Rebane's Ruminations

Racialism Rising

George Rebane

Racialism – the ideology, based on a heightened consciousness of the race of others, that promotes racial divisions and strife to hasten the breakdown of large sovereign nation-states on the road to a unified global world order.

In America there should be as little room for racism as for racialism.  We Americans should equally reject racism and racialism.  In recent years racialism has been on the rise, and is now the new rallying cry for those who want to fundamentally transform America.  In a land as large as ours there will always be some few who will exhibit their racism.  But our overall progress toward racial equality in the last decades has been under-reported as author and Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recently highlighted (here) to counter the current spate of racialist events and lamestream hysteria (see also ‘Kneeing Our National Anthem’).

Most people agree on the various definitions of racism as including “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement”. (more here)

But racialism is a useful term the definition of which is still in flux.  Many/most dictionaries take the lazy way out and define racism and racialism as being synonymous, thus wasting the label for a useful semantic in our language.  Thoughtful authors have attempted to distinguish between the two words without making much headway.  An example of this in a 2015 issue of HuffPost is Peter Schuck’s ‘Racism and Racialism Are Different’.  Therein he does the best he can with the “widespread confusion between racism, which is hostility to blacks based on their supposed inferiority, and what I call racialism, which is a heightened consciousness of the race of others.”

With my own more robust definition of racialism, I hope to avoid ambiguity and inform my readers of how I will use the term.

Those who keep up with America’s changing socio-political landscape know well that the case against racism has been well made between our shores, yet the case against racialism is muted and has been suppressed.  Actually, more than that; there are prominent political factions for whom racialism is a fundamental component of their political toolkit.

I am of the school that holds former President Barack Obama to be the pre-eminent racialist of our times, a job at which he excels and still champions.  As cultural Marxists (q.v.), he and his already realized at the turn of the millennium that racialism had been a fallow field that needed cultivation.  The history of Obama’s rising to the occasion in the ascent of his own career is meticulously detailed in the recently published dispassionate biography – Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama - by Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Garrow which is competently reviewed (here) by H.A. Scott Trask in the October 2017 issue of Chronicles.  Therein Garrow recounts and documents Obama’s own racial sensitivities in his early desire to be seen as a racially uncompromised black, even to the point of shedding his first true love – Sheila Myoshi, a multi-racial lady deemed too white to support his auto-identified “destiny” to become America’s first ‘black president’. Obama’s subsequent hitching with Michelle, who in her own words is “as black as it gets”, gave him the needed optics to climb the South Chicago political ladder.   (“If I’m going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”)

As Obama was well on his way to the Democratic candidacy and then on to be elected in 2008, prominent politicians of both parties opined that the man’s success was based on the careful nurture of his race and his racialism.  (Democrat Gerraldine Ferraro, a Clinton backer, paid with her political life for stating the obvious, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.  He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”)

That racialism is now the political tool of choice for the Left is also evident on the grassroots level if we can use the recorded sentiments of local liberals.  When I recently brought up Obama’s race-based ascent to the presidency, using the SBA set-aside Section 8 metaphor, I was immediately branded as a racist for that argument in another comment thread debating the qualifications of recent presidents.  A casual perusal of these pages quickly reveals that most leftwing RR readers are racialists, furiously gleaning the ideological harvests for any remnant of potential racial bias, thereby alleging non-existent schisms in the face of the obvious chasm which separates our widely disparate views about the coming world order.

As a coda, I want to point my readers to an excellent Other Voices commentary on racialism – ‘Deliberate Turmoil and Chaos at Every Turn’ – by Frank Chuck in the 30sep17 Union.  The man does a good job reflecting the political sentiments of many of us in this community, and, I suspect, more multitudes across our country.

Sandbox – 29sep17

[Is gerrymandering bad for a representative democracy?  Many people, including me, think so.  Thoughts? (more here and here)  gjr]

Tax Policy Noodlings

George Rebane

The newly proposed GOP tax cut has everyone talking.  A couple of its main features are supposed to include switching from sequential taxing to concurrent taxing of earnings.  Also discussed is the removal of certain deductions like mortgage interest paid from taxable earnings.  I was interested in the impact of these two policy changes so I pushed a few squigglies, and I’ll share with you here some of the results without taking you through the weeds – BTW, nothing higher than your high school algebra is required to derive these formulas.

In sequential taxing, the taxing jurisdictions calculate the taxes due in sequence, the later jurisdictions applying their tax rate to the remaining earnings after you’ve paid the earlier jurisdictions.  As an example, say, jurisdiction J1 (e.g. California) taxes at rate r₁, and J2 (e.g. the feds) then tax the remainder at rate r₂.  The overall tax rate r_S  you pay on earnings E is given in formula (1) in the panel below.

In concurrent taxing, the jurisdictions all compute their tax take on your taxable earnings E.  The overall tax rate r_C you pay is then given in formula (2) above.  This rate is always higher than the overall rate for sequential taxing, and the switch from sequential to concurrent is an effective tax increase R_SC given by formula (3).

