Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations – 31may19 (updated 5jun19)

George Rebane

 “The American people, right now, do not support (impeachment) because they do not know the story. They don’t know the facts.” Congressman Nadler (D-NY).  So WTF has been holding up the facts for the last two years????  If you got ‘em, let us see them - now!

Tariffs on all Mexican goods is not my favorite idea to get Mexico to stop and not encourage the transit of central American migrants across their country.  Nothing else has worked to date, and Einstein’s dictum demands we try something new.  So, for all you worthies out there with better ideas, let’s have them.

[1jun19 update]  The RL Crabb cartoon below was filched from the 1jun19 Union.  Here Bob cleverly captures the obvious in our local state senate special election.  The unfortunate part illustrated is California’s so-called “Jungle Primary” law that lands the top two vote-getters from the primary in the final election.  In highly lopsided jurisdictions this means that the top two may be from the same party, therefore denying a voice to the minority to express their desire for other policies or even make known their numbers.  This is what happens when legislative pinheads give little thought to ‘Democracy über alles’.

[2jun19 update] As long argued here, our two ideological poles interpret about every aspect of the realworld from significantly different or even disjoint perspectives.  Three Columbia Law School mavens acknowledge and examine this phenomenon in ‘Republicans and Democrats Are Describing Two Different Constitutions’ published in the current edition of The Atlantic.  The closer we all look at our belief systems (aka ontologies), the wider the chasm between us appears.

Climate Change Cacophony – Russ Steele points us to ‘The Stunning Statistical Fraud Behind The Global Warming Scare’.  And in conjunction I again ask readers to consider this chain of chances (probabilities) before mindlessly promoting public policies – each successive chance is conditioned on the previous ones being true.  So, what’s the chance that climate varies over time, that a long-term warming trend continues, that current warming is overwhelmingly manmade, that the warming trend is catastrophic, that the warming trend can be halted by some means, that we know how to halt warming, that we can afford to halt warming without destroying the economies that provide the wealth to terminate global warming???  Now multiply all those probabilities together to assess your support of climate hysteria.

[5jun19 update]  HOT FLASH!  Speaker Pelosi again confirms (the RR assertion) that the Dems’ constituency is overwhelmingly challenged in the intellectual acumen department.  She made great effort yesterday to 1) acknowledge that the Left’s voters do not grasp the meaning of ‘impeachment’, thinking that once impeached then you’re out.  And 2) explained in detail that impeachment is like indictment, and that a guilty verdict from a trial in the Senate is needed to oust an impeached official.  Of course, she had to negotiate these semantic hurdles while carefully omitting mention of the illustrative example of Sweet Willie being impeached yet remaining in office.  Now methinks she’s worried that her voters are equally clueless about what ‘indictment’ means.

Neither Biden nor Warren know the difference between an objective and a plan to achieve the objective.  Both have now disclosed their “plans” to solve their climate change catastrophe which consist overwhelmingly of just throwing more money at ‘global warming R&D’ and praying fervently (to the extent permitted in the liberal liturgy) that something good will come out of that before the world ends.  Oh yeah, each also intends to pass some more laws and regs to make sure that the economy will not be able to afford achieving the R&D objectives.

Nevada County, the Black Hole of Broadband (updated 9jun19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 29 May 2019.  A slightly edited version of this piece was published in The Union's 1jun19 print edition and also online here.]

Broadband connectivity to the internet is fundamental to the economic growth of every community in America.  And it is doubly critical for the economic development, if not survival, of small rural communities off the beaten path like Nevada County.  However, that truth has yet to be embraced by our local governments.  In fact, there are many of us who adamantly oppose the availability of broadband in these foothills for the simple reason that they are opposed to everything that promotes growth in our county, be it in housing, new or expanding businesses, or anything that invites more working families to locate here.

Sandbox – 28may19

[It looks like a sea change may have occurred in the RR comment streams.  Absent are the vacuous critiques of everything not supporting our country’s headlong rush to socialism.  These leftwingers seldom countered the message, and always condemned the messengers.  And this absence also appears to have reduced the zeal of our commenting capitalists who usually mass to defend open markets, liberty, and smaller government.  Perhaps it is time for a respite from the raucous. gjr]

Memorial Day 2019

The price of liberty is never paid up,

payment for its maintenance is always due.

