-informed mass of Americans who hold that George Floyd’s death is a common occurrence at the hands of our police, and that the perennial poverty and crime in black communities are entirely due to Republicans suppressing the black vote over the last half century.  The data record supports none of these assertions.  The glaring bottom line here is that black lives do NOT matter to blacks, nor to their plantation politicians whom they keep in their sinecured offices.  All this mind-boggling mass action is possible with people subjected to utterly failed schools and a perennially propagandizing entertainment and news media. (more here and here)

On violent black deaths, the posterchild statistic is the comparison of the 9 unarmed blacks who died at the hands of police to the 7,400+ blacks who were murdered by fellow blacks. “The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.” (here)

[11jun20 update]  Increasingly Great Divide ducks are lining up.  The leading elements of our Left are taking the initiative with more than just lootings, burnings, and killings of the established order, they have now assumed control of a major city’s central section, declaring it to be a new (communist, socialist?) “autonomous zone” while controlling ingress/egress to their new domain.  About all this the timid leftwing governor of Washington claimed no knowledge.  Meanwhile some are beginning the calculus of a portending civil war (here), and others have decided to take up arms in the defense of their communities against imported Antifa thugs.  An example ignored in the lamestream (and the scared shitless Fox News) is Coeur d’Alene where hundreds of the good citizens of Idaho made their presence known in town, which subsequently saw no violent mob activity. (here and here)   Meanwhile, leftwing sites claim that the Antifa threat was all a hoax.  My 30may20 third question (here) is being answered.

The clamped down minds of lamestream journalism are starting to denounce their own.  Today one wrong slip of the lip, and you’re history.  So discovered the NYT’s editorial page editor, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the editors of Bon Appétit magazine.  The Left is finally in a position to actively start denying 1A rights in the name of suppressing their obscure but ubiquitous definitions of racism. “The issue here is not about the assertion that racism is endemic in the U.S. The issue is the willingness by many to displace the American system of free argument with a system of enforced, coerced opinion and censorship, which forces comparison to the opinion-control mechanisms that existed in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.” (more here)  Samizdat lives. 

[12jun20 update]  Russian collusion is alive and well in the belief and propaganda systems of the Left (witnessed by our leftwinger comments).  To the rest of us it is astounding that the progressives’ hatred of Trump impels them to continue one their most vicious Big Lies, day after day telling the country that Trump did indeed collude with the Russians.  But more importantly, that part and parcel of this collusion enabled the Russians to interfere in the 2016 so successfully that it was the impact of their efforts that sealed the ‘fraudulent election’ in Trump’s favor.  This narrative continues unabated to this day.

Re my C19 response policy.  Readers may be curious as to what my policy would be for public gatherings and general behavior in public forums.  To save my burying it in some comment stream, I’ll put it here for all to see.  I don't support further lockdowns even though we will have succeeding 'waves' of C19 until a reliable vaccine is developed. None has been developed yet for the garden variety flu, and we have succeeding waves of it every fall and winter which cause tens of thousands to die of it. No one has been social distancing, wearing masks, locking down, and turning off the economy for that, at least for a century. Rebane Doctrine calls for the government and healthcare institutions to publish the latest risk data (accounting for demographics, comorbidity, and geography) for C19, flu, ..., and all other contagious diseases, along with what lowers the probability of people getting infected. Then everyone can decide for themselves where to go and which events to attend. Laws should be passed that you get to sue no one if you catch the bug.

[13jun20 update]  Both the Right and Left understand that a robust free press is required to maintain a liberal democracy.  The Left opposes a free press and promotes the censorship of ideas they don’t favor.  What does that say about the Left’s real intentions to maintain a liberal democracy?  The Left promotes the Big Lie that the killing of George Floyd and other black males is a common police activity and not a rare outlier (see above).  Is there anything Trump does that anywhere near approaches that for dividing the country?

Hurricane George Floyd

“In October 1913, the Bolsheviks were a small radical Russian faction. No reasonable person would have predicted that within a mere four years they would take over the country.” Y.N. Harari, Sapiens (2014).

George Rebane

The on-camera, tragic and unjustified killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman has unleashed a social storm across America that is unprecedented and potentially ruinous to our constitutional republic.  Anti-American coalitions have united to sanctify a habitual criminal and elevate him to a unique martyrdom for the purpose of disrupting our established, albeit imperfect, yet overwhelmingly beneficial social order that is the envy of the world.  All of these cohorts – ranging from Antifa to the Democrat Party - see today’s nationwide protests and riots as an opportunity to create the chaos from which each has the possibility to bring about their own version of a fundamentally transformed United States.

