Rebane's Ruminations

The Good Kind of Blacklist

George Rebane

Well, our little union educated, progressive darlins have once more confirmed the longheld Rebane Doctrine tenet that the Left proscribes free speech wherever it can establish a beachhead of power.  You can feel visible hatred from these mobs of ‘university students’ against those who disagree with them, and more importantly, also those who don’t support their views with sufficient vigor.  They have no idea about the First Amendment simply because it and its place in American society has never been taught to them.

On college campuses in the 1960s, was it not their grandparents who relied on the First Amendment to support and protect their open protests against the government and university administrations?  It used to be that a university was anything but a safe place for any idea – there ideas were treated to rigorous intellectual enquiry and analysis, and discarded unmercifully when found wanting.

Now the little darlins even banish journalists from covering their rage against a society they deem insensitive to their own needs and demands.  In their public appearances they demonstrate both their ignorance and emotional fragility.  This is the generation that needs ‘trigger warnings’ on all things academic and otherwise that might fracture their brittle countenances.  They now need to set aside ‘safe spaces’ where politically incorrect speech and other communications are barred. 

They abhor violence to such a degree that they do not hesitate to use it against others in order to diminish it in society.  And, of course, they are against all forms of discrimination, stereotyping, and bias, as long as it all conforms to their own peculiar notions of goodness and light.  They rail against McCarthyism blacklisting communists during early cold war years, but today they have no problem blacklisting distinguished Americans from speaking or even setting foot on their campuses.  These young narcissists already know it all to an extent that they stand ready to remake their schools by vetting their own administrations and professors.

Our campuses have long been recognized as havens of collectivist thought.  But now we seem to be entering into a new era of what may at best be described as the lunatics running the asylum.  The progressive administrators and professors have a conundrum on their hands.  Their half-baked and mini-minded spawn are actually putting into practice the proletarian putsches they have been carefully taught.  Since they have been abandoned by their elders, the salvation of the American university now lies in the hands of the remaining serious cohort of students who are there for an education from institutions that can again be made to invite, nurture, and honor all ideas that illuminate and advance the human condition.  No more blacklists about who can and cannot speak about what on campus.

Here is what The Atlantic had to say about ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’.

Happy Thanksgiving

Jo Ann and I wish all of our readers a happy Thanksgiving Day which we hope you are spending with people you love.  We give thanks that we can still give thanks in the manner of our choosing.

The denial of broad-based Muslim sentiment (updated 29nov15)

George Rebane

There is a politically dominant and longstanding narrative by the Left in America (and Europe) that the overwhelming fraction of the world’s Muslims have no intrinsic hatred of the west and America.  In the aggregate these Muslims are supposed to be peaceful and quite sanguine about the west, and they have no sympathy with the ragheads that are massacring everyone within reach while giving Islam a bad name.  Until they kill, they are to be viewed as any other cultural and/or ethnic population that has come to these shores and assimilated into the Americans next door.

Well, that narrative was proven wrong by the videos and surveys of the Arab street right after 9/11 and doubly so since that time.  (Trump claims we now have a video that shows Muslims on the New Jersey shore celebrating the burning World Trade Center towers before they came crashing down.)  The anti-western behavior of European Muslims in and out of their enclaves is a matter of record.  The polls surveying the sentiment of Muslims living in the west continually show that a majority support 1) violence against the west if it does not accept Islam, and 2) Muslims allowed to rule their enclaves under sharia while demanding concessions from the neighboring western communities on matters they hold disrespectful to Islam.  RR has reported on these survey results before.

Today the post-Paris news about Muslim sentiment in Europe continues to bear out that the ‘peaceful Muslims’ volubly support attacks by ISIS and other radical Islam organizations against the west.   To make the point Fox News showed chilling videos of young military age Muslims in Brussels sitting at an outdoor café and calmly telling a reporter that they and theirs wholeheartedly supported the Paris massacre declaring that such attacks are justified as long the west opposes the spread of Islam.

In the meantime over two out of three Americans think that Obama has a flawed foreign policy and is not doing enough to secure the country from radical Islam.  Our president is in terminal denial about the threat to America and the west, and has no intention whatsoever of changing his benign stance on Islam and its ‘religion of peace’.  His solution is to allow tens of thousands of unvetted Muslims into the country as quickly as possible to accelerate the Left's plan to fundamentally transform America.  And as with preventable global warming, the debate about the growing war between the civilizations in his mind is also over.