Ruminations – 26may19 (updated 28may19)

George Rebane

Returned from a week at Hat Creek, CA with RV couples – we proudly call ourselves ‘Road Warriors’ – where the weather alternated between idyllic and intense thunderstorms not uncommon during this time of year.  A lightning strike on the RV park’s wifi antenna had us all experience yesteryear.  And we were again reminded of a part of California that is very unlike the part populated by gimmes who see the state as open territory for any and all who believe that the age of America’s exceptionalism is deservedly ending.  (Photo of entrance to Burney cemetary.)

In ‘The Tales of Parson Comey’ WSJ’s Bill McGurn recounts the lies and prevarications of the former FBI director that have now come to light as he rides the media circuit promoting his recent auto-hagiography.  The man has also revealed his ability “to see into other men’s souls”, and while demonstrating that “he knows his congregation”, as “he feeds it from Mt Self-Righteous, with a mix of Democratic talking points, proclamations about the wickedness of anyone with a different point of view, and the occasional lofty quotation from Reinhold Niebuhr.”

New York’s striking union members just got a leg up from the state’s anti-capitalist government.  After Gov Andrew Cuomo signs the new bill from the state’s legislature, strikers will get full unemployment benefits just one week after walking off the job.  This should put the state’s already strong and rapacious unions on par with management when threatening job actions.  Heads up readers know that New York is one in a covey of proto-socialist states which spew wealth creators and middle-class workers to friendlier and ‘greener’ climes.  Other members of this clatch include New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, and, of course, our California.

Alexander Rossi, is in 2nd place (at lap 113/200) in today’s Indy 500 as this is posted.  The Nevada County native won the race in 2016, and placed well in the succeeding years.  As most racing fans know, the 500 is actually a two-phased race with the first part putting great emphasis on pole position and closed-field running; the second phase becomes more tactical in the planning and coordination of pit stops between the driver and pit crew.  [Update]  Well shucks, our own Alex Rossi came in 2nd after a most thrilling finish to the 500-mile classic.  Head to head Rossi and Pagenaud traded places for the lead during the last ten laps with the Frenchman in the lead by 0.2 second when the 200th lap was completed.  Great driving by a real field of pros with no casualties save some pretty smashed up race cars.  Congratulations to all.

Union publisher Don Rogers’ in ‘A crisis in journalism’ does his best to hearken us back to an age when “the journalist’s core role for society (was) to intelligently question convention, find any rotten wood in the good ship, (and) bring truth to light.”  And today the field is filled with political professionals, partisans, and pundits who work on “the other side of a line dividing the passionate from something cooler, more practical, with the ability to sift for empirical evidence out of all the chaff, and to recognize opinions for what they are”.  In my readings of history and my many years on this planet, I have yet to witness journalism in the mainstream of its practice as not just another form of paid promotion and partisanship for established points of view and agendas.  In short, Mr Rogers is wistfully wishing for a time that never was, as today the profession has abandoned even the remaining vestiges of its ‘standards’, long used as the profession’s camouflage of claimed prudence and propriety.

[27may19 update]  The opioid ‘crisis’ included over 25,000 overdose deaths in 2016 from the prescribed drug.  Opioid overdose deaths have been known since before 1999 when the overdose death rate began to soar from consuming the legally prescribed pain killer.  Now local governments and healthcare organizations are suing the pharmas that legally manufacture and legally sell the drug, to physicians who legally prescribe it.  I’m puzzled as to why such suits have standing.  The state could have outlawed opioids decades ago if it felt that the drug could not be safely consumed by the public.  One could also ask why the car companies are not being sued for the 30K+ annual deaths from car accidents.  Did they not also legally manufacture a deadly machine, sold legally to the public who then also suffered from its unintended uses?

Economist Dr James P Smith exhibits his knowledge of history in the 27may19 Union (here),claiming that the rift between Congress and the Executive began with the Russian-influenced election of President Trump.  Before that, everything in Washington was going along swimmingly; now the country must “take heed”.

[28may19 update]  Another neighbor abandons California.  We were surprised last week to learn that one of our recently acquired neighbors, a couple who bought acreage and spent almost five years building their estate, fighting their way through all our regulatory complexities to thwart development, have now had enough.  They are headed for a new start in New Mexico – Godspeed.

