Rebane's Ruminations

Memorial Day – 31 May 2021

George Rebane

Most but not all died to save America from a calamitous tyranny; many have also died for America to remain as the world’s white hat hegemon.  On this day we gratefully remember and honor them all.

‘The Soul of Black Conservatism’

George Rebane

Scholar and commentator Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute has written a biography of economist Thomas Sowell, one of the country’s most celebrated conservative academics and intellectuals.  Progressives accuse Sowell’s perspectives on race in America as “going against the grain of fellow African-Americans.”  That on its face is wrong, as Riley points out in Sowell’s own words during a Charlie Rose interview - “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.” (more here)

A main thesis of Sowellian thought on race is that successful racial/ethnic groups in America have assumed their places in our pluralistic society by relying on their own resources and means, and not waiting for the dominant culture to provide them special dispensations to smooth the ‘E pluribus unum’ road to assimilated equality.  “If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes of self-reliance”.

Sowell has also maintained that “government has a role to play in social mobility, albeit a limited one, and incentives matter”, but he remains worried about “handouts that ask little or nothing of the recipient, and thus risk creating dependency”.  Thanks to the Democrats’ imbued plantation mentality on the nation’s blacks, that kind of dependency has now been created and etched in stone as the foundational principle of modern black politics – white supremacists have taken the blacks’ share of the common weal, and through the practice of ‘systemic racism’ deny blacks the ability to garner their fair share of the nation’s riches.  Hence, America must be fundamentally transformed so that a more comprehensive and encompassing government can then use its gun to force an equitable redistribution.  The Left teaches that is the only way to achieve social justice in the land.

As a concluding thought, Rebane Doctrine holds that to the extent that systemic racism can be shown to exist in America, it is practiced and maintained by the country’s elitist Left (both black and white) with the unwitting support of their purposely under-educated legions of urban African-Americans.  Our main street whites have long been indifferent to the racial make-up of their neighbors, team mates, fellow workers, and even spouses.  Nowhere has this been more demonstrated than in our post-war military.  A litmus test for the end of such racism will be a time when we no longer require organizations, institutions, and agencies to have race-specific names, race-based memberships, and that provide race-based dispensations.

Scattershots – 24may21 (updated 31may21)

If "being shot is a risk police officers take with the job", then isn't being shot a risk criminals take when breaking the law?

George Rebane

Tomorrow our Left will celebrate the life of George Floyd on the anniversary of his death last year in the custody of the Minneapolis police.  The ‘celebration’ itself is a specious undertaking of political propaganda at its most blunt delivery while cloaked in the highest level of obfuscation for the nation’s hoi polloi.  Mr Floyd was a career petty criminal and drug addict, in and out of jails, who devoted his life to victimizing fellow blacks.  His unfortunate death at the hands of white police officers set in motion a perfect storm that has been used by Democrats, cum socialists and communists, to convince the country’s lightly read that America remains a deeply racist country with persecuted minorities, especially our African-Americans, whose lot has not improved since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Huckster Al Sharpton will feature prominently in the coming kabuki, as will President Biden’s White House meeting with the Floyd family to assure all the country’s blacks it is America’s racist Right that has deprived them of their ‘fair share’, and has kept them suffering on the plantation all these decades.

Victor Davis Hanson (here) and Bret Weinstein (here) whose essays have both hit it “outta da park” according to a longtime commenter, who again joins with RR’s cohort of other astute commenters who regularly bring to our readers’ attention significant commentaries that reveal and characterize these historic times, during which our country is rent and the world order is changing.  These pages have featured both writers over the years, and again their recent contributions do not disappoint.