Say, that r₁ = 0.1 (10%) and r₂ = 0.2.  Then from formula (1) r_S  = 1 – (1 – 0.1)(1 – 0.2) = 0.28 = 28%.  And similarly, from formula (2) r_C  = 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3 = 30%.  From (3) we calculate the increase in effective tax rate as 0.1*0.2/(0.1 + 0.2 - 0.1*0.2) = 0.0714 = 7.14%.

For calculating the effective tax rate for deductions, assume that to compute your taxable earnings you can deduct a fraction f of your earnings E before applying the relevant tax rate r.  Then your effective tax rate r_f  is given by formula (4).  Now suppose that a deduction, say Δf, is no longer allowed.  This reduces the fractional amount of E you can deduct to (f – Δf).  Your effective tax rate is now given by formula (5).  Finally, the percentage of your tax increase R_fΔf through the denial of such a deduction is given by formula (6).

As an example, let f = 0.35 = 35% and Δf = 0.25, then R_fΔf  = 0.25/(1 – 0.35) = 0.385 = 38.5%.

You may want to enter the formulas into a spread sheet and play with the numbers to understand the real damage that such tax policy changes will deliver.

Ruminations – 27sep17 (updated 1oct17)

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today. - Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

Canada, the beloved of anti-American liberals, “has an urgent message for immigrants in the US fearing deportation: Don’t count on us for refuge.”  The reality of unmitigated migration of illegal aliens impacts smaller countries sooner, but the eventual impact on larger countries is no different, only delayed.  (more here)

The (guess who) innumerates of the land are again enraged that those who pay the lion’s share of government revenues will get the biggest dollar reduction in their taxes under the proposed tax reforms.  Their solution?  Only those who pay little or no taxes should benefit.  The ones who hire those who can or will work should continue paying at least what they pay now, maybe more.

Keep an eye on how government(s) will keep their ever-watchful eye on big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook.  Besides providing their well-known services, such companies are also leading technology innovators as they seek to expand their markets.  Their increasing regulatory burdens will definitely modify how they game tomorrow’s ‘system’, and don’t bet it will be to the benefit of the rest of us.  Recall ‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.’

Christian churches are becoming more frequent scenes of violence as the latest Tennessee church shootings underline.  In some religious communities, e.g. Islam, mass killings in their places of worship are now a common feature.  In the US, security consultants advise churches “organize security committees and make other suggestions they believe will lessen the risk of attack. That can include installing surveillance cameras, hiring armed guards or allowing members who are police officers or trained, licensed civilians to carry concealed handguns.”  Modern times. (more here)

[29sep17 update]  Nevada City, that hotbed of progressive sentiment and thought, has again determined that wireless is evil.  ‘We can’t let the first cell tower in, because other wireless service providers would soon follow.’  Oh my!  And then there’s their science argument – all EM frequencies are bad no matter their strength – substantiated in the same vein as their embrace of consensus global warming science.  Other rural communities in this 21^st century would welcome and do everything possible to increase their town’s connectivity as a mainstay of commercial activity, development, and general prosperity – but not the unfunded People’s Commune of Nevada City.

SCOTUS is about to pull the plug on mandated contributions to the Democratic Party when it rules on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, who today are forced to contribute to party coffers and candidates through their government employee unions through mandatory payment of ‘dues’.  Those unions supply the major monies to support all manner of socialist causes in the country.  Justice Gorsuch’s advent on the court will continue the work that the late Justice Scalia started to let government workers decide their union memberships.

And speaking of Justice Gorsuch, he is now the latest raison d’hysterie for our great moral milepost Sen Chuckie.  It seems that the justice gave a speech to a conservative group in the Trump International Hotel down the street from the White House, which to the lefties is clear evidence of pernicious portent of SCOTUS going rogue – and who knows, it may even have a Russian connection.  I can’t find many ruffled feathers about the years-long and obvious corruption surrounding Dem luminaries like DiFi, Mad Max, and Principled Pelosi.  (I can already hear the cries from our leftwingers, ‘What corruption, where?!’)

[1oct17 update]  Notice all the rage on the lamestream to convince their audiences that the federal government 1) is responsible for holding every American harmless in the face of natural disasters, 2) must immediately provide succor and remedies for any and all damage and injuries, and 3) President Trump, since assuming office, is the first president to have degraded federal response agencies to a level that his belated and niggardly relief efforts are totally insufficient to provide Puerto Rico any benefit.  And, truth be told, he did all this because he is a racist, since Puerto Rico is primarily a Latino territory.

Review President Trump’s assessment of the one critical Puerto Rican mayor (out of over a thousand) the lamestream dug up to excoriate him and his administration in light of this Puerto Rican CEO who has been on the scene for years – The head of an international engineering firm in Puerto Rico said in an editorial Saturday that when the time came to send 50 of his engineers to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, he bypassed local officials and went straight to FEMA.  The reason, said Jorge Rodriguez, the CEO of PACIV, in an editorial in the New York Post, is that “for the last 30 years, the Puerto Rican government has been completely inept at handling regular societal needs, so I just don’t see it functioning in a crisis like this one.”…“Even before the hurricane hit, water and power systems were already broken. And our $118 billion debt crisis is a result of government corruption and mismanagement.” (more here)  Culture counts.