President Barack Obama started stacking the dominoes with his view of an irretrievably flawed America that needed to be fundamentally transformed into a socialist democracy that would function under a revised, reinterpreted, or totally rewritten constitution.  Today we are witness to the other dominoes all waiting in a row – rotten cities, uncontrolled homelessness, “mismanaged” pandemic, crippled economy, historically high unemployment, politically-biased media, dismally uninformed and innumerate electorate, advance of disruptive technologies, dysfunctional public schools, distrust of businesses and enterprise, rejection of capitalism and markets, looming systemic unemployment, firmly ensconced victimhood of minorities, socially polarized nation, unpopular President with maladroit communication skills, corrupt and timid justice system, Democrat plurality fomenting socialism, lame Republican Party sans backbone, … .

All of these self-inflicted and manufactured flaws today stand in a row ready to be tipped by the riot-prone protests perfidiously promoted by the several political factions sharing various shades of collectivist ideologies in their agendas for a brave new global order.  And the question now is whether that serendipitous video, seen around the world, of the police murdering George Floyd was the flapping of the butterfly wings that has now set in motion a storm the final impact of which no one knows.

From my readings of history, I am reminded of what the previous year’s events gave rise to in the Russia of 1918 and the Germany of 1934.  Today WSJ columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes (here) –

Indiscriminate property damage and looting descended on some 140 cities across the U.S. in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd while in police custody. Business owners, workers and customers in minority neighborhoods were hard hit. And in the years to come they will pay the steepest price for the unchecked violence done by rampaging mobs claiming to represent them.

To be clear, the near universal outrage over the video of Floyd’s death, expressed by an overwhelmingly nonviolent majority of demonstrators, is the lawful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble. This is central to what it means to be an American and to reaching peace and reconciliation.

Violence is another matter entirely. There is evidence that it has been instigated by organized militants trained to leap into action when opportunities present themselves. While they don’t represent the majority of protesters, they use them as shields. What is more, their brutal aggression is politically effective and only mildly condemned. One reason, I would venture, is that they are the mailed fist of a broader movement that has infected academia, the media, popular culture and politics with the notion that Western traditions are oppressive and should be destroyed. … The bad news is that the drip-drip-drip of an intellectual narrative aimed at destroying Western values and publicly shaming anyone who resists the ideological corrosion is here to stay.

I join with those who do not accept the glorification of George Floyd nor the assessments of the street wisdom and fomenting politicians about the irredeemable state of our Union.  From our media we are awash with deceitful propaganda that frames events into formats not supported by any collected data.  In other words, the numbers in the public record (discussed many times in these pages) don’t support the misappropriated emotions of the protesters, politicians, and even police who seek indemnification and redemption for professed sins with every opportunity to ‘take the knee’.  My sentiments about the happenings during the last two weeks are best expressed through the words of Candace Owens in a Facebook video (on Powerline here) now seen by tens of millions.  No one stands taller than this woman against the current tide of insanity.

Antifa Rising (updated 9jun20)

George Rebane

Motivated by the ongoing George Floyd protests cum riots, I renewed my interest in finding out more about Antifa – is it an organization or merely a movement of loosely coupled cells operating all over the country?  The discussions in our comment streams seem to divide along ideological lines – those leaning right see it as a formidable organization that rises to the occasion whenever there’s a political contention in the public forum; those leaning left characterize it as nothing more than a movement of some loosely formed groups of protesters against the country’s capitalist order.  In recent days I’ve received some informative emails from readers containing links to reports and commentaries that cover the waterfront on Antifa.  Here I’ll share a couple of them which I found more salient to my puzzling on the matter.

First some definitions:  A movement is a social cohort sharing an affinity to a set of beliefs and an overarching objective.  They usually express themselves in conjunction with other social gatherings, observances, and/or ad hoc events which may spontaneously/serendipitously arise.  A movement need not be organized around an enduring social structure.  An organization is a social order that has an enduring and labeled identity which is structured to achieve an objective summarized in a published mission statement, the accomplishment of which is through some known intermediate goals.  Organizations have a leadership hierarchy (e.g. board, executive management, operating managers, staff, …), a headquarters, established means of funding operations, membership, and a current agenda.  As they grow and gather steam, movements inevitably become organized in order to continue progress toward their overarching objective. 