“Wage Gap Commissars” are proposed by Sen Kamala Harris, based on demonstrably false data that she uses to describe the difference between aggregate pay rates of men and women.  Her proposed legislation for America would require all businesses with more than 100 employees to demonstrate to a new bureaucracy that their pay scale is gender neutral.  Such companies number more than 100,000 and employ over 80 million workers.  Her new facet of socialism would insert government as the final arbiter of what employers can and should pay their employees.  This is an evil piece of legislation to join the many others that this Democrat and her cohorts running for president have proposed to hobble America should any of them succeed to office. (more here, here, and here)

Sandbox – 19may19

[AG Barr has hired experienced and highly reputed special investigator John Durham to unscramble the shady doings of and subsequent BS spewing from former FBI director James Comey, and former CIA head John Brennan (you can throw in Clapper for good measure).  The Dems are scared and furious, and desperately looking for ways to sink Durham.  Meanwhile, we’re told that surreptitious gathering of information by our government about our citizens is not ‘spying’, but is merely ‘surveillance’.  It was all those other commie and fascist governments that had and still have extensive networks and institutions that spy on their citizens.  We should all be relieved now that’s cleared up, capice?  OK, here’s your Lucky Strike extra, wanna know who the double dummies are?  Just ask someone whether Comey spied or surveilled.  gjr]

Scattershots – 18may19

George Rebane

Freedom and equality have never been bedfellows – naturally enabled inequality in all dimensions is the litmus test for a free society.

‘The Myth of Wage Stagnation’ is explained by Phil Gramm and John Early.  Dr Gramm is an economist and the former chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Dr John Early is the former assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Convincing the country’s lightly read that middle class wages have stagnated for decades is the Democrats’ sine qua non Big Lie, along with ongoing fake news reports, required to beat President Trump in 2020.  The basis of their argument reduces to, ‘Do you believe your lying eyes or what we’re telling you?’  After supplying the reader with a snootfull of relevant economic data, Gramm and Early conclude with – “The suggestion that America hasn’t gotten a raise in 46 years doesn’t pass the laugh test. Poor measurements of compensation are more than misleading; they also cause many voters and policy makers to favor redistribution that would depress growth and compensation. Nothing is more critical to promoting sound policy than measuring economic outcomes accurately. A nation is only as good as its facts.” (more here)

Speaking of facts, our educational systems are supposed to teach us both facts about the world and how to deal with them to create wealth and benefit society.  Two men who have outdone themselves to hinder America in these pursuits are David Coleman and the late Howard Zinn.  Coleman is the maven behind the disastrous Common Core curriculum (extensively covered in these pages) that has put the latest dent into our public education system, and the man who is also the architect of taking down the merit-based SAT by appending to it a proprietary and secret “adversity score” to aid colleges in returning to sub-rosa, race-based admission policies. (more here).  Zinn is the author of the notorious revisionist and widely-used The People’s History of the United States (1980) that has mangled the historical view of two generations of our country’s high school and college students.  Historian Wilfred McClay has now written a counterpoint text, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.  While not “some saccharine whitewash of American history”, the tome does correct the country’s past from Zinn’s version as “a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’”, that explains today’s younger generation’s love affair with socialism. (more here)

Power from magnets may provide us a more hopeful future if the ‘Earth Engine’ prototypes of industrial engineer Dennis Danzick pan out.  He claims to have cracked the long-hidden code of how to suck net energy out of magnetic fields, and has demonstrated the process as something that could soon be commercialized.  No one, including Danzick, has yet to explain the physics of this contraption, and a couple of prominent physicists have poo-poohed the whole thing as yet the promotion of the latest perpetual motion machine.  You can see a live stream of the ‘Crystal’ version of the engine working at the facilities of Inductance Energy located in Scottsdale, AZ.  (more here and here)

Alabama Abortion Law

George Rebane

OK, here’s the drill.  The Left opposes the recent Alabama law that is being replicated in its essential elements by a growing number of heartland states.  The crux of the opposition is preserving the mental health of the mother, not her physiological health or other factors about which most on both sides agree.  (And as a corollary, saving society from the maturing of a rejected child.)  She simply doesn’t think it would be all that satisfying, for a number of reasons, to raise the little darling – besides, at best it was probably a ‘Oops!’ to begin with.  So, with the partial information she has during her pregnancy while baby is growing inside her, she should have the right to decide that it should be killed.

And make no mistake, that is the fundamental argument of the pro-abortion proponents who use the ‘mother’s health’ and ‘mother’s right to choose’ smokescreen.  So OK, let’s go with that.  While the baby is pre-partum, the mother knows little or nothing about the potential of that baby to bring her happiness and grow up to lead a productive life that contributes to society.  The pro-abortionists are militating for her right to make the life or death choice in ignorance.  Any reasonable person would agree that her choice would be more informed and, in short, better for all if she made it knowing more about the child.