The Republicans want to bring this war to the attention of Americans in their election year campaigning.  But it turns out again and again that a catastrophically large body (most?) of our voting age citizens have little or no idea what is going on in the world.  They don’t know the middle east from Middle Earth.  They literally know nothing of American or world history.  Today it is cheap and saddening entertainment to stick a mike into someone’s face on a city sidewalk and ask him the simplest question about our government, history, American traditions, … .  When it comes time evaluate a candidate's statements about ANYTHING to do with public policy save promises to increase their entitlements, they are babes in the woods – totally unarmed between the ears.  Union dominated public schools have taken a toll on our body politic that today is literally beyond comprehension.

[29nov15 update]  Woke up this morning to an interesting NPR interview with five American Muslims in their twenties.  They all showed concern about how incidents like the recent Paris massacres affect relations with Muslims in this country.  None of them claimed that the jihadists were doing something that is foreign to Islam.  And none claimed that hatred of the west was unique to insignificant minorities in Islam.  On the contrary, they all seemed to agree that Islam is NOT a homogenous belief system or religion; that there are many kinds of Muslims with antipathies and interpretations of the Quran that range from the Wahhabis of the Arabian peninsula to moderates in America who barely practice their faith.  And they definitely agreed that ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Iran are part of Islam and practicing the more violent versions of their faith.  One young college graduate underlined this by saying it is “foolish” not to admit these large militant groups (and the nation of Iran) into the global Islamic community.

These reasonable sentiments and interpretations from practicing Muslims kinda knocks into a cocked hat the crap that liberals here and elsewhere have been preaching to the rest of us about their vast knowledge of what Islam really is.  But then we already knew of what they were full.

A more important takeaway from that interview corroborated the asymmetry of Islam vs Christianity.  One young lady attempted to describe the human bond that exists between Muslims and Christians by describing the aftermath of what happened after a devastating fire in their mosque.  Local Christian groups pitched in to help rebuild, and in the interval invited the Muslims to worship in their churches and fellowship halls.  Yes, that is not an unusual Christian response these days.  But what all of them seemed to have missed is that such an outreach is always one-sided.  How many Muslim congregations have invited Christians, whose churches have been burned by Islamic mobs, to worship in their mosques?  How many of those Muslims have offered to help rebuild the destroyed churches?

And here is some new information from columnist Mark Steyn on the Jersey shore celebrations.  H/T to reader for this heads up.

Sandbox - 22nov15

[The tragedies of Paris are many, and the immediate loss of life in that city may well be the least of them.  As readers know, through the years while countering great leftwing vilification, RR has heralded the Islam's scripturally commissioned invasion through colonization (Hijra).  The globalists now are using the raghead attacks in Europe to illustrate the reasons why Syrians and other mideasterners and Africans are fleeing their home countries, and that we in the west should welcome these people into our lands to establish beacheads for their kith and kin, and ultimately their horrific cultures.  To better understand the institutional and organizational details of what really is happening, please take time to watch these two short videos (here and here).  gjr]

The Other Paris Tragedy (addended)

George Rebane

[This is the linked and addended transcript to my regular KVMR commentary which will be broadcast after the evening news on Monday 23 November 2015.  Appended is a graphic detailing the chain (thick red arrows) of valid propositions forming a sane preamble for making preventable global warming public policies.  There is little hope that sanity will be a prerequisite to the UN's Agenda21 deliberations in Paris.]

The echoes of the most recent Islamist massacre of innocents in Paris will not have died down by the time that the latest preventable manmade global warming show opens its doors.  The UN’s conference on climate change, formally called the 21st Conference of the Parties or COP21, is slated to run from 30 November to 11 December in Le Bourget.  However, preconference activities will start on 20 November during which heads of state will meet to lay down the broad outlines of what policies will be agreed to during COP21.

For the proponents of preventable global warming, this conference culminates years of planning that is intended to finally launch a unified international thrust that is supposed to save the world from the loudly and widely predicted catastrophe that will befall us all sometime in the next 30 to 70 years.  In recent years the importance of the misnamed ‘climate change’ issue has declined in the public mind for a number of reasons, among them being that the ‘science’ cited to substantiate the dire predictions has suffered a number of material setbacks.