Sandbox – 22may21

[My ongoing reunification commentaries saga with The Union augments what we’ve discovered in these pages - that grassroots leftwingers have no clue about the kind of America that their elite leadership has chosen for us, and are now implementing through a bevy of misguided policies not experienced in decades.  They’re ignorant of it because their more recent schooling did not reveal collectivist objectives, or because they only consume lamestream outlets which dutifully deny that the Democrats seek to instill the trappings of collectivism in the America they intend to uniformly pauper (equity) with their socialist nostrums.  These assume the classic historical format of the Left, applied devastatingly over the last century, that includes summarily politicizing science, education, and economics to fit their overarching narrative.  gjr]

Systemic Racism in America

George Rebane

Systemic racism is alive and well in America, and it has been in a fine fettle for most of the last fifty years.  We have our progressive and Marxist neighbors to thank for bringing it to our attention, only not in the way that they have massaged the national message.  All of our divers ethnic groups are aware of what the euphemistically labeled ‘Section 8’ promotions, admissions, awards, distributions, recognitions, … have been all about.  (I believe the origin of this label generalized from 'Section 8 set asides' in a HUD regulation that would assure minorities and low income applicants would get their share in certain kinds of contracting and allocations.)  Black intellectuals like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and the late Walter Williams deplored Section 8 advancements, not only for their racism, but for the explicit message that our African-Americans are somehow intellectually inferior and need special favorable dispensations to enable them to approach par with the other racial groups that participate in our public forums.

In our land over the years Section 8 advancements have been brought to bear to a fare-thee-well.  We all have seen it, and now witness its application in steroids.  (Un/fortunately, my professional experiences also abound in this realm.  And these have obviously shaped my socio-political beliefs.) Today even the simplest of statistical tests will confirm that the public face of our society is racially composed and biased.  The histrionics of the current ‘woke culture’ daily exposes a bevy of new insane interpretations of our language, America’s traditional culture, along with lunatic efforts to amplify systemic racism to bring about ‘equity’, the new scourge of progressive social engineering.

The resulting intellectual rot our Left is rapidly inducing into all of our institutions has, of course, already swept through academe, wreaked havoc in transforming capitalism into corporatism, seeped into the very fiber of our military, and today is finally broaching the formerly secure intellectual ramparts of our technical disciplines.  As we now see, equity is Section 8’s bastard issue.

A specific example that clearly illustrates the above is found in today’s academe – specifically, in math education.  Powerline presents the evidence in ‘Math is hard – hardest of all for the Left’.  From there we learn “that certain Virginia public school districts (and others elsewhere in the country) will discontinue advanced math classes, because (of) ‘equity’, and the University of California will permanently discontinue using the SAT for admission purposes.”  The graphic below explains the Left’s concern.  (Click on image for a larger presentation.)

The article by Steven Hayward goes on to explain, “If there’s one thing the left can’t abide at the moment, it is unequal racial results in achievement tests—tests that, let us recall, were largely invented by the liberal establishment decades ago as a means of making meritocracy count for more than family connections, private school pedigree, and so forth. It is not surprising that the left is turning on meritocracy right now.”

To further emphasize the extent of African-American and Hispanic academic deficits, which must be hidden/ignored, take a look at the graphic below that contains a SAT performance data matrix from the DoJ’s recent investigation of Yale’s admission practices.  Note the obvious bias in the admission of blacks and Latinos.  Only 20.18% of whites in the 10th decile (the top 10% of students’ SAT scores) were admitted, whereas 60% of similarly scoring blacks were admitted.  The admission rate for blacks did not sink to the level of the top admission rate for whites until the black students’ scores were in the 5^th decile (in the lower half of test scores) where their admission rate was still 20.85%, higher than that of the highest scoring whites.

Here then we see one of the actual faces of existential systemic racism that has been resurrected in America.  This is the decades-long fruit of Democrat public policies, especially those promoted by their virulent Marxist anti-American wing under the new cynical rubric of ‘equity’.  To continue in power and our country on the road to autocratic socialist mediocrity, the Democrats cannot afford to have America’s blacks and Hispanics understand what has been done to them since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  With the Left’s control of our educational institutions and the media, there is little chance for them to enjoy any ethnic and/or racial epiphanies anytime soon.  Thus, America’s systemic racism is not only sustained, but also assured growth.