So why not increase her legal prerogatives to preserve her QoL and mental health in general, by allowing her to make the decision based on more complete information about the little tyke.  Let’s give all women the option of terminating the development (life) of their child after they have seen how the little darlins are really turning out.  Why not extend the pro-choice period they demand to include, say, the first couple or three post-partum years of the kid’s life?  The mother would have a hell of a lot more information about how her offspring is going to turn out, and the kind of kink it will put in her lifestyle if she kept the kid.  After all, it’s all about empowering women and extending the mother’s right to choose so she can make a more informed decision.  And the final solution for the rejected kid will be the same, we kill it - now as then, we can make it so the kid will never know what hit him.

In the end, if it’s all legal, no one will make a fuss, and in fact, no one will even have to know if one day mom is no longer pushing a perambulator around the shopping mall.  If anyone asks, she just tells them that she exercised her woman’s right to choose, just as if she had decided early on to get rid of the bump in her belly.  Everyone will understand that a law extending womens’ rights in this fashion makes all the sense in the world, since it gives them a greater latitude to decide with much more information than just blindly condemning to death a child whom she has yet to meet and get to know.  So, let’s get with the program.

Trump’s Immigration Policy

George Rebane

Our current immigration policy, such as it is, hails and invites illegal entry from distant lands, favors meritless chain migration without end, and offers entry to only one of eight immigrants who have skillsets that would make them productive members of our workforce.  Additionally, its proponents seek every opportunity to provide amnesty and a fast path to citizenship for the 11M to 20M illegal aliens already in the land.

Trump’s proposal is for more than half of our new immigrants to possess skillsets that are scarce and needed, reduce chain migration to a third of the total, and require all legal immigrants to have some knowledge of English and be able to pass an elemental civics test about the US and its forms of governance. (more here)  It is moot on the resident illegals, knowing that this aspect will be resolved through extensive negotiations with the Democrats who look forward to these millions enlarging its constituent voter base.

But all progressives, led by Pelosi and Schumer, have immediately attacked the Trump plan as obviously being against the strategic interests of the Democrats in their massive lurch to the left.  Their main argument, a la Madame Speaker, is that America has never enforced merit-based immigration, and that the generations of the 19^th and early 20^th century immigrants, who contributed so much to America’s greatness, would never have been allowed in had Trump’s policy been in place then.  This claim is false from a number of perspectives, and again exemplifies the low intellectual esteem that Democrat leaders hold their core supporters, and by extension, the country’s undecides – Team Pelosi considers them all as slogan-swallowing, double dummies.

To make matters worse, the Dems’ arguments are even too difficult for some Republicans (including the vaunted Judge Napolitano) to counter.  The truth of the matter is that when those millions from Europe and Asia arrived in generations past, they ALL possessed skills that allowed them to immediately enter our workforce as its newest productive members.  Taken within the context of predominant workforce skillsets of those times, all the arriving immigrants had the ability to start jobs that they already knew how to do, or for which their skill extensions were easily acquired.  (BTW, Mollie Hemingway, senior editor of The Federalist, was the only one who grokked that historical factor on an FN panel – track her career, she is one astute female.)  In our age of specialization, advanced technology, and automation, such jobs for the under-educated from third world countries are much harder to find, thereby putting those English-absent immigrants at a great disadvantage and make them prey for criminals and other low-lifes ready to take advantage of them and make their advent a net cost to our society.

The other factor of which Team Pelosi is ignorant or willing to dissemble is the merit-based immigration policies we have had in place since WW2.  For example, refugees from war ravaged Europe were let in only on the basis of satisfying three major criteria – having US-needed skills, being sufficiently healthy, and having a political record with no taint of communist or fascist support.  These requirements were relaxed in the post-Vietnam era when immigration policy began to support party-specific voter agendas.  As cited above, workforce merit factors in for only one out of eight legal immigrants, and, of course, zero for those most welcomed above all who are adept at climbing dilapidated fences and fording rivers.

So Trump’s totally pro-American immigration policy proposal has little chance of becoming law under the current federal government's make-up, but contributes yet one more litmus test to distinguish between the pro- and anti-American factions in our land.

‘Religious Freedom in Islam’

George Rebane

That’s the title of the new book by political science professor Daniel Philpott of Notre Dame.  It appears to be another anxious attempt at understanding and reconciling global Islam.  The book has an excellent review by Thomas Howard (history professor at Valparaiso University) in the 14may19 WSJ (here). Philpott divides the non-Islamic world into “Islamoskeptics”, holding that Islam is incompatible with religious freedom, and “Islamopluralists”, who accept the “religion of peace” teaching from the Mecca (v the Medina) Quran.

