Rebane's Ruminations

Afghanistan – Tell us the truth instead (updated 4sep21)

George Rebane

’20-year Afghanistan Mission Accomplished’ tout our Democrat leaders as they thank all those service members who sacrificed their lives in so many ways.  These politicians describe such sacrifices as having been made voluntarily by our military heroes.  But IMHO that doesn’t jive with reality.  Who among the sacrificed would have willingly done so if told from the gitgo in, say, 2012 that you’re going to Afghanistan with the possibility of dying, getting your legs blown off, or coming back with PTSD in order to deny the Taliban ragheads another eight years of running the country as a tyrannical Islamist gulag, and which will again become home to various international terror organizations of the kind that gave us 9/11, and then we will cut and run?  Not many would have signed up for that kind of duty had they been told the truth.

But if being given a realistic mission, say, ‘It’s highly likely that we’ll be in Afghanistan forever with a minimal force level consisting mostly of intelligence operations, drone air support, and training Afghan security forces to prop up their government and keep the country from reverting to raghead terrorist control.  You will be in combat until we can bring the situation into a desired low/no casualty stasis.  This is the cost of doing White Hat business around the world to secure our homeland and the lands of our allies who join us in such operations.  America has done this in the past, and realistically today we see no future time when global evil will be vanquished so that such outposts and tours of duty, first outlined by Ambassador Kennan in 1946, will no longer be necessary.’  I know of no one in our circle of friends who would not sign up for such a tour when called upon – and that is because most of us have manned the ramparts of freedom at one time or another, and will do so again.  But it all starts with telling us the truth.

[4sep21 update]  Never let a crisis or disaster go to waste.  In the Dems’ desperate attempt to paper over the historically atrocious Biden Afghan debacle, the lamestream media are doing their best to sweep that ignominious, tragic, and chaotic military retreat under the rug, any rug of opportunity.  So Ida for Al-Qaeda has become the opportune switcheroo in the socialist press and punditry.  No more are we concerned about that premier terrorist organization resurging and setting up again in Afghanistan.  At the best the lamestream will continue pushing the lie that the Taliban doesn’t get along with Al-Qaeda and other recidivist outfits like the ISIS-X (currently X=K) et al.

So now we don’t have to worry about the return of all kinds of bad guys as long as we ‘work with’ the Taliban.  Anyone who has been paying attention (a shrinking minority) knows that all of them belong to the Haqqani network of cheek-by-jowl anti-western terror outfits.  And at their chapter house meetings, they must be laughing their butts off about what they read in the NYT, WaPo, and hear on CNN, MSNBC, … .  Meanwhile, to keep the Return of the Ragheads under wraps, the Democrats have qued up Covid and climate change for their lamestream as the next diversionary dollops for dimwits.  (Remember, they still have to have to keep the open-border crisis hidden from their cognitively calcified constituents.)

We Live in the Golden Age of Stupidity

Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become. - Jean Cocteau

George Rebane

So argues Lance Morrow, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and former Boston University journalism professor, in the 30aug21 WSJ (here).  Morrow introduces a slightly different aspect of stupidity than the one used in these pages.  (Here ignorance denotes a lack of specific knowledge, and stupid denotes the cognitive inability to process knowledge.  Only the former is correctible.)  Functionally, Morrow’s ‘stupidity’ is the same, but applied wholesale to large masses of people.  He immediately opens with –

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time—one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.

As we have shown for years, the American Left has dedicated itself to 1) creating wholesale ignorance through our public schools, and 2) promoting the stupid in their ranks to enduring positions of power.  The former to create generations of compliant constituents, the latter to generate, promote, and maintain insane and/or dysfunctional public policies in their jurisdictions.  The confluence of both creates the stupidity, as described by Morrow, that ensures the expansion and calcification of monopolistic autocracy in the body politic.  The evidence for this abounds and is available to a shrinking cohort of Americans; to the remainder it is the acceptable norm, socially just, and the ‘American way’.

Until the arrival of mass media (i.e. radio circa 1920) history tells us that we Americans were extremely political animals, participating in extensive discussions of the issues, political corruption, impactive legislation, and election campaigns at all levels.  Newspapers with their editorials and political cartoons (e.g. see Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904) were devoured in detail on Main Street, church suppers, and in Grange meetings.  Everyone had some pertinent knowledge of current events and issues – it was a sought honor to be known as a ‘person of information’. 