All the news youse can use

George Rebane

Ever try to find a coherent set of TV program ratings on the web?  I just tried to do it again, after avoiding the frustration for a number of years.  My sweetie-pie and I were having one of our breakfast conversations when the topic turned to a news article that cited how informed Americans were about our country’s basic facts/numbers.  The 18may21article from Rasmussen Reports (cited by a reader), headlined ‘Conservative Viewers Are Better Informed About Important Topics’, got us thinking about the information sources regularly accessed by our mostly uninformed neighbors across the land.

So, we wondered how many people got their daily news from where.  And that again turned out to be a no easy task to google.  After some considerable surfing of various web sites I was able to assemble the following somewhat coherent table drawn mostly (entirely?) from Nielsen ratings.  I look at these numbers as being a snapshot of a noisy time series of viewers of the six major cable and mainstream television news outlets.

Looking at the above numbers, let’s assume that another 50% of our news consuming countrymen (which definitely includes women and others of all kinds of sexual orientations and configurations) get their news from other TV, print, and online outlets, in more or less the same liberal v conservative proportions.  That brings our total of, shall we say, ‘informed cohort’ to about 40 million.  Say, that this cohort is drawn from those aged 20-84 potential news consumers (and voters?) who currently total about 230M out of a population of 331M.  This number ties nicely to the total number of potential voters in the country, of whom only 55-60% or 127-138M actually, on average, turn out to vote.  (2020 was an extraordinary year in which almost 67% of eligible voters voted.)

From the above table we note that between 1 of 7 and 1 of 8 voters get their information from what can be labeled as conservative or rightwing sources.  The remainder get theirs from robustly liberal or leftwing sources (in these pages charitably labeled the lamestream media).  This provides conservatives a core of about 31M informed voters.  Through daily contacts with neighbors, it is these right-leaning Americans who convince the remainder to bring in the remaining Republican votes during elections.

Here you can see what kind of an uphill battle this disorganized core of conservatives have in order to take their message to the news-oblivious masses so that election outcomes are as tight as we have witnessed.  This ideological war is made even more one-sided when you consider the progressive propaganda that is constantly purveyed through academe, institutions, entertainment, and now also corporatist sectors.  Into today’s maelstrom of Marxist thought and values, the Republican party barely responds as it is outgunned in the public square by Democrats who effectively control the majority of the non-news voting community.

Suppressing Climate Change Debate

“If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” - Michael Crichton in a famous 2003 lecture at Caltech.

George Rebane

The evil Democrats and their corporatist allies continue their massive nationwide campaign to suppress speech and the First Amendment.  Among their latest forays in this area of America’s public discourse is to suppress substantive debate on climate change by loudly and insubstantially denigrating the latest comprehensive treatment of the topic by Caltech physicist Dr Steven Koonin in his Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters (2021).  This book becomes a significant part of the struggling bulwark against the Left’s promotion of mass hysteria about what is claimed to be preventable manmade global warming.  In these pages I and others have presented years of reasoned arguments illustrating the folly of politically erected and sustained consensus science; here we continue this ongoing effort.

In his 26apr21 WJS review of Unsettled, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills writes –

Physicist Steven Koonin kicks the hornet’s nest right out of the gate in “Unsettled.” In the book’s first sentences he asserts that “the Science” about our planet’s climate is anything but “settled.” Mr. Koonin knows well that it is nonetheless a settled subject in the minds of most pundits and politicians and most of the population. … The book is no polemic. It’s a plea for understanding how scientists extract clarity from complexity. And, as Mr. Koonin makes clear, few areas of science are as complex and multidisciplinary as the planet’s climate.

One of my major criticisms of the hyped predictions of climate doom is that they are a based on faulty (general circulation) models.  Dr Koonin wrote the book on modeling large scale ‘physics systems’, and corroborates my own longstanding professional assessment of such models as to their feasibility and reliability.