Philpott tries to give us the correct perspective on Muslim-majority countries by dividing them into three categories – “religiously free” (e.g. Lebanon, Kosovo), “secularly repressive” (e.g. Egypt, Turkey), and “religiously repressive” (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia).  Philpott agrees that the third confirms the West’s worst fears about Islam, but argues (as if it mattered) that the second kind is actually an import from the West, with its teaching that “the state must manage, control, and contain religion in order to make way for modern civilization.”

According to the author, the problem is that the secularly repressive countries spawn most of the Islamist terror that afflicts the world.  Somehow, here he overlooks the major (dominant?) contributions of Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia (homeland of almost all the 9/11 terrorists).  And the so-called peaceful and devout Muslims in the religiously free countries “have concluded that secularism (in its various guises) is to be eschewed as a Trojan horse sent by the West.”  In other words, the West as a whole remains the enemy of Islam, and not only Islamism (the terror spawning kind).

Nowhere does Philpott cover the much-feared and scripturally taught practice of taqiya (q.v., dissembling to promote Islam), or the caliphate as Islam’s endgame.  Most Islamoskeptics and all Islamophobes are sensitive to the global practice of terror killings by Islamists, and also their ongoing practice of green-on-green (and blue) killings, primarily in lands actively resisting Islamist factions such as ISIS, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, … .  Non-Muslims, especially westerners, have a hard time reconciling such ubiquitous and longstanding practice of the ‘murder of the innocents’ with any other belief system save those who follow Allah.

Nevertheless, Philpott’s essay concludes that our Constitution, and especially its First Amendment, provides a global template for protecting religious freedom rights (an unexamined goal of Islamic religionists) that will attract our Muslim brethren to exercise their “capacity to embrace a shift in thought.”  Again, here it is proper to insert from what-to-what, which apparently Philpott avoids in order to also avoid sounding, what, paternalistically neo-colonial?

I count myself definitely as an Islamoskeptic with periodic lapses into Islamophobia (fear of attempts to bring about a sharia-dominated caliphate).  My main concern is the absence of wholesale condemnation by the expatriate Islamic communities of individual acts of Islamist terror.  These Muslims, at best, only murmur a quiet, quick, and qualified disapproval, and when polled, turn in some very scary aggregate sentiments.  (e.g. results from Pew Research)  And the behavior of immigrant Muslims, in countries with insular communities abandoned by indigenous law enforcement agencies, speaks for itself, especially when considered in light of politically correct self-censorship by the media in reporting goings on and statistics that describe such cultural enclaves.

In the final analysis, our need to publish such apologetics in the west as Professor Philpott’s Religious Freedom in Islam (2019) speaks volumes about the real collision between the followers of the Prophet and the rest of us.  In many ways this work sounds like another careful walk whistling past the graveyard of the thousands who have been killed in the name of Allah.

Like likes Likes - once more (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

Dr Mark Moffett of Harvard and the National Museum of Natural History writes ‘The Social Secret That Humans Share With Ants’ (and other social critters), an essay derived from his The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall (2018).  Therein his main thesis is “building giant communities of strangers requires ‘markers’ that let members know who does and doesn’t belong.”  The essay goes on to concur and confirm the oft-repeated Rebane Doctrine tenet that people like to live and work among people who share their mores, values, …, in short, their culture to the maximum extent possible.  For such communal environments promote trust and rapid socialization, foster specialization, and in general provide the benefits that derive from being able to reliably predict each other’s communal behaviors.  (photo philched phrom article)

Moffett’s article is carefully wordsmithed for this day and age, wherein he comes as close as possible to calling a spade a spade without offering an obvious invite to the inevitable opprobrium from the Left should he speak too plainly.  The destruction of America’s common culture, that has been so successful in forging ‘E pluribus unum’, is the seminal objective, bar none, of our indigenous Left.  Achieving this, drives derivative objectives like transforming our public educational system into a giant package of progressive propaganda that today has combined product, distribution, and audience into one compact and unassailable institution.

Moffett points out that durable societies began long ago “when our ancestors began to signal who belonged through the use of what I call ‘markers’, signs that for many societies came to include gestures, rituals, styles of dress and dialects. Bound together by markers, even the simplest hunter-gatherer societies of the past achieved populations of a thousand or more.”  With his markers, Moffett then two-steps around the unifying idea of a common culture without connecting them to such a culture in our modern world of politically corrected multi-cultural societies.  Pointing to the utility – past and present – of a mono-cultural society today is strictly verboten.