The following numbered points summarize my current take on Antifa –

1. The origins of Antifa can be traced to the post-Bolshevik movements to spread the communist revolution into western Europe during the 1920s, specifically to counter the fascist (national socialist) movements that started in Italy with the rise of Mussolini after he was expelled from the Italian Communist Party.
2. Antifa members held a loosely defined and contradictory political ideology that welcomed both anarchists and Marxist/Leninist communists. The anarchists wanted to do away with all government immediately, and the communists wanted big governments to control all aspects of society.  But we recall that the Marx’s stated ultimate objective was a social order in which the perfected communist Man would live in social harmony without further need for government.  So in that sense Antifa could attract both anarchists and communists to work together toward an ultimate common goal, the timing of which they could quibble over after the established ‘fascist social orders’ were overthrown.
3. Antifa divides people into anti-fascists, fascists, and those who are ideologically innocent/naïve. Fascism is never given a precise operational definition, but is simply defined as being anything and everything that opposes the Antifa objectives and methods.
4. The acknowledged and taught MO to achieve Antifa objectives is through violence that is justified because Antifa members consider all opposition to their creed to also be expressions of violence.
5. The Antifa movement never became a stable organization in Europe or in its spread to the US. It arose here and there to oppose fascism in pre-WW2 Europe and was ruthlessly put down by the Nazis.
6. Antifa has made itself known through protest demonstrations of opportunity over the last decades by joining the ranks of non-violent protesters and then turning the protests into violent riots by instigating assaults on police, arson, looting, and generally creating opportunistic mayhem. Their intent is to project the image that the entire protesting cohort in the streets share their objectives and violent means of achieving them.
7. No overarching Antifa organization has been identified in the US. However, there are several Antifa cells that have names and aggressively operate in various cities and regions of our country.  Today they are very active during the ongoing George Floyd protests, successfully having turned most of them into destructive riots.
8. Antifa’s published leaflets and online proclamations declare its fundamental opposition to property, established legal order, capitalism, individual rights and freedom, religion, and constitutional government. The underlying objective of all their activities is the ultimate destruction of the United States of America, their greatest worldwide evil against which all means and methods are justified.
9. “Antifa activists communicate and recruit mostly through social media, using Facebook as their principal forum for organizing protests.” Antifa cells receive money for recruiting and operations through a number of listed leftwing, pro-socialist organizations funded by prominent hard-left personages (e.g. George Soros and various entertainers).
10. The main source of new Antifa members is from the constituents of the Democratic Party. The Dems and their lamestream media provide the political support for Antifa, mischaracterizing them as ‘protesters’, never calling them rioters, and minimizing reports of their violence and destruction.  And when all else fails, Antifa is portrayed as being in the streets to justifiably oppose ‘rightwing anarchists’ and ‘white nationalists’ who are the real fascists and instigators of the riots.
11. The Democratic Party sees Antifa as a cohort of useful idiots that today function to keep alive the more visible and virulent forms of anti-Trump sentiments without having to expose themselves as militantly in the streets seeking to bring about their advertised “fundamental transformation” of America. More importantly, Antifa’s message to the minorities reinforces the Democrats’ decades-long narrative that our Hispanics and African-Americans continue as perpetual victims of corporate America and racist whites.
12. There is a lot written about Antifa. From my readings, the two most informative that I found are ‘Project Veritas: Antifa Operates Like a Business’ and ‘A Communist & Anarchist Movement That Explicitly Endorses Violence’.

[8jun20 update]  The Antifa Manual.  Over the last week I’ve received several emails with what is purported to be the manual for Antifa members that outlines its ideology and the modus operandi of its street operations.  At first I hesitated to post it for several reasons that made me doubt its authenticity, primarily the variations in the writing style and a very naïve composition/structure.  It looks like it was meant to communicate the evils of Antifa to people unfamiliar with the movement.  In any event, whatever its provenance, someone went to some trouble to make the document look like the real deal.  You can download it and make up your own mind.  Download Antifa-Manual

[9jun20 update]  Noted WSJ columnist Bill McGurn joins many nationwide observers of how the peaceful protests have been co-opted by violent thugs, most of whom pledge their allegiance to the many Antifa cells that supply rioters to the various George Floyd demonstration venues.  In his ‘Mayhem is the Message’, McGurn writes – “If justice for George Floyd is the goal, many cannot fathom how it makes any sense to trash already-vulnerable neighborhoods, kill other African-American men in the process, and destroy black-owned stores that, as former President Barack Obama just pointed out, may never come back. But it makes perfect sense if the goal is to indict America as fatally compromised by racism since birth. And if the mayhem provokes authorities such as Mr. Trump into further inflaming the situation, so much the better.”