But what Steven Koonin’s massive and well-referenced tome documents are the factual counters to the large-scale lies with which big government collectivists and their media allies daily fill the news and entertainment channels worldwide.  Examples –

• Frequency and magnitude of severe weather events (e.g. hurricanes) is increasing – NOT TRUE.
• World’s temperature highs are increasing – NOT TRUE.
• Atmospheric CO2 levels are at all-time highs – NOT TRUE.
• Number and severity of droughts are increasing – NOT TRUE.

The real harm is generated by the public’s acceptance of these lies (over 64% of the world’s population believes in a climate “emergency”) is that they compliantly accept the insane, economy stultifying, and liberty constraining public policies their political leaders and government bureaucracies concoct.  All this in the name of nowhere near any “settled science”, as Koonin makes clear.  But then, as they have demonstrated over recent decades, the average voter has had neither the interest nor intellect to examine what science is and what it really says about climate change.  A Swedish teen-ager’s emotional ramblings about a climate calamity are a much more digestible fare to all the folks out there in television land.  Forgive them Father, for they know not … .  (more here and here)

Retired flag officers break their silence

George Rebane

Having served in America’s military constrains neither an individual’s 1A rights nor his duty as a concerned and patriotic citizen in calling attention to a grossly misguided government.  To remain silent in such a case is, at a minimum, the height of cowardice and dereliction of duty.  Seeing the destruction of our republic that the Biden administration is engineering with their even more radical colleagues in Congress, over 120 retired flag officers (generals and admirals) came together to sign an open letter to the nation (here).  In this letter they express their deep concerns about what is going on currently in our country, and what this means to the future of America and Americans.

In response to the publication of this open letter, the always anti-Trump and sometimes right-of-center Foreign Policy was given to vapors as it digested “this piece of appalling partisan invective” (here)  It came out with a strong editorial that took the former flags to task, even accusing them of being unpatriotic, and declared that the “open letter by former officers calling the president a ‘Marxist’ dictator is a greater threat to US democracy than the ouster of Liz Cheney.”

The FP mavens even went so far as to accuse these civilians of having “violated the norms of their profession and contributed to the erosion of healthy civil-military relations in the Untied States.”  Apparently they missed that part of their political science studies that taught them when and where members of the American military are to remain non-partisan.  The strictures when on active duty fall away once their military careers are over and they re-enter civilian life.  Our country’s history is full of episodes of former military officers becoming quite partisan after their service terminated – at least five of them even became presidents, hundreds have served in partisan elected offices, and thousands more let their subsequent partisan voices be heard in the public square.

To FP and like-thinkers, these former officers “are now doing their level best to undermine (the Constitution) and, in particular, the crucial principle of civilian control.”  As you read the flags’ open letter, you will see that they do none of what their leftwing opponents accuse them.

Equality vs Equity

George Rebane

The latest socialist bamboozle is the Democrats' new declaration that America is now more racially divided than it has been for years, and what we now need to fix our society is to pass new laws and regulations to instill equity across the land.  Forget about equality, we’re now told that is a white supremacist cum racist term and concept.  From here on out equity is ‘where it’s at’.  So, what’s the difference?

It turns out the difference is not only big, but requires a very large government, which in turn requires a much greater collection of tribute to bring about nationwide equity.  Part of the big bamboozle is how our leftwing propagandists demonstrate the difference between equality and equity using the graphic below.

All this equity business is being built up to stamp out racism and white privilege.  Pew Research has found that the “public has negative views of the country’s racial progress; more than half say Trump has made race relations worse.”  (more here) What evidence does the average person have/cite that makes him believe that, while the rest of the world’s poor and ‘people of color’ consider that notion to be utterly false (aka bullshit) as attested by their heroic attempts to get into America.  The ‘evidence’ provided the average American has been a steady 24/7 drizzle of racist propaganda from the lamestream as part and parcel of serving up a constant anti-Trump diet for the last five years.  Sadly, the critical thinking skills of our hoi polloi are of bottom-of-barrel quality.