Nevertheless, his dance steps convey a clear message to the careful reader in which he points out how even slight deviations from culture-specific markers “induced anxiety because the conduct of (such individual) couldn’t be predicted.”  And Dr Moffett’s insightful essay concludes with the non-controversial coda – “Then as now, markers have been a way for humans to maintain order and boundaries even in the midst of rapid social change and growth.”  Whew!

As a recent milestone on the multi-kulti highway, one that illustrates the destruction of a stanchion of our common culture - especially when easily related to western cultures – we have Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel).  He is the latest to get a revisionist history written about him.  It turns out that not only was Geisel a “racist”, misogynist, and xx-phobic of everything you can imagine, but even his published “illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”  This man became a beloved icon of America’s common culture which the socialist cum communist Left must now obliterate in every remaining corner in which it is still allowed to draw a breath.  The whole story is told in Becoming Dr Seuss (2019) by Brian Jay Jones which is reviewed here by Meghan Gurdon.

And we all should know the ‘blessings’ bestowed by multi-cultural societies living cheek-by-jowl under repressive regimes that use corrupt and militant justice systems to enforce stacks of laws and regulations, prescribing mandated common behaviors, under each of which inevitably lies the gun.

[13may19 update]  Author and political theorist Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner and the American Enterprise Institute gives us an added perspective on tribalism and its antitheses in today’s public forums (here).  He reviews how de Toqueville and Russel Kirk “saw that a nation’s strength lay in our hodgepodge of ‘little platoons’”, and that “we are a nation of people with multiple overlapping identities.  We have our Americanness as one identity, but that is tied up with a diversity that includes our particular geographic identity, our particular vocation, our particular faith, and yes, our particular ethnicity.”  Carney concludes that “real love for posterity is inextricably tied to a loving, familiar embrace of the past, and of a tribe.”

Ruminations - 10may19 (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

Global warming warmongers like to ‘prove’ their calamitous climate change prognostications by citing the increasing dollar costs and casualties caused by natural disasters such as winds, floods, and fires.  They count on their claims being consumed without question by constituents not able to discover that such statistics are due to greater numbers of buildings and people populating danger-prone areas.  The record of parameters that measure the physical intensity and frequency of such disasters don’t support the lamestream publicized histrionics.  ‘Growth Fuels Size of Catastrophes’ in the 10may19 WSJ attempts to educate the educable.

No Democrat with a 3-digit IQ wants to actually impeach Trump for the simple reason that their case for it is laughable, and then they would lose an anti-Trump election issue that still has legs with certain deficit-laden constituencies.  Speaker Pelosi and Rep Nadler are doing their best to keep blowing hot air into their “constitutional crisis” balloon which continues to float beautifully through lamestream outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

‘Let’s Apply the Moore Protocol to Congress’ suggests R.G. Walker of St Petersburg (here).  That protocol was established by a liberal court in Fairfax County, VA through ordering the release of the sealed divorce records of Stephen Moore and his former wife, despite strong objections from both parties.  This kind of “dumpster diving” was fomented by the lamestream with such intensity that the VA court finally succumbed to the extra-legal sleaze in order to publicize ‘evidence’ that finally caused Moore to withdraw his nomination to the Fed’s Board.  Mr Walker suggests that if this kind of ethical detour is warranted for Fed candidates, it should also be uniformly applied to members of Congress who have much more power to do harm, the propensity for which presumably arises out of previously hidden character shortcomings that the American public has the right to know.  He recommends that they all should have their sealed records unsealed with the merciful option, not offered Moore, to retain their “previously established privacy to any who resign their congressional posts immediately, say, by sundown.”

Our designated reader gave me a heads up that our FUE has once more mounted the pulpit and issued another ex-cathedra missive, this time delivering a sage reflection and admonition under the 10may19 Union’s Hits & Misses column in reference to Jo Ann’s contribution (here).  She is a continuing member on the newspaper’s editorial board, who drew the FUE’s ire for not including my MIM board membership in her praise for MIM’s recent grand opera Carmen presentation.  (For the record, and to pre-empt another breathless revelation, I am also the Vice President of MIM, and we are long-time In Concert Sierra donors, attendees, and appreciative promoters.)  But what we always find remarkable is the boundless hubris with which our self-adorned “veteran editor and award-winning journalist” issues his absolutes about our “podunk community” and its podunkier inhabitants whom he has graced with his presence, that is today regrettably so far removed from a more compatible cosmopolitan and civil environment.  The man is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