The Union leans Left

George Rebane

RR has long argued and demonstrated that the local Left is terribly out of touch with important happenings here and elsewhere.  One of their constant complaints is that The Union is so far biased to the Right in its editorial stance that it should be renamed The Tea Party Gazette.  Nothing could be further from the truth as documented by an ongoing audit by the Nevada County Republican Women Federated (NCRWF).

Members of the NCRWF leadership met on 16 November 2015 with Union publisher Jim Hemig and editor Brian Hamilton to present their most recent tranche of data from their audit of the newspaper’s editorial page contents – editorials, syndicated columns, submitted commentaries, political cartoons, and letters to the editor – which were published in the August-September timeframe.  The audit revealed that of the 329 pieces published, 140 espoused liberal views, 90 were conservative, and 99 were neutral.

Messrs Hemig and Hamilton have long held that their newspaper seeks to represent a balanced political perspective for our community, and they were reportedly surprised to learn that their actual editorial policy was skewed 61% - 39% in favor of leftwing submissions and ideas.

I must add my own surprise to that of The Union’s management.  While having long had a hunch that the paper had a liberal bent to it - that has always been corroborated by the public statements/talks by Hemig and Hamilton - I wrote that off as their being part and parcel of the progressives' preponderance in the news media in general.  (None of this, of course, has been noted or admitted by the Left whose position seems to be that if an outlet doesn’t continuously espouse the socialism of Marx, Engels, et al, then it has been co-opted by the corporatist Right.)

But the nagging question remains as to what specific local pressures exist to tilt the newspaper so markedly toward the left.  Other indicators of the paper’s disposition on this issue are its lax enforcement of its announced policy of a 30-day interval between publishing letters from any one correspondent.  Some frequent writers are definitely favored.  (My own infrequent letters are batting about 500 in this league for getting published.)  And there is a significant problem with the paper’s policy of letting a considerable time lapse between an issue raised in a column and publishing the responding letters.  Again, the Left is favored in this regard.

An illustration of this asymmetric policy is the 19nov15 letter from a Ms Angelica Niblock, an unabashed leftwinger, demonstrably ignorant, and a True Believer in preventable man-made, catastrophic global warming (PGW).  She takes the newspaper to task for having published the full page ad piece by Mr Frank Pinney making the case that ‘global warming is a hoax’ (more here).  She claims that the ad was disguised as an "authentic part"(sic!) of its editorial content, and that the newspaper should no longer publish pieces that are skeptical of man-made global warming.  Her main point is that exposing such ideas to public view is akin to printing statements that Negroes are inferior to white people. And moreover, that permitting such arguments skeptical of PGW in the public forum indicates that The Union does not “take its role in journalism seriously and make wise decisions when asked to print smut.”

Ms Niblock is not the only liberal who has recently demanded that The Union adhere to her higher principles of journalism and thereby institute a policy of proscribing conservative thought and ideas.  History records that the push to censor the other side in the media has been a constant and uniquely leftwing goal for decades.  Such proposals, exhortations, and admonitions continue at all levels in our country with such regularity that they can be taken as a litmus test for correctly identifying a person as a collectivist.

The First Amendment holds that in our republic all ideas should be exposed to public purview so that they may sway the thinking of its educated and informed citizenry who can then decide which ones will carry the day.

Let me finish by saying again that I appreciate our local newspaper’s role in binding and informing our little foothills community.  As a conservetarian I also acknowledge that The Union is a business and a private enterprise which can hold and promote whatever social and political views it sees fit to print.  I don’t want anyone to censor its work product, nor in response to the Niblocks of the world do I want it to censor itself as a purveyor of ideas.

Sandbox - 16nov15

[This sandbox is dedicated to the timely urgings of Mr William Tozer, Esq.  gjr]

Unperturbed, Obama stays the course

George Rebane

We woke up to President Obama’s news conference from the G20 meeting in Turkey.  Since last Friday’s Paris attacks the calls have intensified for our Community Organizer to face the reality of radical Islam expanding (see also ‘Wake up, Mr President’).  At the news conference even lamestream reporters were asking the president pointed questions about the effectiveness of his entrenched Mideast strategy, especially the one he is executing against the Islamic State (more here).  Obama gave each question an extended answer laced with generous dollops of pabulum that informed little but effectively ran out the clock.

