Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox - 23sep21

[My how time flies when you're having fun.  Apologies for letting the last Sandbox get a little too ripe.  At our house we were busy with our last eagle on final, guiding it in for a secure touchdown.  gjr] 

Your Covid Factsheet (updated 24sep21)

George Rebane

The Swiss Policy Institute is a sober outfit that has helped compile a list of established facts about C19 and its pandemic (here).  Most of what you’ve read and heard about the disease is mired in politicized BS.  You have read a lot of the good stuff on RR posted by our readers and me.  But The Guardian has also published a compelling “crib sheet” of referenced facts and graphics which summarize what is known about Covid-SARS-2 (here)  Definitely worth a read so that you can be immunized against what comes out the lamestream and various government agencies and state houses.  (H/T to reader)

[24sep21 update]  NIH Publishes Study - Ivermectin works.  NIH has published on its website (here) an article in the July-August issue of the American Journal of Therapeutics that concluded that “large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin.”

And the American Journal of Therapeutics concludes (here) –

Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.

"Given the evidence of efficacy, safety, low cost, and current death rates, ivermectin is likely to have an impact on health and economic outcomes of the pandemic across many countries. Ivermectin is not a new and experimental drug with an unknown safety profile. It is a WHO “Essential Medicine” already used in several different indications, in colossal cumulative volumes. Corticosteroids have become an accepted standard of care in COVID-19, based on a single RCT of dexamethasone.1 If a single RCT is sufficient for the adoption of dexamethasone, then a fortiori the evidence of 2 dozen RCTs supports the adoption of ivermectin.

Ivermectin is likely to be an equitable, acceptable, and feasible global intervention against COVID-19. Health professionals should strongly consider its use, in both treatment and prophylaxis."

You heard it here first and often, and that through all the bullshit that the evil Democrats and their lamestream media tried to cover up with the resulting loss of hundreds of thousands of lives for which no one is responsible nor accountable – your government at work in peace and war.

[and more]  Led by Bumblebrain and the CDC, the government is still convincing those who don’t know any better that science speaks with a single voice, and that they are “following the science.”  The 24sep21 WSJ reports “Behind Booster Authorization Were Disagreements on Evidence, Broad Access" … The extra Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine doses are rolling out to certain fully vaccinated adults, after disputes inside the U.S. government and with its scientific adviser.”

Scattershots – 20sep21 (updated 23sep21)

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be – starting with the lawyers and enactors. Lao-Tzu (as embellished by Rebane)

George Rebane

The wisdom of Lao-Tzu was brought to my attention again by a friend and reader.  Jeff Thomas, a true conservetarian, wrote ‘The First Libertarian?’, an important little essay on governance – its ills and desiderata.  In it he distilled some more useful aphorism from the great sage.

Those in power are meddlesome.

The greater the restrictions and prohibitions, the more people are impoverished.

The more advanced the weapons of the state, the darker the nation … thus the virtuous attend to contracts, while those without virtue collect taxes.

Act before things exist, manage them before there’s disorder

Trickle down taxes is a specialty of the Democratic Party which it sells gift-wrapped in a couple of its perennial Big Lies – raising taxes does not impact economic behavior (the Laffer curve doesn’t work), and corporate taxes lower the tax burden on the working class.  They correctly assess their constituents as being too ignorant to questions such lies, but they know both of them to be false.  For example, Kennedy lowered taxes in xx to stimulate the economy.  And corporations pay no taxes but pass that cost on to their customers in the form of higher prices, which quietly impacts most the poorest in the land.  And a tax not even the Democrats want to talk about is inflation – always government induced (more here and here).  The worker bees’ bigger paychecks don’t give them any more buying power, but do promote them into higher tax brackets (plus higher sales taxes) which surreptitiously increase their overall tax rates.  But our leftwing elites have no worries about pushback from their Democrat voters, people who are totally oblivious to such economic factors, and continue to believe that their political leaders are making corporations and the rich pay their ‘fair share’.