[13may19 update]  After my 9may19 visit to our local pot shop (here), I now read that bio-engineering companies may start making MJ’s active ingredients, THC and CBD, in processing plants without having to grow those smelly weeds.  In the MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado tells us of the Dutch bio-tech company Amyris that has designs of producing those ingredients in bulk to become readily available ingredients for “large scale use” in all kinds of consumables.  Of course, there still is some “cognitive dissonance” involved in all this since “biotech is supposed to be about helping people, and cannabis, like alcohol, doesn’t always do that. It can be used for pain relief, but there’s also a link to psychosis.” (more here)

Sandbox – 9may19

[Trump thumping has now reached a fever pitch in Democrat, socialist, and alt-Left circles.  When was the last time you heard a US president accused by political opponents of working to do away with our Constitution, democracy, free speech, and other liberties that have defined America since its founding?  In our daily dose from the Democratic leadership, the media are full of emotional videos accusing President Trump of exactly that – he’s a treasonous and treacherous criminal with no morals who must be removed from office by any and all means possible in order to save our nation.  Any memories of such a state of affairs?  gjr]

Scattershots – 6may19 (updated 9may19)

It is the ultimate fantasy that we can live our lives, or at any rate live them in peace and contentment with each other, without ever having to share a common reality. - James Bowman

George Rebane

An example of fake news.  Apple News is a very comprehensive news website for Mac, iPad, and iPhone users, one that allows you to customize with your interests, and then augments the format with your viewing history – in short, it snoops in your user sessions.  Recently it included a piece from the National Geographic reporting on the military marine mammal programs of Russia and US (here).  I was a bit astounded that almost everything they reported on the US program was either false or grossly misleading.  Full disclosure – I and my company spent years supporting the US Navy’s marine mammal (and other animal) R&D programs as their analytical support team doing the heavy lifting in the math, data analysis, and systems design work.

The 6may19 Union’s op-ed has two pieces from our favorite leftwing columnists, Dr Milan Vodicka (search RR) and, of course, Mr George Boardman.  Dr Vodicka delivered one of his trademark muddled sermons on the joys of socialism (not posted yet).  There he attempted to augment Bertand Russell’s three factors motivating human behavior with a fractured taxonomy that makes absolutely no sense to the careful reader, and then went on to celebrate the free nationalized healthcare systems found in EU countries.  In the latter, he drinks the kool-aid by the gallon, and evinces no understanding of the realities that obtain.  Mr Boardman presents a good critique of the Republican California Senate candidates Assemblymen Dahle and Kiley, and then blows a tire describing the Democrat Audrey Denny attempting unseat Congressman LaMalfa (here).  Without so much as a smidgen of qualification or sourcing, he tells the reader that the Green New Deal is “a sweeping national plan to zero-out emissions and provide clean energy and infrastructure jobs to millions.”  Apparently, our columnist continues to have trouble distinguishing between objectives and plans, and reports the GND as actually being a plan.  Regardless, objectives or plans, It has a snowball’s chance in hell of accomplishing anything touted.

[7may19 update]  Spying v. Surveillance.  I don’t know why this is so difficult for the media talking heads to resolve (those on FN, not the lamestream whose agenda is known).  A nation’s law enforcement agency does surveillance (on an individual, group, organization) when the target of such intelligence gathering involves a domestic issue/parties that does NOT involve the presumed culpability of a foreign government.  That same agency conducts a spying operation when it seeks to gather intelligence on a matter that does involve a foreign government.  To infiltrate a domestic gang, you send in an 'undercover agent'; to surveil or infiltrate foreign government operations, you employ/send in 'spies'. That is the way we have successfully defined spying v. surveillance for generations.  Since Obama’s FBI et al were convinced from the gitgo that Team Trump was in cahoots with Russia, their surreptitious intelligence gathering efforts were clearly spying.

[8may19 update]  Upcoming tariffs increase on Chinese goods this Friday (10may19) is supposed to be in retaliation for the Chinese reneging on parts of the two countries’ established trade agreements and/or the progress made in the current negotiations.  And there’s a big debate on whether President Trump is doing the right thing with this retaliation.  The debate would be moot if the administration just published the details of China’s renege.  I don’t know why the big secret in not putting it out for all to see and judge for themselves as to the relative magnitudes of the offense vs the response.  Everyone involved in such negotiations around the world already knows what has gone down; the only ones ignorant who will be affected by it all are the people of China and America.  I can understand the communists keeping their people in the dark (it’s their nature), but I can’t see why our government also keeps us in the dark.