What we took away from the president’s answers could be easily summarized as –

1. My strategy against ISIS continues to work and I have no intention of changing it, but now I will “intensify” it.

2. I’m already doing all that my critics are suggesting, except that I will not commit more ‘boots on the ground’ to make a difference.

3. If I put 50K troops into Iraq/Syria to defeat ISIS, then I’ll have to do the same if Al Qaeda starts acting up more in places like Yemen.  And that’s not a sustainable policy.

4. What I’m doing now in the Mideast is in concord with my security team and Pentagon’s military advisers.  There are no better ideas to implement.

5. And I’ll be damned if I will use the word ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic’ in any of these remarks, the closest you’ll get out of me is a reference to “ISIL’s caliphate”, so there.

Progressives et al on ISIS et al

"... if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."  Sun Tzu

George Rebane

It’s now hard to figure out whether Sanders and O’Malley are Hillary’s stooges or, more generously, her shills.  Last night’s Democratic debate firmly tossed their supposed contest for the nomination into that corner.  Denting Hillary’s image was definitely out of bounds, her opponents would only gently remind viewers that Hillary voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but did not touch her other scandals and faux pas – e.g. Russian reset, Benghazi, spraying classified emails across the world.  Anything that would cause people to doubt her ability to be commander-in-chief appeared to be off limits.

And as a Lucky Strike Extra, viewers were exposed to Sanders’ knowledge of the country’s economic history when he claimed that Eisenhower was a bigger socialist than he, since the top income tax tier was then at 90%.  Sanders is apparently unaware that the 90% rate was window dressing to mollify the masses, literally no one paid that rate because of the lavish exceptions, deductions, and write-offs (aka ‘loopholes) then available to the high earning cognoscenti.  But today that citation still makes good copy for the gullible gruberized.

Regarding Islamic terror and Friday’s attacks in Paris, the Democrats are having to turn themselves into lexicographic pretzels as they twist and turn when they describe and discuss their non-denominational ‘war on terror’.  The big idea to promote according to the Obama Doctrine is that ISIS and its sought after caliphate is not a reflection of Islam.  On the other hand Iran (the country that took us to the cleaners on the nuclear deal while it continues to vow our destruction and the defeat of western civilization) is not isolated from Islam, nor are the Palestinians, nor are the prominent Wahabi elements in the governments of the Arabian Peninsula, nor is the populous movement in Pakistan, nor …, but you get the idea.  All of them have the identical warm thoughts about the west, and the Great Satans - United States and Israel.  And Iran, now financially reconstituted, is the acknowledged leader of state sponsored Islamic terror around the world.

Led by the US, the west continues its la-la land lauding of Islam as the ‘religion of peace’ in the same breath pointing out that all the millions of Muslims in western countries have not strapped on explosive vests to detonate themselves in the midst of gathered infidels.  Never mind that Islamic terrorists are radicalized and constantly emerge from such 'peaceful communities' to join ISIS and/or launch their attacks in western lands.  As long as they don’t assemble en masse to blow themselves and us to bits, in the progressive mind they will forever remain the unassailable practitioners of peace and reason.  We may not even discuss, let alone join their faith to the horrific events that now punctuate our lives on every continent.

The NC BoS is non-partisan, really?

George Rebane

We have been told forever by the Left that our county’s Board of Supervisors is a non-partisan governing body.  No one believes it, especially our progressives, but the message must be repeated endlessly to the county’s light thinkers.  The existential fact is that the supes are all partisan and readily exhibit their individual ideologies during their terms of office.  I always get a kick out listening to someone argue that they are among the pure and untainted when they assess and evaluate social policies – ‘I don’t care much for politics’, ‘I’m not an ideologue; I make my decisions on the merits.’

Today we are gearing up to elect three new supervisors next year.  Nate Beason, our senior and three-term supervisor from District #1, will (sadly) not seek a fourth term.  His seat will be contested for by the very liberal Heidi Hall, and the (best that I can tell) left-center bike shop owner Duane Strawser.  This leaves a yawning spot for someone of a more conservatarian bent to also throw their hat in the ring.  Actually, someone obviously from the Right might do very well next November since there is a good chance that Hall and Strawser will then split the Left vote.  But as we all know, election season brings out the political chameleon in those seeking office. 