Scattershots – 26sep17 (updated 1oct17)

Government is a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory. – Max Weber, progressive economist and co-founder of sociology.

George Rebane

In ‘Rule of law or mob rule’, appearing in the 26sep17 Union, Ms Linda Erdmann presents clear and cogent arguments of how ‘presentism’ has uniformly infected the liberal mind in its reinterpretation of history.  In the study of history, presentism is the application of contemporary moral judgments and world views to those of the past.  In her commentary Erdmann correctly and forcefully reminds us that today presentism “is a virus spreading across college campuses and into other areas of society.”

That local liberals are lightly read was again confirmed in an email I received from one of those worthies (an avid RR reader and former commenter) who exhorted KVMR to drop my regular commentary for the reason (gasp!) that I exhibited “mental illness” in again identifying former President Barack Obama as having been elected primarily because of his mixed race.  Apparently this individual’s awareness of national goings on is so limited that the thinks I’m the first person to draw that “disgusting” conclusion, when in fact it has been in the public dialogue since Obama was first elected – so proposed by conservative commentators and strongly rejected by their progressive counterparts.  As evidenced by their comments over the years, our right-leaning readers do not seem to restrict themselves to such narrow channels of input as does our politically correct cohort, many of whom have over the years been equally surprised by RR’s commentaries.

You can go to jail in America for handing out pamphlets, so reports Jacob Sullum in the Nov2017 issue of Reason.  That’s what happened to Keith Wood in Mecosta County, Michigan for peacefully handing out pamphlets on public property that argued “jurors have a right and a responsibility to judge the law as well as the facts, which might lead them to acquit a technically guilty defendant in the interest of justice.”  The man was tried and sent to jail for eight weekends, fined $545, forced to do 120 community service, and spend six months on probation.

[1oct17 update]  According to a Philadelphia elections official, hundreds of individuals who are not U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Philadelphia and nearly half of them voted in past elections. Since 2006, 317 registered voters have contacted the City Commissioners, which oversees Philadelphia elections, asking that their registrations be canceled because they are not citizens. … Philly.com reported that many of them registered while either applying for or renewing their driver’s licenses. All applicants were offered the option to register to vote even after providing documentation to DMV officials that although they were in the country legally, they were not citizens. (more here)

Now if you think that this auto-registration happened only in Philadelphia, I have a great landmark bridge for sale that might interest you.

Deflected Dialogue Redux

George Rebane

Gentle reader, we again return to RR’s department of poetry.  For the new to these pages, this is part of our cultural outreach that emphasizes the ‘rhyme’ part of our overall Rhyme and Reason offerings.  Actually, today we sample a reprise of an earlier poem for an earlier time entitled Deflected Dialogue –Upon reflection, it turns out that the times have not changed all that much for certain factions of our political spectrum.  Hence we are able present for your edification, Deflected Dialogue Redux -

Kneeing Our National Anthem (updated 27sep17)

George Rebane

More and more NFL players, owners, and managers started showing their disrespect for one of our nation’s most hallowed totems – The Star-Spangled Banner.  They chose to do this for a number of political reasons starting with protesting alleged police brutality.  And in doing so they have the temerity to claim that their acts of disrespect are not unpatriotic but intended to show “unity”.  That’s bullshit.

Whatever their sentiments are about civil rights violations and governments’ overreach, they have many other ways (e.g. a protest patch on their uniforms) to exhibit their feelings that need not desecrate the totems of our unique and special nation; hallowed symbols that have gathered Americans for generations to visibly demonstrate to each other that ‘e pluribus unum’ works and is the underlying rationale for living civil and productive lives together.  And in such unseemly public acts these people also dishonor those many who have given life and limb to defend and preserve those symbols of our nation.

If these people – ungrateful millionaires all - choose such overt and crass actions to demonstrate their unity, then to me and mine they have come together to achieve different ends through means neither of which I condone nor can unite.  When they knee our national anthem, they are simply cranking another notch ratcheting toward our Great Divide.

[27sep17 update]  Jason Riley in the 27sep17 WSJ (here) covers today’s national anthem brouhaha, and brings up a couple of points with which I happened to agree and did not include in the above.  As a youngster, Riley’s Jehovah’s Witness religious teachings did not allow him to salute the flag or honor our national anthem, which he first started doing as a teenager when he left that church.  JWs were often persecuted (beyond shunning) by their neighbors for these omissions which highlighted their different beliefs.