[21sep21 update]  Sorry ass Biden.  I have been aware of presidential doings since ol' Harry was in office, and want to enter into the RR record that I have never seen such a terminally sorry ass elected President of the United States of America as Bumblebrain Biden.  This idiot has done everything wrong that he could possibly do, as he continues to work on bringing about even bigger disasters for the country.  The list of his failures gets rehashed regularly in these pages, and I’m sure that at some future date I’ll compile another list of them myself.  Right now the bigger problem for our republic is that a huge share of our voting age citizens have shown themselves to be simply too dumb to maintain the blessed land we inherited.  Ben Franklin’s admonition – “… a republic, if you can keep it” – has come true as ever more of our freedoms are stripped away daily.  Nay, not stripped, we have now been reduced to compliant serfs who willingly give away our freedoms – no stripping required.  And many of us even sing hosannas to the munificent wisdom of our socialist overlords so long as the checks keep arriving.  They are buying our freedoms with our own money, and welcoming in millions more aliens, cum tomorrow's Democrats, who will guarantee our descent to tyranny.

[22sep21 update]  Bumblebrain’s poll numbers are tanking and Republicans are happy dancing in the streets about next year’s election.  That election is more than several political eternities in the future, and the not-too-bright electorate has a short memory.  By next Fall things could easily be turned 180, especially if the Dems can pass more social legislation to increase the number and size of checks to the takers, while crowing that their massive tax increases will make the ‘rich’ makers and corporations pay their “fair share”.  (Over 60% of US households pay no capital gains or federal income taxes.)  Their constituents are dim enough to lap up all that kool-aid, especially if Republicans don’t have the balls to call it like it is – loudly and often - singing castrato doesn't cut it.

[23sep21 update]  Biden denounces and repudiates capitalism and the US economic system.  Bumblebrain made it clear in his speech last Thursday that, contrary to his professions of being a capitalist and not a socialist, he is indeed most strongly a socialist and not a capitalist.  As Daniel Henninger underlines in the 23sep21 WSJ, “At no point in that speech did he acknowledge the private sector contributed anything positive to the life of Americans.”  His work on $3.5T Democrat debacle, that is supposed to be the hallmark of his administration, has been assessed by the US Chamber of Commerce as being an “existential risk” to the US economy.  Astute readers know that the USCC is far from being a rightwing propaganda organ.  If Bumblebrain knows anything, it is that he has only a short time to put some mark, any mark, on his reputation and legacy.  And so far everything he touched has turned to s#!t, so with what’s left of his cognitive abilities, he now thinks that locking America onto the path of irretrievable socialism is the only thing he can pull off with the Democratic Party that has already declared itself ‘all in’ for that fundamental transformation.

The Canadian COVID Conspiracy: Dr David E Martin (updated 19sep21)

George Rebane

A longtime reader and friend sent me this mind-bending video on Bitchute of an interview with David Martin (here) who lays out the multi-decadal conspiracy of developing the human infectable/transmissible corona virus and the worldwide pandemic to create a market for its ‘vaccine’, which is really not a vaccine in any medical sense of the word.  I found the 54-minute video riveting as Martin unfolds and exposes the business, marketing, investment, collusion factors that come together as a description of the most massive and well-executed conspiracy to fleece the world with the enthusiastic cooperation of governments and the media.  The financial and political gifts to the co-operating players appear to be unending.

As to the verity of what Martin reports I cannot attest, since at this writing I’m not very familiar with other corroborating sources of this information.  I do invite readers to share such sources should they discover them.  In any event, for those interested in the ongoing COVID saga, the video is definitely worth watching with a glass of your favorite adult beverage, and possibly a pen and paper.  (and here is more)

For more research on David Martin and what he reports, search ‘David E Martin credibility’ on Bing to get some links that cover the pro/con sides of the matter – Google search gives a definitely one-sided collection of hits on that query.