Mr Strawser may wrap himself in a new cloak for the coming year, and that will make things interesting.  I am not familiar with the man’s voting record during his turn on the Nevada City city council.  But given the perennial silly season that that elected body has enjoyed over the years (decades?), a more conservative candidate could make it hard for Strawser to conveniently tack starboard during the coming months.  More knowledgeable heads about the county’s local governments should weigh in on this possibility.

In any event, the Nevada County BoS slots are very political, and whoever fills them will determine how much the county will bend over to grab its ankles when the diktats come down from on high.  And in the worst case the supes may go on a regulatory binge to save us all again from climate change, chemical food additives, pedestrian safety, hate speech, various forms of marijuana, low cost housing, and fatty foods.  It has happened before, and today we are in a much weakened state when it comes to welcoming more of leviathan’s tender mercies into our lives.  Just look at the highly educated yokels demonstrating on our university campuses.

Scattershots – 11nov15 (updated 14nov15)

George Rebane

Today is Veterans’ Day, a national holiday with a bit of a convoluted history (here).  It started out as Armistice Day to honor those who served and fell in WW1.  Then through a series of congressional acts starting in 1954 it became a day to honor all veterans who served in the nation’s armed forces, and its observance was returned to 11 November.  Memorial Day is reserved, as it should be, for those who gave their "last full measure of devotion" to America.

My thoughts on this day also turn to how our military is now constituted as an ‘all-volunteer’ fighting force.  The bar to get into the services has been significantly raised so that many young men and women who might benefit from the experience will not qualify.   I side with those who believe that in a broadly franchised liberal democratic republic everyone who is able to contribute to the forceful defense of our nation should be required to man the ramparts – in short, I would like to see a new version of the draft returned, similar to the one that provided millions of our young, especially the men, with an irreplaceable coming-of-age institution.  Yes, it may be a less efficient way to defend our country, but having an all-volunteer professional military in its stead also comes with dangers known and unknown.

Last night’s Republican debate sponsored by Fox Business News and the WSJ set a new standard for how such events should be conducted.  The moderators - Neil Cavuto, Maria Bartiromo, Gerard Baker – showed everyone how professionals can and should draw out the substantive policies, beliefs, and backgrounds of the candidates.  The bookend to this debate was the last one by CNBC where the obviously leftwing moderators couldn’t outdo each other in their attempt to discredit the whole Republican field with questions like, ‘Senator A, in his recent campaign ad Mr B calls you an asshole, how do you respond to that?’  From the latest debate that gave ample time for candidates to speak, we learned the candidates’ positions on important issues focusing on the economy and the nation’s foreign policy.  This morning on countless blogs and media outlets you can read how these positions compare/contrast, and how well thought out they are at this stage of the campaign.  We will welcome more of this kind of debates.

IMHO progressives are bad news for the country in whatever form they express themselves.  The latest, of course, are the insane student demonstrations on our college and university campuses.  These young people and their useless professors are functional idiots who have to a large degree changed our centers for learning and new ideas into Orwellian enclaves where allowable thought and speech are today dictated by people who really should apply for tuition refunds because their schools failed to teach them anything, even in the lightweight majors they have attempted to study.  The Univ of Missouri situation has become the most recent posterchild of how students from union K-12 schools are now participating in the destruction of our institutions of higher education.  And don’t get me wrong, their politically correct and cowardly administrators and teachers are aiding and abetting the ongoing travesty.  We have to remember how many generations have been intellectually polluted since the Great Society vulture spread its wings over academe.  You can read a brief but insightful summary of these goings on in ‘Bonfire of the Academy’.

[Later]  And as more inquiry is devoted to the U of M affair, it appears that no one can provide any evidence for all the alleged race-based infractions that got the campus light thinkers agitated.  It turns out that even the report of the football team walking out en masse is wrong, only a few players refused to play if the resignation demands were not met.