A relevant 1943 SCOTUS ruling stated that government or any of its agencies (e.g. public schools) forcing someone to salute the flag was unconstitutional.  More cogently, the court held that “saluting the flag is a form of utterance and that the right to not speak is as equally protected under the First Amendment as the right to free speech.” (emphasis mine) And “to believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”

Now critical minds will understand the difference between public enforcement and enforcement of private sector policies of which the kneeling athletes are in violation.  And, of course, all of us are free to shun anyone on any grounds as we please.  (At least we had that freedom during the progressives’ bad old days; today things are not so simple anymore.)  We don’t have to watch them play or buy their sponsors’ products.  As I stated above, I and mine are of a mind to do exactly that with anyone who disses the good ol’ US of A.

In the end, “team owners and NFL officials will have to decide whether to continue indulging such behavior on company time, but the larger question is whether what is being protested has some basis in reality beyond anecdotes and viral videos on social media.”  And here Riley points out the most ludicrous part of the current kneeing epidemic – their putative casus belli, as I pointed out above, is existentially bullshit.

Why?  Because all available data from national and regional police databases show that police-involved shootings have dropped drastically in the last decades while the allegedly afflicted populations have grown enormously.  Riley quotes the relevant stats, and correctly concludes – “An increase in press coverage of police shootings isn’t the same thing as an increase in police shootings.”

Hijacking Religion and Delivering the Votes

George Rebane

On the 23sep17 Union’s op-ed page there is a quarter page ad taken out by an outfit calling itself the Earth Justice Ministries.  From their own words (here) it appears that the EJM is a leftwing organization of progressives appealing to people of faith, mainly Christians, to join in the progressive agenda through the embrace of, you guessed it, social justice and sustainability.  The organization is geared to appeal to the lightly read who have no idea that progressives promote the long-established agenda of Cultural Marxism (here and here) today advancing under the new banner of Agenda21 and its metastasized ICLEIs (q.v.).  The hopeful nebbishes who come to support the EJM have no idea that the ‘religion’ of progressives is a secular humanism that barely tolerates the opiate of the masses.

While claiming to work for “the transformation of the world”, EJM cannot start to ‘fundamentally transform America’ within the current sentiments of an educated and knowledgeable electorate.  Such an electorate must first be diluted, and this requires the addition of legions of unassimilated illegal aliens and double dummies which our already transformed educational system pumps out by the millions every year.

The EJM ad in Nevada County exhorts the reader to contact their MOCs to prevent the scheduled termination of Obama’s DACA next spring.  They position the ad as another ‘resist Trump’ piece in the “clean passage” of the new Dream Act of 2017.  This legislation is needed “to protect our young and to resist attempts to target immigrants.”  Otherwise we will be headed for a redux of the Nazi Holocaust V2.0 right here in America.

This connection is made in the ad by reprinting Rev Martin Niemöller’s famous, “First they came for the communists, …, then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.”  Making this connection between Nazis and today’s American conservatives and libertarians is a particularly insidious piece of work in their composition, which nevertheless exposes the real ideology and purpose of their organization.

Using the Alinsky ‘accuse them of your sins first’ paradigm, progressives indict the classical liberals of seeking to turn America into a centrally controlled authoritarian state.  Nothing in the historical record or present-day initiatives supports this.  But with the ever-ignorant, the Alinsky approach is almost foolproof, and has an enviable record of success in the spread of Cultural Marxism.

As if by serendipity, in the same issue of The Union we have the editorial ‘Ready to Vote’ contributed by the newspaper’s Editorial Board.  In there the paper’s sentiments about urging the ignorant and ill-prepared to vote are presented.  The piece recounts the recent presentation by California SecState Alex Padilla urging 16 and 17 year-olds to register to vote so that they automatically are eligible when they turn 18.  RR has a consistent record of covering the intellectual development of our youth, and by all measures that record is not pretty.  As the SecState noted, the 18-25 age group is the state’s largest voting block made up of Millennials and iGeners (q.v.).  The Union then asks, “Imagine if this age group voted as religiously as retirees. What shape would our county, state and nation take if that occurred?” 

The editorial concludes with its own answer, “Picture that — an unregistered 18-year-old arriving at a vote center on election day. That person registers to vote on the spot and casts his or her first ballot within moments, participating in a fundamental act that helps make our country an amazing place to live. … No complaints here.”

Picture that indeed.

Scattershots – 20sep17 (updated 22sep17)

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. - Christopher Hitchens

George Rebane

Cindy Hren, local student and purveyor of things constitutional, published a refresher on the form of our government in the 17feb17 Union (here and here).  Then as if by clockwork, several embarrassingly (but not to them) ignorant progressives lit off against Ms Hren, displaying their intellect in all available glory.  Today she answers her critics (here) and attempts to shed some light into the dark corners of their minds.

