George Rebane
* VE Day remembrance
* Ethanol realities come home to roost
* Vallejo’s Bankruptcy
* Some Left-wing Views on Illegal Aliens
* Repairing the family washing machine
VE Day. Sixty-three years ago my mother, father, and I watched elements of Patton's Third Army roll into a small farming village near Monheim, Germany. We had walked into this village a couple of weeks before carrying our suitcases. My father was an electrician and was able to trade his talents for room and board. This night we spent huddled with other villagers in a basement on the gun-target line listening to incoming shells that were annihilating the remnants of an SS unit - holed up in a patch of forest about 200 yards from us - and shaking hell out of the village. One of the SS troopers was wounded early in the shelling, and for most of the night we could hear his screams between explosions. The screaming stopped before sunrise not long before the barrage was halted. As we went back upstairs we saw two lines of soldiers with rifles at the ready on its only street slowly walk into the village while hugging the houses. After that, the GIs started going through each house which created many a tense moment as they burst into one room after another. We were very scared when our single room in the attic was assaulted and three very dirty and tired GIs came in with their M-1s at high port. Then more drama and comedy as the main force came into town. Soon thereafter the Rebanes were sitting in the back of a 3/4 ton truck being taken to the refugee camp in Augsburg that was set up as the collection point for east Europeans. We were to be interned in such camps for the next four years.
It’s been too long in coming, but there’s hope that the ethanol boondoggle will soon join Alar and silicone breast implants in the archives of major government scams. Today’s WSJ opines that All it took was a mere global "food crisis." Last week chief economist Joseph Glauber of the USDA, which has been among Big Ethanol's best friends in Washington, blamed biofuels for increasing prices on corn and soybeans. Mr. Glauber also predicted that corn prices will continue their historic rise because of demand from "expanding use for ethanol." Even the environmental left, which pushed ethanol for decades as an alternative to gasoline, is coming clean. Lester Brown, one of the original eco-Apostles, wrote in the Washington Post that "it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel mandates have failed." We knew for sure the tide had turned when Time magazine's recent cover story, "The Clean Energy Myth," described how turning crops into fuel increases both food prices and atmospheric CO2. No one captures elite green wisdom better than Time's Manhattan editors. Can Vanity Fair be far behind? The interested reader has already been made aware of the utter futility of today’s bio-based ethanol solving any of our energy problems. But the mob, once it’s been prodded to howl, must be tossed a raw chunk of meat now and then. Now we wonder how long it will be until the climate change drama will be taken off the flashing political marquee and dutifully returned to its rightful place in scientific enquiry.
Vallejo’s long-heralded bankruptcy is about to become true. The SacBee article reports that as a result
City leaders said filing for bankruptcy will not immediately allow them to fill the potholes on untended streets or add more detectives to the undermanned police force. But they hope, if a judge rules in their favor, it will allow them to restructure union contracts and other debts in a way that allows the city to turn itself around financially within the next few years.
In addition to being the largest California city to declare bankruptcy, Vallejo will be the first city in the state to do so because its revenues cannot cover expenses, experts say.
Our Nevada County towns are in the same predicament and have been attempting to cut costs in addition to their unfunded liabilities, but not too hard. We will know they’re serious when they also attempt to reduce city employee compensation packages. Hopefully, we will also get weeks of notification if it comes to bankruptcy. Right now all our towns are saying that bankruptcy is not in the cards.
Today we had a doozy of a hare-brained, left-wing article titled 'The actions of Minutemen should ‘concern us all’(sic)' in The Union which the paper decided not to include in its online edition. The author writes about “illegal immigration” (a sadly entrenched oxymoron, see here), the role of the Minutemen in helping the Border Patrol, the benefits illegal aliens shower us with, and our continued responsibilities regarding the poor conditions in their home countries, their welfare after they successfully violate our laws, and resisting efforts by our government and volunteers to stem the tide. Maintaining the United States as a sovereign nation-state is clearly something the author is ignorant of or about which she fosters an alternative agenda. Sadly, she represents a sizeable cohort, not only in our county, but across the land.
Finally, our washing machine went on the blink and Jo Ann scheduled its repair. Unfortunately, during the appointed time this morning she had also arranged to be out and about with our visiting granddaughter Claire. To allay my apprehension about not knowing the details of the problem, she left a note with a description so I could properly deal with the repair people. Well, they arrived on schedule and consisted of a very capable repairwoman and her trainee-in-tow. I dutifully led them to the faulty equipment in the laundry room and we all read from the note that Jo Ann had left on the washer. I said that I knew nothing more than what was on the paper. Attempting to bolster my role in the matter, the repairlady said that I did a good job following the instructions that had been left. Somehow to my mind that didn’t quite bolster enough, and as I departed the laundry room I assured her that I too had family responsibilities in which I took the uncontested lead. However, to reinforce that assertion all I could muster at the moment was that I was the sole author of the Rebane family’s foreign policy for The People’s Republic of China.
Well done George, every family needs a foreign policy for the Peoples Republic of China. For most it comes down to buy or not to buy useless trinkets at the Cracker Barrel.
Posted by: russ | 09 May 2008 at 10:13 AM