[19sep21 update]  Here is a noteworthy development on C19 vaccines – ‘FDA Allows Whistleblower Testimony that COVID-19 Vaccines Are Killing and Harming People!’  This report has some astounding stats on the aftereffects of certain 'vaccines' that studies are now revealing.  We now know that what people are being inoculated with are not real vaccines in the medical sense, but designed, special-purpose bio-molecules ("medical devices") that are supposed to prompt your immune system to then manufacture the antibodies (provided by normal vaccines) to resist C19.  (H/T to reader)

 

Ruminations – 14sep21 (update 18sep21)

George Rebane

Government bureaucrats allocate capital better than private investors – fundamental tenet of the Left

Newsom's recall is opposed by another progressive dimwit in the 14sep21 Union (here) arguing that all of CA’s problems were there before he was elected.  The ‘gentleman’ does not understand that the recall is about his making all of the problems worse, and then adding on new ones.  And he also quotes a fictitious $70B “surplus”, having no idea that any such monies are long spoken for with the state’s over $1T in unfunded liabilities.

Europe’s electricity prices are going through the roof (here).  Why?  Well, the goddam wind is not blowing very much these days, and their having shut down their nuclear and fossil fuel plants without much consideration that the so-called sustainable sun/wind/water energy sources are sometime things, now they find their mammaries twixt the rollers.  Brings to mind the old Estonian saying about not crapping in the old well before the new one’s dug.  Here in CA, we haven’t learned a thing about that problem.

NIH investigates removal Covid genetic data per Chinese researcher request (here).  The agency removed C19 gene sequence data obtained from Wuhan patients in January/February 2020.  This data would be an important input to determining the source and type (manmade vs nature) of the virus.  The  portents of its compliant and rapid deletion from our database opens up more serious questions about the NIH/Wuhan lab relationship.  Chalk up another one for China.  Dr Fauci call your office.

[15sep21 update]  Newsom’s recall rejected by a landslide.  CA voters once again demonstrate that they know not how to select their political leaders as the state continues its downward plunge along every imaginable way – illegal alien and welfare recipient surge, rampaging homelessness, dilapidated infrastructure, exodus of productive workers, businesses, and retirees, overall population loss, increasing already high taxes, regulatory tsunami, continued growth of eco-fanatics, historic water mismanagement, historic power generation/distribution mismanagement, continued mismanagement of forests, fiscal corruption and incompetency, continued growth of record unfunded liabilities, … .  And perpetuating a never-ending, one party monopoly that only serves the takers and punishes the makers.

Gen Mark Milley’s phone calls to China promising to warn them of any pending US military action against them was one of several acts of treason our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pulled off during the Trump administration.  He is part of the devastation in our flag officer ranks that Obama left behind in his politicization of the military.  Bob Woodward and Robert Costa outline this travesty in their Peril (2021).

SecState Blinken, who is particularly unsuited for his job, now claims to bring the Taliban to heel with his toothless diplomacy.  Echoing Stalin’s famous ‘How many divisions does the Pope have?’, after our precipitous and shameful retreat, the Taliban now ask, ‘How many divisions does Blinken have?’  Biden and Blinken have given new meaning to our shooting diplomatic blanks – Blinken Blanks?

C19 response mismanagement last year is laid bare in Uncontrolled Spread (2021) by former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb.  The good doctor documents the numerous and impactive screw-ups perpetrated by the CDC, FDA, and NIH which cry out for deep and penetrating investigations to better prepare us for the next pandemic.  Gottlieb highlights Warp Speed as the only government initiative undertaken correctly and against massive political opposition.

Facebook confirmed a sleazebag outfit, as demonstrated again by its corrupt censorship policy which selectively favors the high and mighty.

C19 ‘cases’ and hospitalization stats are grossly misleading and meant to support more government command and control mandates.  Both cases and hospitalizations have been overwhelmingly (positively tested) asymptomatic and mild when admitted.  Continuing to serve as the DNC trumpet, the lamestream has, of course, omitted mentioning any of this.

[17sep21 update] California voters got what they deserve, 'good and hard' (a la HL Mencken). Syndicated columnist Michael Barone lays out the particulars for us here.  And more and more of today’s college graduates reflect the socialist crap they were taught in universities by voting Democratic.

Democrats’ planned price controls on drugs will kill America’s innovative pharma industry and will be dangerous to your health. (more here and here)  The party of evil is hard at work taking the country down as fast as it can to a uniform level of misery (aka equity) that has been presaged by so many other nations adopting elitist autocratic regimes that have successfully sold central planning and control to their terminally benighted citizens.