RR has extensively documented the decline of the Millennials and now the iGeners in the paucity of their knowledge bases and their ability to manage critical thought.  The Left has, of course, abetted their own ignorance of these multi-decadal developments by accusing any messenger of such news as sufferers of bigotry, racism, xx-phobias, up to and including the heartbreak of psoriasis.  Today we receive further and ongoing confirmation of these generational deficits from none other than the left-leaning policy analysis Brookings Institution.  They have completed and published a “survey showing that American college students have no clue what the First Amendment means.”  Brookings’ author of the survey, Dr John Villasenor, concludes, “Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on US campuses.”  (more here)

‘Trump Shock at Turtle Bay’, so heralds the 20sep17 WSJ the president’s UN speech.  In reading our president’s words, I find myself among the celebrants of someone finally cutting the bullshit in that longstanding and ineffective international body where the same has reigned supreme for generations.  The speech also highlights the legions of media outlets in the extremis of Trump Derangement Syndrome that have quoted out of context parts of his speech – ‘Trump vows we have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea’ - and are enraged at the president’s view that a prudent nations-serving globalism is possible while still maintaining the Westphalian world order.  Thus continue to flare the fanned fires of fake news.

[22sep17 update]  Do nothing Republicans beware!

Occam’s Razor restated by the late “slashing polemicist” Christopher Hitchens reads, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”  I have always agreed with Hitchens’ principle here, although it is not always easy to apply in the public forum, especially in today’s era of the uncritical consumption of fake news.  Occam’s original version has long served as one of the stout legs on which science has made great strides - ‘Given two theories which explain all the known facts, embrace the simpler of the two.’  Falsification, the other leg, is even more persuasive, ‘If a proposed theory does not contain the clear elements that enable its own falsification, then it is religion and not science.’

HuffPost, the unabashedly elitist leftwing outlet, has been losing readers in droves and is desperately attempting to rebrand itself.  It can’t be that the younger set is getting smarter, as we have presented here, there is too much evidence countering that.  It must be the older leftwingers getting smarter as they age, and have now the perspective of deciding what works and what doesn’t.   Well, at least HuffPost’s new management is admitting what most critical thinkers have known for years.  (more here)

‘Right to Work Isn’t Theft’ - Union hubris has hit new heights recently with their suits against ‘right to work’ states arguing that the government is violating the Constitution’s takings clause.  How’s that?!  Well, the buggers have taken it for granted that the money in workers’ pockets that could go for union dues is actually already theirs, and laws that let workers decide how they want to spend their earnings are, in effect, taking what innately does and should belong to unions.  That position is so ludicrous that state supreme courts have thrown out the suits with rulings that such arguments are “fatally unsupported and lacking in merit”, dunning the lower courts’ rulings as “not merely imprudent, but profoundly legally incorrect.”

The Left’s panic over Graham-Cassidy’s latest GOP attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare is producing fake news bereft of facts by the ton.  Relate what’s happening here to the above comments about HuffPost and Occam’s Razor restated.  (more here)

Sandbox - 20sep17

[We just returned from a visit to the east coast upon which I will report shortly.  Apologies for the sand getting a little putrid with all the internecine tete-a-tetes going after each other's morals, character, mental acumen, aboriginal ethnicities, and added divers factors too numerous to mention.  In any event, here's something I'd like to see our liberal readers consolidate into their more comprehensive worldview - Trump's political flip-flops (aka progressives' "lies") compared to those of ALL other leaders of sovereign nation-states.  Start here with Angela Merkel.  gjr]

Dershowitz Defines Dangers

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 September 2017.]

Selectively celebrated and nationally prominent attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz has become a familiar advocate of divers, sometimes conflicting, causes over the last few decades.  The country’s most prominent secular Jew has defended the likes of Patty Hearst, Mike Tyson, and O.J. Simpson.  On the political side Dershowitz is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive and a staunch Democrat, even acting as king-maker in the party.  His support for Hillary, then Barack, then again Hillary is understandable, but less so the whiplash induced by his current strong support for President Trump’s advocacy of various issues, especially those dovetailing with his longstanding pro-Israeli stance on mid-east politics.

Sandbox - 12sep17

[Hillary's book - What Happened? - published today.  We're going on a short jaunt to a reunion of my old Army outfit, where we again renew ties with all those young lieutenants and captains, and our young pretty and perky wives with their infant fledglings in perambulators, all of whom now look pretty much like we do - tempest fugit.  On the trip Jo Ann will be reading and reporting on the travails of Hillary who today told the Dems the bad news, "I'm not going anywhere."  And one loud and clear message to her discerning readers (aka Democrats in high places) from between the lines of her book is, 'Don't assume that you know everything that I know about you all.' gjr]

Samples of Snowflakes’ Safespace Sophistries

George Rebane

This Thursday conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley.  To gird the fragile ideological loins of its student body, that campus’s Executive Vice President and Provost, Paul Alivisatos has published this memo for the university’s students and faculty.