Especially on this Veterans' Day, this video is worth watching.  (H/T to reader) 

[14nov15 update]  Friday the thirteenth in Paris – bad omen.  ISIS, Obama’s JV team of terrorists, is operating freely on three continents, and most freely in western countries with liberal democratic societies.  Yesterday’s attacks in the City of Lights is a definite game changer, and will also affect attitudes about the hordes of illegal Muslim migrants now swarming across Europe’s borders.  My irritation continues with the know-nothing journalists who still continue to call this the ‘war on terror’ of which it is nothing of the kind – as before, WW2 was not a ‘war on the mechanized division’.  For a broader view about the portents for Europe and perhaps America, I direct your attention to this Stratfor report – ‘What to Expect After the Nov. 13 Paris Attacks’.

Catalonia yearns for independence

George Rebane

So contrary to the progressives’ push for a global leviathan are the yearnings of uncounted peoples each of whom share a common language, faith, heritage, traditions, and history.  The collectivist mind does not understand that such people above all want self-determination and independence, and a corner of the world in which they can be with their own kind.  It isn’t that each of these cohorts thinks that they are better than the others or that they harbor hatred for people who are different, but it is that they want to live their daily lives among neighbors they know, neighbors whose social behavior they can reliably predict, neighbors with whom they can celebrate their history and with whose children they can educate and raise their own in a manner that upholds and values their origins and the legacy of their ancestors.

Catalonia forms the eastern part of Spain with Barcelona as its capital.  Its 7.5 million Catalans have a long history of being autonomous, semi-autonomous, and a forcibly integrated part of other empires.  Through it all the Catalans have retained and practiced their own culture and today see themselves as distinct and wish to separate from the central government of Spain.  In spite of strong opposition by Madrid, several political initiatives are again being set in motion to move Catalonia toward complete independence.  (more here, here, and here)

The Catalans are joined by numerous other ethnic peoples on all continents who seek their roots and their own place in the sun.  In Europe alone there are activist movements in 25 countries to separate and declare their autonomy (more here).   Here in the United States we have outlined a number of movements of various people who no longer believe that the current political map of the country serves in the best interest of the several ethnic, cultural, and political groupings of Americans.  To all these yearnings our leftwing central planners and their gruberized constituency are totally blind.  Their fantasy is the opposite of the existential global yearnings.  They seek instead to pursue the objectives of UN’s Agenda 21 and work for a unified and homogenized world order under one central government that shares all the important aspects of Marxist-Leninist thought for how humanity should organize itself.

It is a sad commentary that here in the land of the free and home of the brave, every day fewer Americans are able to perceive these massive and longstanding tensions as our elites trumpet the benefits of an Orwellian future through their eagerly compliant lamestream outlets.  Those of us who still care to preserve some of that which the Founders left us advocate for separations like the formation of Northern California (nee State of Jefferson).  So let us wish the Catalans success in their ongoing efforts to retrieve and live in their own sovereign nation-state.

RR Glossary & Semantics - V9nov15

George Rebane

From time to time RR's Glossary & Semantics is updated to provide readers with the more precise definitions of words that I use in my scribblings.  Since the information carrying capacity of English is decreasing, due primarily to run amok political correctness and the increase in national dumbth, such a glossary becomes necessary when we join to slice, dice, and debate complex issues and current events.  The latest version of this post may always be accessed from the top right panel of this website, and the pdf of the document itself is available here -  Download RR Glossary&Semantics_v190206

Frank Pinney on Preventable Global Warming

George Rebane

Kudos to Mr Frank Pinney for placing a full page 'Paid Advertisement' essay on the PGW hoax in the 9nov15 Union.  He summarizes in one place extensive data and information (covered here and on other regional blogs over the years) into one piece that also has a distinctly local flavor to it.  Its appearance now is timely due to the UN Climate Change Convention scheduled in Paris for later this month.  The figure below is copied from the online edition of The Union.  Click on it to enlarge and use the magnifying glass and/or 'Ctrl +' to further enlarge for comfortable reading.

‘Put down your arms, resistance is futile!’

George Rebane

I sent the following letter to The Union after reading the latest ‘resistance is futile’ offering from a well-meaning neighbor in Auburn.