[18sep21 update]  My essay 'America the Unnatural', originally posted here on 27 June 2021, finally appeared in today's print and online editions of The Union.  Unfortunately the print version was edited enough to change/omit several critical points in the submitted version.  However, they did kindly post the full submitted version in their online edition (here), for which I am grateful.

Sandbox – 13sep21

[New revelation about Facebook’s history of selective gatekeeping and lying was discovered by the WSJ and is reported here.  gjr]

We have forgotten 9/11 (updated)

George Rebane

Until we understand and address the role of the swamp, swatting individual mosquitoes will not reduce our suffering.

On 11 September 2001 we as a country vowed that we would never forget what happened on that day which took the lives of almost 3,000 innocent Americans.  Since then, we have built a magnificent Ground Zero monument and museum, and in somber ceremonies called out the names of our murdered country men and women.  But the tragedy more often than not has been observed as an act of God, similar to our remembrance of the devastation of Katrina.

During these observances someone will utter a brief reference to the ‘terrorists’ who flew those passenger airliners into buildings and into a field in Pennsylvania.  At best these faceless terrorists are also glossed over as having no further identity, ideology, and purpose than did Katrina.  We focus all our attention on the killed and their grieving survivors.

But many more than 3,000 Americans die every day, and no national memorials are held for them.  No one asks any longer what made these 9/11 deaths special, and why that date, as another one in our history, will live in infamy.  When we were still a proud country and suffered a great blow on 7 December 1941, we didn’t memorialize our fallen as some inevitable victims of a natural disaster.  We made it clear that everyone down to our kindergarteners knew that it was Imperial Japan, with leaders like Tojo and Yamamoto, that had perpetrated and carried out that dastardly attack.  And even though Japan is no longer a warmongering empire, we still remember who attacked us on that day of infamy, and how we as a country responded to that outrage.

This is not the case with 9/11 that we now briefly identify as having been caused by some band of vanilla terrorists of indifferent provenance.  Today during these hallowed observances we cannot even mention  that it was fundamentalist Islam that motivated, assembled, trained, and set loose the self-sacrificing killers.  And that fundamental Islam has not deviated a whit from its greater goal to subvert the globe to its merciless credo, proving its unflagging zeal by continuing to send an unending stream of Islamist terrorists to maim and murder in the west.

In response, our progressive and woke leadership cringes at even the thought of identifying the terrorists’ creed.  We even take down Old Glory from classroom walls if a Muslim student expresses ‘discomfort’ with that flag for which so many have sacrificed.  We continue mumbling that Islam is still a “religion of peace”, ignoring the wholesale global support by Muslims of anti-western terror as an acceptable tool to bring about their new world order.  And in response, we have turned on ourselves by quietly accepting the leftists in our government who have fabricated the lie that white supremacists make up the greatest terror threat America faces.

There is no doubt that twenty years on, we as a nation have forgotten what really happened on 9/11.

[update]  RL Crabb, our celebrated cartoonist who is also on the editorial board of The Union, is a local leading intellectual light in the cadre of our calcified cohort of collectivists.  His cartoon in today’s 11sep21 issue of the newspaper (below) underlines the point that I am making in the above commentary.  As a collectivist, for him 9/11 was just another tragedy of lives lost to an event perpetrated by some inscrutable terrorists of indifferent origin who no longer deserve recognition, let alone mention.  Most students of geo-politics and Islamic affairs find nothing inscrutable about the 9/11 terrorists and are anything but indifferent as to their origin.  Fundamentalist Islam is the geo-political plague of our times and as such has been endemic for decades.  And so it will continue to be as long as our progressive thought leaders, who are also masters of our media, deem this scourge as just another act of nature to be dealt only with a general trepidation and ill-directed preparations which must neither address nor insult its source.  These leftists wish us to focus only on those whom they designate as “rightwing domestic terrorists”, their paramount threat to our republic.