We are deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging. No one should be made to feel threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe. For that reason, the following support services are being offered and encouraged:

• Student support services
• Employee (faculty and staff) support services 

I strongly urge readers, especially the sheltered progressives among us who believe all this is just the offal of fevered foothill fascists, to go to the above links and read what the UC is today officially telling its community both explicitly and, more importantly, implicitly.  These are tough times for the development of critical thinkers and thought.  These sentiments (aka fears) are real, and you simply cannot make this stuff up.  (more here)

Fake News Defined

George Rebane

Since I took some considerable issue with the LWV’s attempt to illuminate the nation’s travails with fake news (here), the definition of which never quite emerged from that conclave, I thought it proper to make my own contribution to the same.  I believe that most people graced with critical thinking skills will more or less agree with the sequel.  In any event, when I subsequently refer to ‘fake news’, it is in this light.

First, fake news falls into two broad categories – Insignificant and Misleading.  News stories about topics that are totally irrelevant to a medium’s consumers, and placed there out of lack of editorial attention or to please some other desire to fill ‘space’ or fulfill an innocent obligation, even if completely true in fact and form (e.g. fluff pieces), falls into fake news simply because it is not the kind of news which the outlet purports to deliver and fulfill the expectations of its consumers.

Second, news stories which mislead, either intentionally or through poor journalism/editing (endemic these days), are also fake news.  Purposive misleading by a seemingly legitimate news item can be accomplished in the several ways that satisfy the definition lying, how lies can be told, and therefore fully conform to that semantic taxonomy.  I covered these variations some years back in ‘Lies and Lying’, and these are worth a revisit by anyone attempting to understand the present dissertation.

It is important to peel off certain types of communication which many people thoughtlessly group with fake news.  Propaganda per se is not fake news if it hews to a truthful attempt to promote some agenda or conclusion.  We recall that propaganda is “information, ideas, OR rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.”  I have emphasized the ‘or’ to point out that this kind of purposive communication can also be totally legitimate, containing no false information or ideas, or even rumors that later turn out to be true.  Propaganda only becomes fake news when it subsumes the nature and purpose of lying - to deceive and/or mislead.

We can equally eliminate the factual and opinionated denigration or celebration of individuals, organizations, or causes from the fake news category.  Editorials and commentaries that are factually correct and unabashedly make their purpose clear to their consumer, are by any means neither fake nor news.  (Satire is in its own category, and its absorption as fake news depends on the acumen of it consumer, and the known type of its source.)

In summary, when a previously consumed media piece, ostensibly presented as news, is known or subsequently discovered as having been ‘designed to deceive in the sense of being counterfeit or not real’, then we can reliably ascribe it to be fake news and communicate that conclusion to others.  Else the more detailed considerations given above should come into play.

Scattershots – 6sep17 (updated 10sep17)

George Rebane

The local League of Women Voters presented a get together on ‘Fake News’ at Sierra College last night.  It featured Brooke Binkowski, Managing Editor of snopes.com and Randall ‘Fink’ Finkelstein, NC Scooper editor, both supposed experts on the topic.  It was a real jaw dropper.  Jo Ann and I had never attended a more lame, information free, and sophomoric presentation as we witnessed last night.  The LWV used to be a real heads up organization and source of non-partisan voter information before its joining the progressives.  No more.  The clear political implication was to obliquely point to the Republican Party and, of course, Trump (never leave him out) as the fount of fake news, which, by the way, no one was able to define – sort of like pornography.

About half an hour into the thing, people of the Right and Left started walking out, as people realized that no one on stage knew what they were talking about.  We greeted Reinette Senum, who sat behind us, and saw her with some friends quietly get up and leave during an unbelievable sequence with Ms Binkowski, a certified feather-head.  (Ms Senum’s ascerbic post on the evening is on her Facebook page.)  And we still don’t have any idea why Mr Finkelstein was invited to participate.  Full disclosure - it pains me to admit that we were not the first to leave.  

 

Great Divide – Yes Virginia, we really are very different

George Rebane

Today’s headline again corroborates what those who have paid attention have known for some years now.  The latest WSJ/NBC poll out today reports the stark differences between the country’s Right and Left as represented by their respective Republican and Democrat party affiliations.  The important part here is that the “WSJ/NBC News survey indicates a wide (and widening) split on cultural, economic issues.”  The best I can tell is that the only ones who have been in denial for years, and refuse to acknowledge this divide are the lightly read local lefties, which even includes their leading lights.  Limiting your input to the offerings and interpretations of DailyKos, HuffPo, CNN, MSNBC, … leaves a pretty big hole in a person’s understanding of what’s happening now.

The data-filled 6sep17 WSJ report begins with –

Divisions in America reach far beyond Washington into the nation’s culture, economy and social fabric, and the polarization began long before the rise of President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey of social trends has found. … The findings help explain why political divisions are now especially hard to bridge. People who identify with either party increasingly disagree not just on policy; they inhabit separate worlds of differing social and cultural values and even see their economic outlook through a partisan lens.  (emphasis mine)

Among the polls highlights are the drastic drop since Eisenhower of the opposite party’s support of the recently elected president.  That percentage has dropped from Eisenhower’s 60% to 8% for Trump.  The only reversals in the downtrend were for Bush1 and Bush2.