***

Mr Gregg Littell’s thoughtful 7nov15 piece, ‘The idea of 'armed rebellion' in the U.S. is ludicrous’, disturbs on several counts.  First and foremost his arguments ignore historical and ongoing realities.  More distressingly he paints a hopeless picture for humanity since tyranny is the most easily attainable and stable form of governance known – tyrannies replace tyrannies ad nauseum.  With an armed populace the American Revolution showed humanity how it could answer ‘Can man govern himself?’ with a resounding YES!

Today, after decades of meticulous preparation, the American leviathan is in rapid ascent toward global governance with half of us applauding its progress.  Mr Littell’s hopeless analysis of the futility of armed resistance is contradicted by all autocratic governments, joined now by America, that acknowledge disarming its citizens is the sine qua non necessary and sufficient precondition to a centrally planned state with a compliant population.  Ultimately America’s freedoms will be reinstated and preserved by a newly educated citizenry that rejects a carefully crafted imperious America, and instead sees a truly exceptional nation that has delivered by far the most wealth, enlightenment, and hope to the world’s poor and oppressed.  My blog has a more complete response to Mr Littell’s counsel. 

 ***

Of course there is much more to be said about the ‘futility notion’, and RR readers and I have pretty well covered the waterfront on these pages over the last eight years.  The Union’s 200-word letter limit didn’t allow me to add the following for their readers which here I summarize in a painfully abbreviated set of points.  Hopefully our learned and well-read readers can recall the appropriately extended arguments.

Sandbox - 6nov15

[While Dr Ben Carson's political fate is being dissected on the 1nov15 sandbox, readers wishing to pursue other threads may now start fresh with sharing their insights on issues yet to be uncovered, or maybe not, for there are always a few dead horses out there who can do with another lash or two.  gjr]

On the way to our Uncommon Core

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 November 2015.]

America’s K-12 education has suffered hard times for over forty years.  Tons of money have been blown into the winds, and all kinds of state and federal programs have been tried to improve the amount our kids learn and then retain after high school.  The results have been disappointing to say the least, and an unmitigated disaster when we look at our standing in the competitive global marketplace.

The latest fix for getting our young people educated is Common Core, a new educational program that everyone has heard about yet few people understand.  Common Core is supposed to be a set of teaching, knowledge achievement, and testing standards that is going to elevate educational performance to a new uniform and high level across the country.  These standards were not designed to define the details of curriculum.  But they turned out to be so confusing that most school districts trying to implement them had so many problems developing curriculum, that they started copying from those few districts which looked like they had cracked the curriculum code.  But developing compliant curricula was just the beginning of what has now turned into a trail of tears in the attempt to get all 50 states on the same educational page with uniformly executed standards and tests.

When the federal government promised to fund some start-up costs, 45 states initially decided to adopt the new standard.  And when Washington started giving money to districts they thought were correctly implementing Common Core, it quickly promised to become a de facto federal standard.  A number of states did not like this, especially as it became clear that implementing Common Core would require a large effort to train teachers to teach the new curriculum, then to test the students with tests that were expensive and still not uniform, and finally to establish a new layer of liaison with other districts and the federal bureaucracy to make sure that your school district was doing it right.

The response to date has been that many states have withdrawn from Common Core in ways ranging from complete abandonment, through drafting their own revisions, to opting out of specific components such as the uniform testing program.  In short, Common Core has delivered anything but its intended basis for a common curriculum and testing standards that span the K-12 grades.  And more states continue to declare that they are rejecting additional features of Common Core.  In some states the very name ‘Common Core’ has become such a toxic political issue that its use is officially banned, with people referring to it simply as “higher standards”. (more here)

But the real bombshell is yet to come as the bumpy introduction of Common Core continues.  This administration has decided to join with progressive activists to change even more radically the face of education.  According to the new thinking, it turns out that all modern education has been based on a wrong premise – simply too much emphasis has been placed on merit, and too much effort has been expended to test and determine levels of our students’ meritorious achievement. 

Last month President Obama led the way when he ‘recommended limiting the amount of time students spend on testing, stating that excessive testing “takes the joy out of teaching and learning.”’  So what kind of encouragement does this give to school districts still attempting to come up with tests that uniformly measure coast-to-coast student performance?