And then there’s CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the idiot brother of New York’s governor, who pours gasoline on the fire with his, “Please, show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”  The dufus totally misses that ‘polite and peaceful’ is how the lamestream, led by his employer, has been characterizing the riots.  Today’s perversity of the Left includes the observation by Scott Walker of the Capital Research Center that “Radical mobs on campuses call speech they don’t like ‘violence,’ ” while “Radical mobs in the streets call their violence ‘speech.’ Either way, instead of highlighting the difference between peaceful protesters and rioters, they want to erase it.”  The reasonable voices from the black community are always few and hard to hear over those screeching victimhood, but three intellectual giants stand out – Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Shelby Steele.  African-Americans would fare far better following their counsel, instead of divisive demogauges like Sharpton and Jackson.

Riot Reflections – 5jun20 (updated 6jun20)

George Rebane

Taking a knee during our national anthem.  This has now become the woke behavior of all right-thinking people in our land where we are free to protest our government and institutions 24/7 (although not always with impunity since the 1A is ailing and in desperate straits).  Given that, remains there no sacrosanct ceremony or totem for us where showing our unabashed allegiance and gratitude for this unique land is not sullied for yet another opportunity to denigrate and protest?

Sheriffs and police chiefs marching with protesters??!  Can some of the more knowledgeable among us shed light on what these LE department heads were trying to communicate with their attendance in the throng?  Were they protesting their own inability to bring about the protesters’ desired changes in their departments (e.g. defunding), or were they just ropa-doping ‘solidarity’ with the protesters in the attempt to mollify their eventual morphing into a riotous mob?

“rightwing anarchists” is one of progressives’ phrases-of-art du jour.  Not surprisingly, it even appears on Bob Crabb’s blog to apparently identify one of the major causes of today’s nationwide riots, having no mention of the otherwise obvious participants with their desiderata prominently displayed on slogan embellished signs, graffiti, online manifestos, megaphoned gatherings, stashed caches for burnings, lootings, … .  Where can we go to witness these rightwing anarchists who are the root and visible causes of all this mayhem?  What is their number?  Where do they congregate on our streets?  Have any of them been captured or arrested?

Memo to President Trump – ‘Please STFU, give it a rest, and let the news cycle contain something else – e.g. good ecnomic news, waning pandemic – besides the lamestream’s trumpeting about your latest foot-in-mouth tweets.  Thank you.’

[update]  Economists miss May job numbers by more than 420%.  The predicted an 8M jobs loss into the face of 2.5M jobs added.  When they start doing numbers, economists are a real sorry lot, especially when we need them the most, like during this historic recession.  They do a lot of harm when they gather in bunches such as in the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget – they really are gangs that can’t shoot straight.  You’d think that screwing up time after time they’d find other kinds of work – don’t they ever get embarrassed?

Bad poll numbers again for Trump.  So reports one of our more prominent commenters who is now easily past his fourth year of a steady stream of announcements about Trump’s declining poll numbers that are always setting record lows, especially now during the pandemic.  According to him the president never seems to recover.  So how is it that after all these years of drastic losses of public confidence, Trump’s poll numbers haven’t zeroed out, but instead remain pretty much the same.  Sounds like some kind of numerical magic to me.  Perhaps he’ll explain it to us.

[6jun20 update]  D-Day 76 years ago.  In 1944 the Rebanes had recently arrived in the Third Reich from Estonia, and were living in a hastily government-erected clapboard cabin (about 500sqft) in Stettin-am-Oder – an old German cultural and trade center, now named Szczecin in Poland.  As refugees, my electrician father was pressed into a work battalion to reinstall electricity (that or fight on the eastern front) after the nightly bombings by mostly Soviet bombers.  My seamstress mother was put to work sewing rank insignia and epaulets for Wehrmacht uniforms.  In the evenings we heard Goebbels telling the Reich of the latest German victory that somehow always was closer to Berlin than the previously reported victories.  On the night of 6 June 1944 we heard him boast of how the Wehrmacht in France was pushing the long expected allied landings in France back into the English Channel.

Revolution YES, Vigilantes NO.  That is the message from our eternally dysfunctional Democratic functionaries who rule our riotous cities on both coasts, with some more sprinkled in between.  These historically-innocent politicians are celebrating the “protests” conducted by thugs who smash and burn property while killing and maiming anyone who attempts to stop them.  We are assured that such protests are good revolutionary expressions, and America always was a revolutionary country.  In the same breath they tell law-abiding suburbanites and business owners that to defend their stores and homes with guns is illegal vigilantism, and that is not allowed.  Only the rioters are free to assault the social order with arson and mayhem while police watch.  These power-infused dufuses have no idea that the American Revolution and other laudatory labor revolts always started with citizens joining together as vigilantes when needed to oppose or augment the established order.