Sandbox – 29aug21

[The genesis of our wildfires.  Here’s a topic everyone is afraid of discussing.  Almost all of our wildfires are manmade – they are started by indigents, crazies, and people with a political agenda.  The fires started by accidents and natural causes are well-known, few and far in between.  However, our politicians, liberal activists, and media of all hues treat western wildfires as if they were ‘acts of God’, and therefore their genesis need not be questioned, let alone examined, any further.  Given the number of annual wildfires, notice how rare is there any subsequent mention of arson investigations or what these may have discovered.  It seems that the ‘vulnerable underprivileged’ have a natural right to start fires and then be left alone.  And it is not a stretch to imagine the damage anti-American terrorists can do in a free country by simply setting wildfires with easily fabricated, time-delayed pyrotechnic devices.  But from what the public sees, our authorities neither suspect nor pursue such errant behavior – the fires just magically flare up and cause totally acceptable devastation.  gjr]

The Ongoing and Tragic Biden Debacle

George Rebane

Let’s face it from the gitgo, Bumblebrain is so out of it that he and those supporters around him don’t even acknowledge the long list of tragedies that this administration has launched in its first eight months in office – border crisis, national crime wave, confused Covid response, $3.5T Green New Deal, mangled national employment, …, and now Afghanistan.  To them these atrocities either don’t exist or are just normative and expected reactions to their carefully laid out policies.

In Afghanistan we now see what has happened when they executed an exit policy that would have been rejected by a third-year ROTC cadet with a couple courses of military history and tactics under his belt.  The two most obvious and advised-against mistakes were the abandonment of the Bagram air base, and the withdrawing our last combat troops before starting the evacuation of civilians.  Everyone with a 3-digit IQ knew that the Afghan army would collapse as a fighting force immediately after we withdrew our air support, intelligence feeds, and contracted mechanics who kept their aircraft and their more complex combat systems operational.  And all, save the administration, knew that the Taliban would then be in Kabul in a fortnight.

Were there any honor left in the administration and its Pentagon political lackies, there would be a long list of resignations on the president’s desk to herald the much-needed housecleaning to make room for a more competent cadre of staff and military leaders.  And were any semblance of justice and concern for national security left in the Democratic Party, there would be a long list of impeachment filings against officials who were obviously derelict in their sworn duties or even criminal in their errors and omissions.

Since none of that is happening, and flacks like Psaki and Kirby are trotted out to obfuscate and confound what is really happening, we know that the cover-up of the century has been launched in preparation for next year’s midterm election.

Part and parcel of the Democrats’ national redoubt is California’s September recall election.  I am of the school that believes that Team Newsom with the help of national Democrats will do whatever is necessary to make sure Gavin does not get recalled.  The state’s election laws are now tailored to support election fraud and ‘irregularities’, abetted by everything from universal use of mail-ballots to the voting/vote counting period that extends before and after the 14sep21 election day.

California has been mismanaged so visibly and for so long that, post-Newsom, people will immediately ascribe responsibility to the state’s political monopoly.  A Republican governor will have the ability to reverse an untold number of misbegotten policies, codes, initiatives, and regulations that have been put in place by executive fiat.  The immediate impact of such a reversal will be apparent to a sufficient fraction of the state’s voters that it would most likely signal the end of the Democrats’ super-majority legislature, and perhaps even their massive embeds in the state’s various appointed and elected office slots.  The problem for the national Democrats is that such a political epiphany will be seen everywhere, and give lie to the progressive policies that have issued from state capitals and city halls across the land, those dominated by proto-Marxist politicians.

The amount of out-of-state money pouring in to support Newsom’s retainment attests to this assessment.  And we ain’t seen nothing yet when the fireworks erupt as the election draws nigh.  It will be a hot time in the old town for many a night.

Meanwhile, Biden’s tragic Afghanistan rout rolls on. (more here)

‘Illiberal American Century’

George Rebane

[This is a quick response to an essay by a noted leftwing academic that I received from a longtime correspondent and friend who sometimes tacks a bit to my port side.  I post it because the author presents a good summary of what continues to abet our Left’s ongoing expressions of TDS as their never-ending source of all ills that currently blanket this fair land.]

America is becoming a “rogue superpower” according to Michael Beckley, leftwing academic at Harvard’s Kennedy Center and a professor at Tufts.  His essay ‘Rogue Superpower – Why This Could be an Illiberal American Century’ in the Nov/Dec2020 Foreign Affairs argued that President Trump’s policies focusing on America’s interests was making our country a pariah hegemon in the community of nations.  Events since then have made many important aspects of his arguments moot or just plain wrong, but his arguments are worth reviewing since they still form the core of what Democrats and their radical left purvey daily through our lamestream media.