A really significant change of attitudes in how confident Americans are that their children will have better lives than they have.  From August 2010 to August 2017 the Dems’ confidence fell from about 42% to 25%, and the Repubs’ confidence rose sharply from 12% to 48%.  You need to read the article to get the significance of this latest survey on the national attitudes.

And today most of us see only the other party as doing all the bad things for/to the country.  Here’s part of local leftie Ms Nancy Eubanks’ outrage in her 6sep17 letter to The Union.

After Trump's outrageous news conference in the aftermath of Charlottesville, many of you "say" you are against racism and bigotry, that you disavow White Supremacy and Neo-Nazi groups and what they stand for. But actions speak loader than words. You could do several things to show you really can put country above party. Stop voter suppression laws that disenfranchise minority groups. Support a new Voter Rights Act. Stop gerrymandering districts to discriminate against minority voters. In addition, take actions to show you won't compromise principles of openness and fairness. Pass a law requiring all presidents to disclose their income taxes. Require all presidents to divest themselves of any business interest so that presidents can't have any conflicts of interest. Take away the lease on the Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. so Trump can't continue to profit from that enterprise.

You can’t make this stuff up; the schism is really real.

Sandbox - 6sep17

[Subsidies, conspiracies, DACA, DACA, DACA - oh my!  gjr]

Scattershots – 3sep17 (updated)

George Rebane

Readers were recently introduced (here) to the sad story of the iGeners.  Professor Twenge of San Diego State expands on the travails of that sensitive, coddled, and brittle generation in her 2sep17 WSJ essay, ‘The Smartphone Generation vs Free Speech’.  Here we learn that the iGeners’ prime concern is “emotional safety”, something that makes them vulnerable to an open exchange of ideas and free speech.  At university, their overarching demand is that the administration continue to provide them a secure ‘home environment’ rather than an education that includes exposure to a diversity of thought.  Safety – physical, emotional, intellectual, … - is concern one.

[update]  The constant din from socialists fomenting the goal of national collectivism is that government needs to be the final arbiter of everything and the universal source of succor for all.  Prescriptions promoting this agenda flow abundantly during times of disaster and depression.  To overuse a metaphor, to a socialist every storm, natural or social, is a perfect storm.  An expression of this arising from Harvey is government subsidies – who should get what and when.  In the 31aug17 Sandbox and 'Socialists' Conundrum' comment streams ‘corporate subsidies’ have become casus belli for our leftwing readers; specifically, why should Exxon/Mobil (XOM) receive any government favors?

Such discussions always erupt and bloom enthusiastically without any of the participants agreeing on or even understanding the definition of ‘subsidy’.  And these proceed from the Left with the tacit premise that government creates the wealth that it selectively dispenses.  Few on the port side of our ship of state acknowledge that government has nothing save what it takes from its citizens and their wealth creating enterprises.  Some such takings are surrendered willingly; today most are not.  The Left counters this inconvenient truth by citing numbers indicating that most people are in favor of ever higher taxes and expanding leviathan.  What they seek to hide is that those seeking government redistributions are not the ones who create the wealth or pay sufficient/any taxes – they are simply voting on what should be done with other people’s money.

In pillorying XOM, leftwingers bring in factors such as a privately held company’s executive salaries in the attempt to rile the proletariat against capitalism (an overarching goal).  The underlying theme is that the company really belongs to ‘the peehpul’, and it has gone rogue in its operations as a private enterprise.  The unstated companion thesis is that government bureaucrats would do a much better job managing such an asset for the benefit of its citizens if it were to nationalize and operate the company.  History provides no supporting evidence for this.

North Korea cools US heads.  The 3sep17 WSJ reports “U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis warned North Korea in stark terms on Sunday that any attack on the U.S. or its allies would trigger a massive military response, in comments that came after a national-security briefing with President Donald Trump called in response to Pyongyang’s sixth and most powerful nuclear test.”  This should warm the cockles of progressive and libertarian hearts.  It used to be that we promised “fire and fury” in response to NK threats to homeland or allies.  Now the Fat Kid shoved that response up our collective bunghole, and told the world flat out that after his last ‘People’s 6.3 Earthquake’ he’s prepared to detonate a thermonuclear device over continental US that would effectively put us back into the 19^th century within one millisecond.  That has scared and cooled our heads sufficiently to condition our response from ‘threat’ to ‘attack’.  Maybe our next step toward greater cool would be for Trump or Mattis or … to announce, ‘I want to make it perfectly clear, if NK kills one more than 20M Americans, and I do mean just one more single red-blooded American than 20M, then we will rain down a deluge of UN sanctions on that country like the world has never seen.’  If anything, that should stop them in their tracks.