A fruitful read on the entire matter of global Islamism is ‘The War on Terror Shifts to ‘Brainistan’’ by Tawfik Hamid, an American physician who in his younger years was himself an indoctrinated jihadist ready to martyr himself attacking the west.  He presents the case that “The West needs a better system for identifying radical Islamists and cutting out the religious underpinnings of jihad.”  Ignoring the ideological origins of 9/11 is not part of such a better system.  More such sentiments are presented today in essays such as 'Purposeful Forgetfulness' by Pedro Gonzales, associate editor of Chronicles, who argues that "Americans have been encouraged to forget about 9/11 and to focus on the enemy within."

On Our Road to Serfdom – 10sep21

George Rebane

We Americans have been on the road to serfdom since the launch of President Johnson’s Great Society programs in the late 1960s.  Our progress toward an authoritarian social order was an almost imperceptible creep during the early years starting in the 1970s.  With the passing of the decades, our loss of freedoms has now become a gallop, especially highlighted by the state diktats, we quietly succumbed to during the Covid pandemic.  Specifically, I’m really talking about the battering suffered by the Bastiat Triangle of Rights (q.v.) – Liberty, Security, and Property.  These rights form the seminal legal structure upon which ALL other rights are based and secured; none can be weakened without a concomitant weakening of the other two, and, of course, the weakening of the rights deriving from these.

A beguiling danger on the road to serfdom is that its many disarming byways and slowly enlarging chuck holes are not readily noticed by travelers being drawn by descriptions of the promised land at its terminus.  By the time the journey becomes so difficult that even the lightest thinkers notice, it is too late to turn around and go back.  In America, our socialist elites have successfully brought a compliant and undereducated electorate to such a milestone on the road to serfdom and totalitarianism.

Noted Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, along with Milton Friedman of the ‘Chicago school’, each warned us of the ultimate disaster that would result from an embrace of collectivist governance based on central planning and control by elites.  The disasters of practiced fascism and communism highlight pre-woke and pre-CRT history books.  That both arose from initial adoption of various forms of Marxian socialism is today clouded by the Left’s resurgence and its citation of the Scandinavian experience.  Nowhere is mentioned Scandinavia’s actual unsustainable experience with socialism, along with their ongoing attempts to retreat from their extreme flirtations during the 1960s and 70s.

The US, on the other hand, is rushing toward a neo-Marxian socialist future on a disintegrating chariot pulled by global warming, open borders, and critical theories.  The party in charge of this rush to misery are the Democrats dominated by their left-wing zealots.  A socialist future is now openly presented as the objective of the country’s fundamental transformation.  And the road is already littered with authoritarian mandates that would have gathered our forefathers bearing torches and pitchforks in the public square.  With more of us arriving daily.

This week we heard that CDC has expanded from controlling our rental market to overruling relationships between Americans and their physicians.  As relayed by a reader who went to the local Rite-Aid drugstore to fill an Ivermectin prescription by her doctor, the pharmacist told her that they are rejecting such prescriptions because the CDC has deemed Ivermectin to have suddenly become harmful and not to be used as a C19 therapeutic or prophylactic.  So these unelected, politicized bureaucrats have now injected themselves into our country’s doctor/patient relationship starting with using a demonstrated lamestream hoax to prevent physicians from prescribing lawful medicines to their patients.  And no one has made a peep.  The lamestream has, of course, remained mum, but even the so-called rightwing outlets have yet to pick up on this latest rollback of our freedoms.  We have become so inured to having our rights casually cancelled by any politician or bureaucrat at literally any level of governance.  We are already serfs who comply with our master’s voice.  No second thought is given.  We are even enthusiastic enforcers of such mandates, ready, willing, and able to turn on our neighbor when we see noncompliance.

The Nobelist Hayek was most eloquent and clear in the warnings he issued, beginning with The Road to Serfdom (1944) and continuing throughout his life after he went to the University of Chicago and became part of ‘the Chicago School’ which also included Nobelist Milton Friedman.  A perusal of Serfdom yields some of his more important sentiments about socialism, collectivism, and totalitarianism.