To begin, Beckley has a somewhat skewed if not jaundiced view of history with blithe observations that after WW2 “hundreds of millions accepted communism”, a proposition that flies in the face of the actual methods communists used to subvert national governments and turn nations into wholesale gulags under the heels of tyrants who slaughtered millions of their own citizens.

Beckley sees Trump’s policy of having NATO countries pay at their agreed levels (2% of GDP) for their and the continent’s security as a mortal sin of international diplomacy.  Beckley’s solution is for us to continue bearing the overwhelming share of NATO’s defense budget, and subsume our national interest in the process.  He does not recognize nor make mention of China’s rapid advances in technology (mostly purloined), military build-up, and territorial expansions.  This blind spot makes him a critic of America’s response to Trump’s defense budgets.

Somehow the entire decades-long successful strategy of containing communist, and now fundamentalist Islamic tyrannies, is completely overlooked.  It’s as if Beckley is ignorant of what George Kennan laid out in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ to President Truman.  There Kennan made clear the global aims of the Left headed by the USSR and supported by numerous Marxist-Leninist regimes that supplanted many formerly western colonial governments after WW2.

Kennan’s counsel was assiduously followed during the Cold War, and specifically supported by Trump in his announced policy of fielding expeditionary units as needed vs maintaining expensive and politically sensitive permanent bases as the correct solution to an affordable and effective white hat global hegemony.  Beckley missed this one completely and recommends global deterrence by setting up US missile bases on foreign soils.  He is apparently ignorant of how allies like Germany responded when we suggested basing intermediate range nuclear missiles in their lands.  At least then we had our troops in those countries to defend such installations.  Beckley is silent on the force levels required to defend the foreign-based missiles in his plan.  And curiously, he argues against Trump’s stated policy of using Taiwan and the Baltics as well-armed buffers against China’s and Russia’s demonstrated expansionist aims.

And some things Beckley just gets wrong for reasons that are out of scope for this short piece.  An example is his assertion that Trump “gutted” DepState and “handed more responsibility to the Pentagon”.  Save for increasing defense spending, Trump did exactly the opposite with his announced policies of diminishing our military’s overseas roles and bases, and in Mike Pompeo, installing one of the most knowledgeable and widely respected SecStates in recent history.  I invite comparison to Biden’s low grade ore Antony Blinken now underperforming in that slot.  (In addition to him I invite your attention to our newly politicized Pentagon with worthies like SecDef Austin and JCS Chair Gen Milley.  What they are doing to our military deserves expanded inquiries by the DOJ and a bipartisan congressional committee.  Cutting to the chase, Biden has populated his cabinet with an historical legion of losers.)

So, along with many other Americans, I am puzzled as to what is rogue about a country acting in its own best interests to maintain world order - e.g. see Kissinger’s World Order (2014)  ALL other countries have demonstrably done the same for centuries, and do so to this day.  Beckley wants the US to continue its sacrifice-and-pay policy while suborning America’s interests to that of its allies and even countries that are openly hostile to us – has he forgotten Golden Rule #2? - ‘them that’s got the gold makes the rules’, or its gentler version, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune.’  America First has never meant that the rest of the world can go to hell in a handbasket.

Sandbox - 23aug21

['I am NOT a victim'  Worth watching before YouTube censors it, especially by our portside progressives.  gjr]

Scattershots – 19aug21 (updated 23aug21)

George Rebane

“Since the introduction of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, China has what economists call a socialist market economy – one in which a dominant state-owned enterprises sector exists in parallel with market capitalism and private ownership.”  This is the version of capitalism of which many on our Left are so enamored, with claims of how such restructuring of the economy will promote - wait for it - equity.  The truth is actually the opposite.  The further the socialist slide toward communism has progressed, the more unequal becomes a country’s economy and wealth distribution as measured by the UN in its Gini Index (or Coefficient) ratings of member countries.  The index ranges between zero (complete equality) and one (complete inequality) – a review here.  Today China’s GI = 70.4 compared to America’s GI = 47.7 (more here)  That’s quite a difference in wealth distribution, and completely expected for authoritarian cum totalitarian regimes.  Team Biden and the new radically socialist wing of the Democratic Party are busy fundamentally transforming our economy to more resemble the People’s Republic of China.