Sandbox – 4jun20

[Apologies for letting the 2jun20 Sandbox get out of hand with all of its misplaced comments that I should have deleted as they appeared.  Here I’m talking about the pandemic and George Floyd response comments that had homes under my other topical commentaries.  I’ll try to do a much better job in this sandbox to delete all misplaced comments immediately before they become lengthy discussion threads.  And thanks for your support.  gjr]

Returning to Race-based College Admissions

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my resumed regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 3 June 2020.]

Former University of California regent Ward Connerly founded the American Civil Rights Institute in response to the corrupt racism that affirmative action introduced into state government contracting, public jobs hiring, and deciding who would be admitted to state schools.  Almost 25 years ago he launched Prop 209 which was the successful ballot initiative that made it illegal for California to consider race in performing any of those functions.

Being able to award contracts, jobs, and admissions on the basis of race was a big progressive vote getter for the state’s Democratic Party, and leftwing politicians have been chafing for all these years trying to figure out how to make racial patrimony legal again.

In the meantime, race-based admissions into the nation’s universities and colleges has become a much-publicized issue, especially after it was discovered that elite universities were leading the pack with racial quota systems in their admissions programs applied in the most corrupt and merit-free manner.  For these elitist administrations academic merit became a racist criterion when considering applicants for their freshman classes.  Since African-American and Hispanic students ranked way below the Asians and whites in academic achievement, it was clear that something had to be done to ‘level the playing field’ and bring social justice to bear.

The result was that race quotas were pushed to the top, and academic merit was demoted in the ranking of factors that would recommend admission.  The proponents of academics started pushing back when these admissions policies came to light.  However, nobody really cared how the white applicants were discriminated against.  What really hit a nerve on the race-based policies was the dirty deal dealt to Asian-American applicants.  This cohort of minority students always blew the tops off their high school grades, achievement tests, and any other criteria like extra-curricular activities and breadth of interests.  If the new progressive race-based admissions standards were fairly applied to all minorities, the Asian-American kids would have flooded the enrollment rolls.  What to do now?

Well, the answer to the progressive administrations was obvious, lay on another layer of corruption and eliminate any semblance of balance between minority and academic requirements.  If you were black or Latino, you went to the head of the line until the quota was filled, and that was that.  However, when the Asian-American community got wind of such obviously biased and unfair practices, they got active and involved.  The result was that these tilted playing field practices made national headlines with our polarized country predictably lined up on both sides of the issue.

Today, California’s Democrats see an opportunity to eliminate the last barriers to race-based admissions policies.  This week the State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee will vote to pass ACA5, the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn Prop209, and again legitimize race-based admissions.  The 81-year-old Ward Connerly has returned to work with a handful of very devoted Asian-American civic groups to stop ACA5, which most likely will be railroaded through the Senate during this pandemic season without a single public hearing.  It will then appear on the November ballot to let Californians again decide how they want to diminish and demote the state’s higher education systems.  The reinstatement of this corrupt practice will be sold to our electorate under the guise of affirmative action.  In opposition, Asian-Americans against ACA5 know that “If it passes, Asian-American students will be further scapegoated and penalized in college admissions.”  Those Californians who believe in a colorblind society when it comes to government preferences and perks should join to oppose ACA5 on the November ballot.

Should it pass, lawsuits are already being prepared to fight this discriminatory amendment.  And there’s a good chance the case will end up before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs hope that the court would then rule as clearly and categorically as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” (more here)

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Scattershots – 3jun20 (updated 4jun20)

George Rebane

Worldwide lockdowns were triggered by panicky politicians who listened to the ‘eminent epidemiologist’ Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.  He came out with a slew of mortality predictions almost every country of note by monkeying with his models.  Trouble is that none of them came anywhere near true, but politicians were reluctant to let go of the new dimensions of power they had appropriated.  So most of the world shut down economies and also caused untold more deaths and morbidity (as many of us then predicted).  Now Ferguson, with stiff upper lip firmly in place, admits to having observed these “interesting” realworld results, perhaps starting with the admission, “Without instituting full lockdown, Sweden is essentially getting the same effect.”  (whouda thought?  H/T to reader and more here)  And here is a confirming update on the C19 stats from Sweden (H/T to reader).  Consider this report in the context of my 16may20 commentary that also appears in today’s 3jun20 Union (here).