• Western democracies, including the UK and the US, have "progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past".  Society has mistakenly tried to ensure continuing prosperity by centralized planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

• Socialism is a hypocritical system, because its professed humanitarian goals can only be put into practice by brutal methods "of which most socialists disapprove". Such centralized systems also require effective propaganda, so that the people come to believe that the state's goals are theirs. As with communism, Hayek argues that the roots of National Socialism lie in socialism.

• Centralized planning is inherently undemocratic, because it requires "that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people".  The power of these minorities to act by taking money or property in pursuit of centralized goals, destroys the Rule of Law and individual freedoms.  Where there is centralized planning, "the individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as ''socialized welfare' or the 'good of the community'".

• Hayek opposed regulations that restrict the freedom to enter a trade, or to buy and sell at any price, or to control quantities. Nevertheless, he acknowledged the utility of regulations that restrict legal methods of production, so long as these are applied equally to everyone and not used as an indirect way of controlling prices or quantities, and without forgetting the cost of such restrictions.

So today we have Biden and his CDC stumbling through one science-free policy after another in their misbegotten efforts to curb Covid.  None of them understand that the disease is now endemic and a permanent part of our health landscape.  We will fight it as we have other infectious diseases, by developing herd immunity through exposure and vaccines, but never by lockdowns and economic destruction.  Ignoring history and science while putting politics first, Team Biden now issues illegal and unconstitutional federal mandates to prescribe everything from masks, to vaccinations, to testing, to social distancing.  And again, we as the serfs we have become do not make a peep in opposition.  Half of us have become so compliant that they rush to denounce their neighbors who don’t toe the (Democratic) party line.

Scattershots – 5sep21 (updated 13sep21)

Geoge Rebane

About a month ago in ‘The Criminality of Covid Care’ we reviewed a catalog of atrocious policies that our governments have imposed since C19 was first loosened on the nation early last year.  Specifically, the focus was on the denigration and proscription of the established anti-viral Ivermectin for both prophylaxis and therapy for the disease.  Evidence of IVM’s benefits continues to be made available, all to the tin ears of CDC and Team Fauci.  Here’s the latest information from a reader – ‘Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honored distinction with indicated efficacy against a new global scourge, COVID-19’.  This article is published in the September 2021 issue of New Microbes and New Infections published by Elsevier. (more here)

And here is your Ivermectin Lucky Strike Extra.  'Ivermectin, a potential anticancer drug derived from an antiparasitic drug.'  I think we may have covered this before, but it is definitely worth repeating to illustrate the magnitude of the crime our TDS progressives have committed and continue in the avalanche lies appearing daily about IVM.

[10sep21 update] Bidenese by Bumblebrain - Alright, a little change of pace to examine in more detail what regularly comes out of our president's mouth when in front of a mic.  How many times have you watched him attempt to explain or expand something, and out comes mush.  Well, it's not mush, and here is a video by a stalwart researcher who has captured a sampling of Bidenese to include in your lexicon for the next time you hear the president speak. (H/T to reader)  Download Bidenese

[11sep21 update] Re Recall Newsom - California resident Curt Kruger writes in the 11sep21 WSJ that people who oppose the recall of our misdirected and incompetent governor also support the following initiatives to reduce the state’s standing as the country’s leading repository of the homeless.

• Eliminate laws against living in a tent on public property.
• Remove the social stigma associated with living on the street (terms like hobo, vagrant, etc.)
• Provide free food. During nasty weather, provide free shelter.
• Provide enough cash that people don’t have to hold down a job.
• Make psychiatric-care and drug-dependency programs optional.

Mr Kruger concludes, “It’s ironic that Gov. Newsom’s program to reduce homelessness includes the same policies most people would implement to increase it.”

[13sep21 update]  Corporatist Facebook is one of the country’s premier SOS liars.  A major piece – ‘Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt’ - in the 13sep21 WSJ based on access to company confidential documents reveals, “A program known as XCheck has given millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse”.

In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.  The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

In front of congressional committees holding public hearings Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed multiple times that he is a sleazebag lying sack of (user fill-in, my preference is ‘shit’).  This is the kind of oligopolistic behaviors that make the case for breaking up Facebook or turning companies like this into regulated public utilities.