[20aug21 update]  Islam – our eternal foe?  So suggests Robert Nicholson, president of the Philos Project, as he dances around the notion of religious plurality in the Middle East.  In his ‘The Unconquerable Islamic World’ (20aug21 WSJ) he writes – “The House of Islam has many rooms, but it stands on a few pillars: The Quran is Allah’s final revelation, binding on all humanity; faith is a matter of private devotion as well as public law, best lived out in a state that blends religion and politics; and Muslims should, where possible, hold power over non-Muslims to ensure that Allah’s law is rightly enforced. It is doctrines like these that cause the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Hamas to fight the ‘Jews and Crusaders’ who tread on land that historically belonged to Islam. But their commitments are far from radical; most Muslims see them as normative even if they fail to act on them.” (emphasis mine)  Combine such ‘normative beliefs’ with Islam’s taqiya, and you get a much better idea of the Muslim mentality that the world faces.  [23aug21 update is the nearby picture.  H/T to correspondent.]

[21aug21 update]  ‘The biggest crime committed during the vaccine heist is the censorship of Ivermectin’  (H/T to reader)  In these pages over the past 18 months we have covered the imbecility and criminality of our governments’ Covid responses, blindly abetted by millions of our leftwing lackies.  Most recently RR focused on the criminality of withholding effective and established prophylactic and treatment drugs from the American public while hundreds of thousands needlessly died waiting for Warp Speed to bear fruit (here).  Now more physicians and scientists have begun to speak out about this enormous crime.  The above cited pieces summarizes –

• While the list of crimes committed by authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic is a long one, perhaps the biggest crime of all is the purposeful suppression of safe and effective treatments, including ivermectin. This appears to have been done to protect the COVID “vaccine” program
• The COVID shots were brought to market under emergency use authorization (EUA), which can only be obtained if there are no other safe and effective alternatives available
• Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies looked at ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection. A rapid review performed on behalf of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) in the U.S., January 3, 2021, found the drug “probably reduces deaths by an average 83% compared to no ivermectin treatment”
• According to a more recent review and meta-analysis, ivermectin, when used preventatively, reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86%
• Another recent scientific review concluded ivermectin produces large statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance

Do you have your prescribed Ivermectin courses of treatment ready to go in your medicine cabinet?

Speaking of getting vaccinated, one should take every opportunity -

[more 23aug21 update]  And now, if you can lower your eyes a mite, for your edification we delve into a bit of timely poetry.

Afghanistan Reflections (updated 21aug21)

George Rebane

Diplomacy unsupported by the threat of force is nothing but duplicitous hot air.

Has Kabul fallen?  For all intents and purposes the answer is yes.  How else to explain all those towelheads carrying their AKs and RPGs, casually walking the streets of that city of six million, while thousands are desperately trying to get on a flight out from the airport’s military side still under American control?  Last we looked, the Afghani ‘security forces’ who had yet to flee were still wearing their uniforms.

Our display of existential historical ignorance is on parade.  Even backwoods snuffies like me have known for decades that Afghanistan is not a ‘country’, but a region of ethnically and culturally similar tribes of the mostly fanatically devout and concomitantly ignorant Muslims.  As recounted here numberless times and echoed by RR’s commentariat, attempting to deal with that region as a unified sovereign nation-state has been a fool’s errand, as history confirms.  The only time Afghanis unite and cooperate is when they fight to expel foreigners from their sandbox.  All foreign policies should start recognizing those truths.

Illustrations of Futility (updated 19aug21)

George Rebane

In the latest effort to find common ground in our fractured country, a new civics curriculum has been devised by a few hundred scholars under the aegis of Educating for American Democracy Initiative.  Bipartisan support comes from Sens Coons and Cornyn who have authored the Civics Secures Democracy Act to pump $1B of federal money into teaching a federal curriculum on history and civics at TBD K-12 levels. (more here)

The initiative is funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Dept of Education.  The intent is for “states to evolve from the traditional approach to curriculum—listing a series of events and concepts for students to learn—and embrace an “inquiry focus” that encourages students to explore open-ended questions from multiple perspectives. Topics would include how the system of American constitutional democracy came to be and what it means to participate in it, the place of the U.S. in the world, and the debates that characterize contemporary American civic life. Instead of focusing on facts about the Constitutional Convention or Shay’s Rebellion, for example, lessons would pose questions, such as ‘How did the institution of enslavement and practices of indigenous removal and even extermination affect national unity in the U.S.?’ Or, ‘Why does a society need shared rules and what do rules do?’”  (Note the ideological drift here.)

Such questions, of course, are less than meaningless to young minds empty of any historical context, context which will somehow be absorbed through the ether since there are no plans to extend the 24-hour day.  Given this approach, and the ideological tint of the curriculum’s progenitors, it is highly probable "that (many) have criticized the initiative as a pretext for teaching left-wing ideas” as is the reasonable concern of some conservative groups.