An obvious aspect of the above picture of equity as it concerns wealth redistribution is that their scheme keeps the amount of wealth constant – you just reallocate the existing boxes.  A more complete definition of equity includes the dictum of equal outcomes – equal opportunity is not sufficient because that then requires differential effort to achieve equal outcome.  And a fundamental tenet of socialists everywhere is that enabling the poor and ignorant to compete will tend to make them more independent and accomplished, and less needy of socialist succor.  For the success of socialism, best to keep them on the plantation and be seen as their only reliable source of life’s necessaries.

Scattershots - 12may21 (updated 14may21)

George Rebane

Online cheating at all time high (here).  Getting someone else to do your assignment or take your test is a big business in the current epoch of remote learning.  Students cite the difficulty in learning anything in the remote and virtual presentations of material they are offered.  Others say that the stress level to achieve today is higher than ever.  Both reasons seem to justify cheating by hiring online ‘tutors’ to do their work.  Online cheating is very hard to detect, and everyone believes that what was put in practice during the C19 pandemic will be continued in the new post-pandemic ‘normal’.  Combine this with the already crap for curriculum that unionized public school teachers deliver, and the future for the next generation of ‘educated’ workers looks very dim, … and what does that do for America having to compete in international markets and maintaining leadership in defense technologies?  All this is being brought about in an environment of classroom chaos tolerated more than ever in the name of ‘racial equity’.  (more here)

Everyone is testing Biden on the world stage, and so far he continues to fail every test.  As most of us predicted last year in these pages, Bumblebrain as president would be subjected to a battery of international ‘crises’ as soon as he was sworn in.  And true to form, every bad guy on the geo-strategic stage is now taking advantage of the American president renown for his absolute ignorance of how the world order works as attested to his record of past failures in assessing international events and problems.  Bumblebrain has surrounded himself with a remarkable cadre of limp-wristed policy makers and enforcers who have garnered no respect from our allies and antagonists (e.g. note how Alejandro Mayorkas SecDHS continues to deny the border crisis and push the administration’s Big Lie that “the border is secure”).  The likelihood for a major conflict and/or setback on the world stage increases daily.

Almost all economists cannot make useful predictions of economic behavior and events.  My view of economists, especially those professing quantitative models and more so those of socialist leanings, has been justifiably dour for most of my adult life.  Today these know-nothings are especially in demand by the Dems and the Biden administration to sprinkle some progressive pixie dust on the country’s path to ever more comprehensive socialism.  But as usual, they make huge errors that would be egregious in any public forum attended by an informed and numerate population.  That being far from the case, the current cadre of economists are free to continue their nonsensical blatherings without harming any one but America’s taxpayers.  The most recent example being their prediction of a million new jobs for April that turned out to be less than one fourth that number. (more here)

Anybody know what Trump did that was unconstitutional?  The Dems and their lamestream lackeys repeat that charge daily in their desperate attempts to divert attention from their own anti-constitutional proposals and policies.  Today the list of the most egregious anti-American activities of the Dems is headed by their utter abandonment of border security and their promotion of HR1 in Congress.  The latter’s provisions are based on enormous lies and cynical assessments of our national elections and the country's state of affairs in general.  Their intent is to bring the nation’s elections under federal control, in distinct contravention of our Constitution’s prescriptions.  True to their rampant road to socialism, HR1 would destroy the federalism under which the several states conduct their elections. (more here) Central planning and control über alles.

CDC, NIH, WHO, …, all of them have shown how politicized science can mismanage responses to the Covid pandemic at all levels of government.  The potpourri of pronouncements from such agencies over the last year have been all over the map, and continue to this day.  Their main function has been to let politicians establish and extend illegal, unnecessary, and harmful public policies, the only function of which is to reduce individual liberties and expand the establishment of a powerful centralized government.  The latest such revelation (which is not news to most RR readers) is CDC’s lying about the C19’s outdoor transmission rate which enables politicians to double down on social distancing and mask mandates.  These substantive big lies have been enthusiastically backed by the Dems and trumpeted daily by their lamestream media.  Their impact on the nation’s economic health and forms of transforming governance will be studied for decades by free-thinking historians.  Government historians have already written this history and incorporated it into the nation’s school curricula.  (more here and here)