Afghanistan – Tell us the truth instead (updated 4sep21)

George Rebane

’20-year Afghanistan Mission Accomplished’ tout our Democrat leaders as they thank all those service members who sacrificed their lives in so many ways.  These politicians describe such sacrifices as having been made voluntarily by our military heroes.  But IMHO that doesn’t jive with reality.  Who among the sacrificed would have willingly done so if told from the gitgo in, say, 2012 that you’re going to Afghanistan with the possibility of dying, getting your legs blown off, or coming back with PTSD in order to deny the Taliban ragheads another eight years of running the country as a tyrannical Islamist gulag, and which will again become home to various international terror organizations of the kind that gave us 9/11, and then we will cut and run?  Not many would have signed up for that kind of duty had they been told the truth.

But if being given a realistic mission, say, ‘It’s highly likely that we’ll be in Afghanistan forever with a minimal force level consisting mostly of intelligence operations, drone air support, and training Afghan security forces to prop up their government and keep the country from reverting to raghead terrorist control.  You will be in combat until we can bring the situation into a desired low/no casualty stasis.  This is the cost of doing White Hat business around the world to secure our homeland and the lands of our allies who join us in such operations.  America has done this in the past, and realistically today we see no future time when global evil will be vanquished so that such outposts and tours of duty, first outlined by Ambassador Kennan in 1946, will no longer be necessary.’  I know of no one in our circle of friends who would not sign up for such a tour when called upon – and that is because most of us have manned the ramparts of freedom at one time or another, and will do so again.  But it all starts with telling us the truth.

[4sep21 update]  Never let a crisis or disaster go to waste.  In the Dems’ desperate attempt to paper over the historically atrocious Biden Afghan debacle, the lamestream media are doing their best to sweep that ignominious, tragic, and chaotic military retreat under the rug, any rug of opportunity.  So Ida for Al-Qaeda has become the opportune switcheroo in the socialist press and punditry.  No more are we concerned about that premier terrorist organization resurging and setting up again in Afghanistan.  At the best the lamestream will continue pushing the lie that the Taliban doesn’t get along with Al-Qaeda and other recidivist outfits like the ISIS-X (currently X=K) et al.

So now we don’t have to worry about the return of all kinds of bad guys as long as we ‘work with’ the Taliban.  Anyone who has been paying attention (a shrinking minority) knows that all of them belong to the Haqqani network of cheek-by-jowl anti-western terror outfits.  And at their chapter house meetings, they must be laughing their butts off about what they read in the NYT, WaPo, and hear on CNN, MSNBC, … .  Meanwhile, to keep the Return of the Ragheads under wraps, the Democrats have qued up Covid and climate change for their lamestream as the next diversionary dollops for dimwits.  (Remember, they still have to have to keep the open-border crisis hidden from their cognitively calcified constituents.)

We Live in the Golden Age of Stupidity

Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become. - Jean Cocteau

George Rebane

So argues Lance Morrow, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and former Boston University journalism professor, in the 30aug21 WSJ (here).  Morrow introduces a slightly different aspect of stupidity than the one used in these pages.  (Here ignorance denotes a lack of specific knowledge, and stupid denotes the cognitive inability to process knowledge.  Only the former is correctible.)  Functionally, Morrow’s ‘stupidity’ is the same, but applied wholesale to large masses of people.  He immediately opens with –

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time—one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.

As we have shown for years, the American Left has dedicated itself to 1) creating wholesale ignorance through our public schools, and 2) promoting the stupid in their ranks to enduring positions of power.  The former to create generations of compliant constituents, the latter to generate, promote, and maintain insane and/or dysfunctional public policies in their jurisdictions.  The confluence of both creates the stupidity, as described by Morrow, that ensures the expansion and calcification of monopolistic autocracy in the body politic.  The evidence for this abounds and is available to a shrinking cohort of Americans; to the remainder it is the acceptable norm, socially just, and the ‘American way’.