The Socialists’ Conundrum

[In his 22sep17 letter to The Union’s editor, my friend Norm Sauer shares the Left’s conundrum in a clear, concise, and complete format originally summarized by L. Poplack of Olympia (where they used to brew my favorite beer).  The only problem remaining – is the Left sharp enough to understand the situation?  From the local leftists the answer is an unambiguous NO.  gjr]

Norm Sauer

A "conundrum" is that which is puzzling or confusing. Consider the following, from Larry Poplack of Olympia, Washington:

1. America is capitalist and greedy — yet half of the population is subsidized.
2. Half of the population is subsidized — yet they think they are victims.
3. They think they are victims — yet their representatives run the government.
4. Their representatives run the government — yet the poor keep getting poorer.
5. The poor keep getting poorer — yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about — yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

The sad reality is the Democrat Progressive Socialist Party needs people to fail, be without jobs, without health care, without insurance, and in economic pain for the party to succeed. With such misery, more people will be incapable of helping themselves and big government will (help them) at the immoral expense of taking from the producers.

The Progressive Socialists run from the Trump Administration's demonstrated job growth, reduced unemployment, surge in housing starts, the Dow's record highs, and decreased illegal border crossings.

The conundrum: they say Trump and Republicans are crazy!

When disaster is certain, who pays? (codas added)

George Rebane

Every time I look at the news of floods, fires, earthquakes, and other large and predictable emergencies, the notion that the rest of us have to pay to make whole those who knowingly take those risks rubs me the wrong way.  I lived most of my life in SoCal, one of the world’s most notorious earthquake and wildfire zones.  But nowhere in our financial planning did we factor in that you and yours would have pay for resurrecting our financial fortunes if the Big One hit, and we found our house a rubble pile of 2x4s and stucco, with household goods marbled throughout.

Yet decade after decade there are millions who expect, nay, demand that kind of response from their fellow Americans across the land.  They build and live in locales that are known to suffer from one kind of natural calamity or another with probability one – that’s certainty for the innumerates.  And when the inevitable happens, we have what’s happening in Texas right now.  (I really get frosted looking at big neighborhoods of million-dollar homes ass deep in water.)  The federal politicians spending other people’s money can’t wait to get in there and tell all the afflicted how government is going to bail them out, and make them come out even better than before disaster struck.

Rebane Doctrine has the simple answer that puts the citizens’ gray matter back in their brain pans – the envelope please.  (And last night I heard national columnist and Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley agree.)  Get government out of the no-premium insurance business, and let the private sector take care of insuring those who insist on buying and living in known dangerous areas.  These greedy capitalists will know exactly how to price the premiums so no one gets a haircut when the inevitable happens.  You wanna live there, then you pay the price or take the risk.

The cognitively handicapped will argue that we all benefit from having millions live in places where we have to pay for their certain losses.  But that is a position not supported by evidence.  Hurricane Harvey gave us the ability to draw a line back from the coast behind which building homes and businesses would almost certainly not suffer from conceivable future flooding.  Let the government provide flood insurance for those landward of that line, and those choosing to live on the gulf side would buy as much insurance as they want from the insurance companies.  And for those unfortunates insisting on losing everything, there are enough compassionate ones among us private citizens who appeal to the generous among us to help fund recovery - here's an example, JJ Watt of the Houston Texans at www.YouCaring.com/JJWatt who has raised over $12M for flood relief.

The same goes for all the beachfront properties, those in high fire danger areas (where we lived for 25 years and paid for our fire and earthquake insurance which we finally had to use in November 1993 and January 1994), and, of course, all those good people enjoying the great California coastal climate waiting for the Big One while fixing things up in the interval from the ‘small’ ones.

‘Take what you will, but pay the price’ should instead read, ‘Take what you will, but don’t make others pay the price.’

Coda:  And in the case of Houston, it looks like the nation's progressives also fault the people of Houston for the damage they have suffered from Harvey.  To them the country's fossil fuel hub is Sin City Numero Uno, that and a lack of enough government regulations helped bring on its flooding.  So how would they feel about the federal treasury being used to put Houston back together again?  (more here)

Coda2:  And then there’s the serious question of how finely should an insurance company be able to design the premiums it charges.  If the national loss data clearly indicated that a certain subgroup of customers habitually suffer more of a certain kind of covered losses, should the premiums for that subgroup be higher than those subgroups who have lower claim frequencies and amounts?  Or should the insurance company be made to charge ‘everyone’ the same amount?  And how big is everyone?  We know (or at least we knew) that teen driver’s have a higher accident rate, and therefore their insurance premiums were higher so as to make the riskier cohort of insureds pay their ‘fair share’.  What are those fair shares, and what attributes of the insureds should the insurance company be able to take into account to offer a spectrum of premiums that recognizes the differential risks and keeps the costs down for those folks who are more careful or work/live in safer environments?

For example, suppose Americans of Estonian extraction are shown to have a higher rate of home accidents than everyone else.  Should their premiums be commensurately higher, or should everyone shoulder the burden of the careless Estonian-Americans in their midst?  Or ask the same question where the careless cohort is defined by people of northern European extraction, or some other ethnic, religious, racial, or cultural discriminant.  In short, the perennial question in a society is ‘how widely should what kinds of risk be distributed?  Your answers will most likely also be a litmus test for your socio-political ideology.