[14may21 update]  Masks still required for the vaccinated frequenting crowded spaces.  So can someone from the vaunted ‘party of science’ explain how the immunizing and prophylactic properties of the vaccine diminish when the vaccinated walk into one of these crowded space?  The CDC failed to expand on that point.  Even David Leonhardt of the NYT penned a critical commentary of the CDC (here) about its baseless, fluid, and science-free face mask mandates. (H/T to reader, and more here, here and here)

Covid, the third greatest killer in the land?  This little stat is being purveyed perhaps to justify the mostly insane response policies that have been recommended and implemented by government agencies and jurisdictions over the last year.  Our own Don Rogers (Union publisher) writes today – “Some of us also learned folly, depression, grief, though these were not nearly so widespread nor the disease so deadly as at first feared. Still, it is widespread. It is deadly. It is the third-leading cause of death in America, right behind cardiac disease and cancer whether you count by diagnosis or annual deaths above average. It is real.”  Such naked reporting overlooks C19’s role as the stand-in grim reaper for the elderly and/or infirm who were statistically on death’s door with or without the pandemic.  Some malady was going to take these people in any case, and it turned out to be a dreaded disease that had little if any measurable effect on the mortality rates of the young and younger.  C19 was able to rack up its score and place third this time only because of its (not so exceptional) virulence and some wrong-headed and random response policies.  But writing reports which make the lightly-read reader believe that now we have permanently ensconced a new third-place killer is both misleading and wrong.  All that such journalism does is perpetuate continued and docile acceptance of population control policies, no matter how ill-advised.

Sandbox - 11may21

[Many apologies for letting the last sandbox getting a bit overfilled.  We are now in the Houston terminal waiting to board our flight to Sacramento - it’s been a long three weeks and we’ve seen a lot of our US of A that has changed so much from the pre-Covid days.  Everywhere you turn, insanity rules.  Much more to be said about the fundamental transformation now in full swing.  Gjr]

In a country of wimps and wooses

George Rebane

We’ve been on travel over the last couple of weeks, doing a ‘southeast’ tour that started in Washington DC and worked its way down the coast to Miami, and then up the gulf coast visiting friends along the way.  We are currently in New Orleans and will finish in Houston after seeing our niece and her family in San Antonio (another set of California expatriates).  There is a lot to report on what we’ve seen in all the states we’ve been in, especially as it comes to how the country continues its pandemic response.  The bottom line of all that we’ve witnessed is that 1) there is no consistency in what people are doing and 2) the state-to-state public policies.  How/when/where people wear masks and socially distance varies all over the place.  No one seems to be sure of anything, except that they must comply to whatever insane diktats of their governor or mayor they believe to be in effect.  I am sad to report that in the large we Americans are a bunch of subservient wimps and wooses demonstrating over-abundant cautious behaviors - timid, compliant, and confused - that were more appropriate to serfs than a population of informed and independent minded citizens of a free country.  That kind of responses the Left appears to have successfully beaten out of us – ‘I don’t know why I’m doing it other than following orders.’  

Neil Patel of the Daily Caller is one of several national journalists who observes the same degradation of our citizens, and in his ‘Masks In Cars — What’s Behind America’s COVID-19 Insanity?’ writes –

If you wanted to teach a class on how to cause confusion and distrust, you would follow the U.S. government’s coronavirus playbook. A lot has been written about the historically low levels of trust Americans have in their leaders and institutions. There’s been less analysis on what happens when a government has no faith in its own citizens. We are seeing the results today. From the start of the pandemic, health authorities have chosen gamesmanship over honesty. This has resulted in muddled and inconsistent messaging from national leaders. The end result is a broken country of citizens at one another’s throats. Mask fights, deboarding flights and, of course, the crazy people driving around alone in their cars with masks on all stem, at least in part, from a government that refused to treat Americans like adults who could handle the truth.