Until the arrival of mass media (i.e. radio circa 1920) history tells us that we Americans were extremely political animals, participating in extensive discussions of the issues, political corruption, impactive legislation, and election campaigns at all levels.  Newspapers with their editorials and political cartoons (e.g. see Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904) were devoured in detail on Main Street, church suppers, and in Grange meetings.  Everyone had some pertinent knowledge of current events and issues – it was a sought honor to be known as a ‘person of information’. 

Sandbox – 29aug21

[The genesis of our wildfires.  Here’s a topic everyone is afraid of discussing.  Almost all of our wildfires are manmade – they are started by indigents, crazies, and people with a political agenda.  The fires started by accidents and natural causes are well-known, few and far in between.  However, our politicians, liberal activists, and media of all hues treat western wildfires as if they were ‘acts of God’, and therefore their genesis need not be questioned, let alone examined, any further.  Given the number of annual wildfires, notice how rare is there any subsequent mention of arson investigations or what these may have discovered.  It seems that the ‘vulnerable underprivileged’ have a natural right to start fires and then be left alone.  And it is not a stretch to imagine the damage anti-American terrorists can do in a free country by simply setting wildfires with easily fabricated, time-delayed pyrotechnic devices.  But from what the public sees, our authorities neither suspect nor pursue such errant behavior – the fires just magically flare up and cause totally acceptable devastation.  gjr]

The Ongoing and Tragic Biden Debacle

George Rebane

Let’s face it from the gitgo, Bumblebrain is so out of it that he and those supporters around him don’t even acknowledge the long list of tragedies that this administration has launched in its first eight months in office – border crisis, national crime wave, confused Covid response, $3.5T Green New Deal, mangled national employment, …, and now Afghanistan.  To them these atrocities either don’t exist or are just normative and expected reactions to their carefully laid out policies.

In Afghanistan we now see what has happened when they executed an exit policy that would have been rejected by a third-year ROTC cadet with a couple courses of military history and tactics under his belt.  The two most obvious and advised-against mistakes were the abandonment of the Bagram air base, and the withdrawing our last combat troops before starting the evacuation of civilians.  Everyone with a 3-digit IQ knew that the Afghan army would collapse as a fighting force immediately after we withdrew our air support, intelligence feeds, and contracted mechanics who kept their aircraft and their more complex combat systems operational.  And all, save the administration, knew that the Taliban would then be in Kabul in a fortnight.

Were there any honor left in the administration and its Pentagon political lackies, there would be a long list of resignations on the president’s desk to herald the much-needed housecleaning to make room for a more competent cadre of staff and military leaders.  And were any semblance of justice and concern for national security left in the Democratic Party, there would be a long list of impeachment filings against officials who were obviously derelict in their sworn duties or even criminal in their errors and omissions.

Since none of that is happening, and flacks like Psaki and Kirby are trotted out to obfuscate and confound what is really happening, we know that the cover-up of the century has been launched in preparation for next year’s midterm election.

Part and parcel of the Democrats’ national redoubt is California’s September recall election.  I am of the school that believes that Team Newsom with the help of national Democrats will do whatever is necessary to make sure Gavin does not get recalled.  The state’s election laws are now tailored to support election fraud and ‘irregularities’, abetted by everything from universal use of mail-ballots to the voting/vote counting period that extends before and after the 14sep21 election day.

California has been mismanaged so visibly and for so long that, post-Newsom, people will immediately ascribe responsibility to the state’s political monopoly.  A Republican governor will have the ability to reverse an untold number of misbegotten policies, codes, initiatives, and regulations that have been put in place by executive fiat.  The immediate impact of such a reversal will be apparent to a sufficient fraction of the state’s voters that it would most likely signal the end of the Democrats’ super-majority legislature, and perhaps even their massive embeds in the state’s various appointed and elected office slots.  The problem for the national Democrats is that such a political epiphany will be seen everywhere, and give lie to the progressive policies that have issued from state capitals and city halls across the land, those dominated by proto-Marxist politicians.

The amount of out-of-state money pouring in to support Newsom’s retainment attests to this assessment.  And we ain’t seen nothing yet when the fireworks erupt as the election draws nigh.  It will be a hot time in the old town for many a night.

Meanwhile, Biden’s tragic Afghanistan rout rolls on. (more here)