AG Barr will be held in contempt of a Democrat House, and that is again denigrating the intelligence of their own constituents – why?  Simply because they can.  They know that in the aggregate, Democrat voters have little or no idea how our government works or what the laws are, and they overwhelmingly consume media outlets that cynically keep them in the dark.  The rest of us know that AG Barr is under no legal imperative to release any of the Mueller report to anyone, or to even reveal its main contents/conclusions – why?  Because the special prosecutor came up with nothing with which to prosecute anyone.  (He diddled away the people’s money on a self-serving sideshow nailing individuals on process crimes, people who had nothing to do with his commissioned charter, and then wrote the best anti-Trump political blueprint that he could.)  Now scumbag Nadler is going to up it a notch and hold Barr in contempt for not releasing information that is against the law for him to release - please reread this.  And none of it has anything to do with Congress’ oversight function for legislative purposes.  Moreover, the whole thing is a total bag of bullcrap that Democrats are dealing out to their know-nothings as part and parcel of the Big Lie – i.e. anything it will take to defeat Trump in 2020.

[9may19 update] Well boys and girls, your humble host has now visited a genuine, legal pot shop.  A good friend (known to you all) with whom I often take lunch, took me on a tour of the Elevation 2477 cannabis dispensary in Nevada City.  The experience was quite remarkable.  We entered into an immaculate reception area at the end of which sat a uniformed security officer behind (bulletproof?) glass.  The room contained a nice couch and an abstract painting presumably abstracting some visions customers may enjoy after imbibing of the establishment’s offerings.  We were invited to the window to place our driver’s licenses against the glass to be scanned, and I being a newbie, was instructed to fill in a store “membership application”, studying the store’s rules, and then putting my John Hancock declaring that I understood everything.  My friend was already a member, so my joining up allowed us both to be ushered into the inner sanctum housing the stash.

The store itself was immaculately laid out with neat glass-cased counters displaying all the desiderata in various forms and at various concentrations of THC and CBD.  For the cognoscenti, this was no doubt a very inviting display as evinced by the palaver carried on between other customers and clerks, all of whom were very knowledgeable of both their products and the applicable legalese.  After getting some answers to my questions, my friend made a very modest purchase of probably their most benign SKU, and we made our way to the exit.  Then I noticed that the store’s walls each had a magnificent abstract painting cum mural on it, replicating their foyer and no doubt reinforcing visually the promises made by the cleverly named substances and concoctions.  As we left the premises, it occurred to me that I am now marked for life.

4 May 2019 - A Day of Auspicious Observances

George Rebane

Seventy years ago today, in the early hours of 4 May 1949, I stood on the rail of the troop carrier USS Harry Taylor (pictured) with my father, as the ship slid past the Statue of Liberty to dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  That evening on a chicken farm near Plainfield, Connecticut began our new life in America.  The description of that auspicious day I recall in ‘Sixty Years Ago Today – 4 May 1949’.

Earlier today Jo Ann and I attended a farewell party for our friends Stan and Elaine Meckler.  They are the latest Californians who see no reason to stay in this state of galloping socialism, rapacious taxes, and a badly fractured society with dysfunctional values and no identifiable culture.  After the 2008 election we worked with the senior and junior Mecklers and a few other Nevada County families to found the Tea Party.  In the following years, their son Mark Meckler became the recognized co-founder and prominent national voice of the Tea Party.  Jo Ann and I are sad to see another family of friends disappear over the horizon to greener pastures.

And finally, this afternoon we also said good-bye to a long-time friend and poker buddy Gil Gray who died about six weeks ago.  Gil’s wife Dee asked me to deliver the eulogy at his celebration of life held at the Gold Miners Inn in Grass Valley.  Gil was a kind good-hearted person, and always a gentleman.  Gil’s passing marks for many of us a tragic 12-months, during which we now have lost three from our band of Brothers of the Green Felt, who attend monthly psychostochastic seminars around the beloved octagon, a tradition now in its 25^th year.

Sandbox - 1may19

[The $2T infrastructure bill is going to be a problem that the Dems hope will choke Team Trump.  What about letting the several states plan and do the infrastructure work in their states under a coordinated plan from the feds.  The states can come up with novel public/private funding schemes which may involve the feds only to the extent of guaranteeing loans and bond issues of those they approve.  Thoughts?  gjr]