My ‘Unsettling ‘Settled Science’’ was published in today’s (3jun20) Union.  As expected, it drew a lot of ire from our local leftwingers.  Almost all of it was hard to connect with the points I made in the commentary.  Some even rejected my propositions on the basis of their similarity of what they may have heard from Limbaugh, or that it “was written by a staunch trump supporter”.  But a comment from George Boardman, one of our liberal thought leaders and intellects, piqued my interest.  He asked why Jo Ann and I “have been sheltering in place for 70 plus days”, since my “oft-expressed skepticism of the conventional scientific wisdom”.   To start with, Mr Boardman apparently is not a very careful (or comprehending?) reader of RR.  From the body count alone, no one should doubt that the elderly are in the most vulnerable group.  So there was no point in our going out just to solicit the infection - after all I am a Bayesian.  But the main reason is that all of our outside activities were canceled and many brought online, not by us, but by the government – in short, there was no place for us to go, save to run the usual store errands which we did.  However, undeterred we continued seeing our family and Nevada County friends on a regular basis – e.g. we had an ‘essential’ dinner party at our house last night – during this months-long interval of insane and conflicting dicta issuing from various government offices (see the latest from Neil Ferguson above).  Boardman, flying hot, true, and normal with his fellow progressive pundits, evinces no capability of nuancing anything he sees.  I have found people like that to operate in what we control engineers call ‘bang-bang mode’, their needle gets pegged at either end with no readings from the middle.  But perhaps I too am missing something here.  I’d like to lunch with George Boardman and have each of us really get the cut of the other’s jib.

This is what we see on the streets, and what the Democrats and the lamestream refuse to denounce.

[update]  Yellow journalism on Bret Baier’s FN program.  For the program’s panel tonight, Baier had assembled Ari Fleischer (Bush2 press secretary), Mara Liaisson (NPR political correspondent), and Mo Elleithee (Georgetown Institute of Politics) – a laudible 2-to-1 in favor of leftists.  Subject: Trump’s threat to use military against rioters if states can’t control them.  In his comments Elleithee said, “(Trump) authorizes militarized law enforcement to use excessive force against peaceful protesters.”  We all expect that kind of crap out of leftwing ideologues like Elleithee and Liasson, but since Trump said no such thing (it was just one more in the Left's daily avalanche of uncounted lies), the ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ Baier’s next question should have been, ‘Mo, what evidence do you have that the President said any such thing?  Please share it with us.’  Instead the network’s flagship anchor again showed his lily liver, and let the whole statement slide as if it were a commonly known truth.  Back in older days FN journalists would not have allowed that kind of crap to just float out there unchallenged.  Today their lead correspondent has taken the knee on truth, and has yet to update his closing line to ‘Feebly balanced and scared shitless.’  FN is rapidly becoming a CNN-in-training outlet.

[4jun20 update]  Apropos to ‘settled science’ (here) and making decisions on the basis of ‘science not politics’, we now read the WHO has flipped on their hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) admonitions cum screed. The widely cited study ‘disproving’ the effectiveness of HCQ turns out to have been badly flawed, as attested to by 120+ scientists who examined the record. (more here)  So now they’re going back to square one and resuming the trial that they prematurely aborted.  And, of course, we’re all familiar with the field day the Democrats and their lamestream lackies had when during the early days of the pandemic President Trump suggested that HCQ might be something we should also examine.  Don’t expect any of those sumbiches to show any remorse at their TDS-powered hipshot remonstrations.

Common Core curriculum fans rejoice.  One of your aims was for the new educational initiative to “narrow the performance gap” between the high-end students and those at/near the bottom.  According to both the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the gap is being closed, not by boosting the academic performance of the low achievers, but by dumbing down the high achievers.  We have reported on this many times, and now Union columnist Terry McLaughlin writes in the 3jun20 edition of the newspaper, “After decades of slow and steady improvement, reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have seen historic declines in the six years since most states implemented national Common Core English and math curriculum standards”. (more here)  Bill Gates’ sponsorship of Common Core did immeasurable damage and played right into the progressives’ agenda to dumb down succeeding generations of American voters.  As a humorous footnote, RR’s spam folder correctly trapped a well-known leftwing local who sought to comment on ‘Returning to Race-based College Admissions’ by declaring his ignorance of the legislature's initiative to repeal Prop209 that prohibits race-based state contracting, hiring, and admissions.