Taking up the president’s challenge, today progressive activists like lawyer Erica Etelson present a much more radical argument that describes ‘How the Myth of Meritocracy ruins students’ and society.  According to this theory, the very notion of merit leads to all the social ills of discrimination and resulting inequality in everything from wealth, income, jobs, self-esteem, social standing, …, you get the idea.   And for that reason and that alone, schools should no longer test and differentiate on the basis of learning achievement and intellectual merit.

In this new post-Common Core world, schools would be redesigned to remove discomfiting challenges, and return education to some bygone era filled with the joy of teaching and learning of which President Obama spoke.  The result, according to Ms Etelson would be a society in which wealth and achievement is distributed equally to everyone according to their need.  Now where have we heard that before?

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.

Ruminations – 4nov15 (updated 9nov15)

"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain

George Rebane

NPR reported this morning that conservatives across the country had a great night celebrating Republican and Tea Party victories in yesterday’s elections.  Meanwhile, the know-nothing local Left continues its happy dancing that everything to the right of socialism is doomed, and soon we’ll all be together in that Great Global Collective where everything is finally equal.  (more here)

In ‘The Next Climate Scandal’ Holman Jenkins reports that NOAA is refusing to turn over emails involved in its last doctoring of temperature data that had to massaged for the 16th time in order to hide the insults to which it has been subjected in order for it to confess the politically mandated global warming in preparation for the upcoming Paris Hysteria Fest.  Meanwhile, a body of international scientists are predicting a new cooling epoch (here), as countries across the world are busy adjusting upward their local temperature logs to better support the foregone conclusion from Paris, and argue how much they have been and will be damaged by the politically correct higher temperatures. (more here)  This circus promises to be extraordinary in its scope and demanded remediations. 

SEIU, your favorite sleazebag public employees union, suffered a defeat in Washington state.  Their latest overreach was to gather home healthcare workers into their avaricious bosom, demanding dues for negotiating pay scales which compensate some of these workers.  This worked for a while until the Supreme Court said that was violation of the First Amendment, and the workers could quit SEIU any time they wanted.  Well, SEIU then fought against the workers being informed of their newly granted rights.  When that didn’t work and the word got out, more than 50% of the workers immediately dropped out and lent their data to the latest study about how fast people leave unions when they have a choice.  (more here)

[6nov15 update]  Did you notice that the leftwing politicians are not picking up ‘Big Oil’s Windfall Losses’?  Along with the 6nov15 WSJ, I am reminded of the lamestream's silence surrounding the massive pullback in the oil and gas industry with thousands of job losses, cancelled projects, plummeting share prices, and huge reductions and even losses in profits.  According to progressives' received wisdom, such things were not supposed to happen to an industry that is the embodiment of evil and really has control of the world.

Obama’s refusal to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built on his watch was the termination of a 7+ year game of political sleazeball.  The reasons given were so out of the park with reality that in my mind the occasion was another milestone on this administration’s rogue road to maximally damage the United States.   EVERYTHING this man and his minions have done (and refused to do) has been exactly 180 out of what would have benefitted America and Americans.  I cannot think of a single exception.  If we argue that his actions are the result of inexperience and being inept, then we should expect that at least one thing with his name on it would have accidentally been of benefit to the country.  But since that is not the case, simple probabilistics advises that the man had in mind to cause exactly the damage that we have witnessed and continue to bear.  January 2017 cannot arrive quickly enough.

[8nov15 update]  The travesty that is Obamacare continues on many fronts.  The latest news of the collapse of more than half of the states’ insurance exchanges is creating chaos for hundreds of thousands of Americans who believed in the crap government ladled out about the national healthcare program.  The reality is that people are having their policies canceled, some cancer patients with tragic consequences since their care hospitals only admitted them into treatments if covered by Obamacare.  The alternatives for these people now remain in the greatly diminished private healthcare market.  But the other revealing aspect of this latest of Obamacare failures is that the leftwing lamestream is completely silent on the matter – for them and their readers (some of whom comment here) this catastrophe never happened, and the Kool-Aid keeps flowing from the administration.

[9nov15 update]  Bernie Sanders is a certifiable idiot - evidence here.

Sandbox - 1nov15

[Time for some fresh sand. I'm concerned that we don't have a viable declared candidate in Nevada County's District #1 to oppose Ms Heidi Hall for Supervisor. Anyone have any ideas? gjr]