With some grounding in American history, the group could have suggested some more meaningful pro-American questions for students to discuss, such as, ‘How did the US become the world’s beacon of freedom and enterprise as the ‘shining city on the hill’ of liberty, when it had to work through its difficult decades of slavery, civil war, and years of subsequent racial segregation?’

The way this federal program is to be foisted on local school districts gives pause to even some of it proponents who are concerned “that continued political polarization will likely make it hard for schools to adopt the initiative’s recommendations.”  There are also some other material concerns with the ability of current curricula to educate students so that they will be “civics ready” by 2030.  The most important of these concerns is that the Right and Left see diametrically opposite futures for America's governance and therefore the kind of civics required to produce a citizenry that is supportive and compliant with each of these futures – no such civics exists nor is conceivable.

We refuse to even adopt a conversation that would allow us to try to cobble together a mutually acceptable American future.  Note that I offered a plan and tried to start a conversation with that aim in these pages (here).  That went over like a fart in church with our RR readership, no one is interested in any rapprochement.  North Carolina State University professor Paula McAvoy thinks that this program will run into strong headwinds.  She concludes with –

We’re in a moment in which there’s incredible disagreement about whether democracy is a good idea in the first place, what a good democracy looks like, what civility looks like and what truth looks like, and because we have all this churning in the public about what a good society is, I think this initiative bumps up against the very thing it’s trying to fix.

This is another example of seminal futility that our country’s leadership can’t wrap their heads around.

[19aug21 update]  The country’s Left has been successful in implementing Lenin’s dictum about educating young minds in order to transform a country’s governance and social order.  Its success in America, as in other places, comes from inattention and lack of concern for what is taught in our schools.  With all the other problems in the land, people just aren’t interested in what is poured into the heads of little Jacks and Jills by their unionized leftwing teachers, who by and far are marginally competent to teach them ‘regular subjects’.  This lack of interest arises from a wide spectrum of political beliefs, and isn’t isolated on the Right or the Left.

These pages contribute their own evidence of this particular form of ennui.  This commentary highlights a very recent and damning initiative contributing to the ongoing demise of our public education system, and it has drawn exactly zero comments in its first five days of posting.  I can understand the readers’ disinterest in my more technical topics – after all, our country does not ‘do numbers’ – but what is being taught to our kids should IMHO raise an eyebrow or two here and there.  Our last great century indeed.

Sandbox – 14aug21

[Mark Levin’s American Marxism has been #1 nationwide since it was published some five weeks ago.  It is an exhaustive compendium of America’s body politic and can serve as a handbook for anyone researching items of national concern.  It is also a page-turner that contains an enormous number of substantial quotes drawn political writings that precede Marx, include him and buddy Engels, and go on to the socialist literature that has swept us through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, terminating with the outpourings of today’s Left and their more strident neo-Marxist organizations.  Unless you know the stuff in the book, you are at best lobbing small caliber rounds, and more likely shooting blanks.  Levin is a good wordsmith with whom those on the Left and Right should spend time, first, to learn more completely their own ideologies, and then to discover what really drives the other side beyond the daily ad hominems and diversionary dollops of fake news.  gjr]

Climate Hysteria 3.0 (maybe 4.0)

George Rebane

‘Settled’ is not an adjective to be used with real science.

The recently released AR6 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has injected new life into climate hysteria that seems to have been flagging over the last few years.  The usual hysterics are again up in arms with another round of outlandish warnings and proposals to tank the economies of the developed countries, led, of course, by the US.  More sober and knowledgeable scientists are saying ‘not so fast’.

Physicist Steven Koonin has been introduced in these pages as one of the leading sober and knowledgeable scientists who has for some years now been counseling a more measured view of climate change.  His recent best seller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021), summarizes the unsubstantiated fears and foibles that continue to be foisted on the lay public worldwide.  The 11aug21 WSJ, from which the nearby figure was filched, contains his critique of AR6, and is definitely worth a read.  I’ll give some highlights.

To begin for those late to this pity party, what all the fuss is about that we are ignoring a global catastrophe in process – namely, preventable manmade global warming (PMGW).  Every word in that label is important, and it’s the ‘preventable’ part that promises to be most devastating to the fortunes of developed countries.  You have to be convinced that we humans did it all by ourselves, and that therefore we can and must roll back global warming all by ourselves.

In ‘Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole’ Dr Koonin begins with -

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its latest report assessing the state of the climate and projecting its future. As usual, the media and politicians are exaggerating and distorting the evidence in the report. They lament an allegedly broken climate and proclaim, yet again, that we are facing the “last, best chance” to save the planet from a hellish future. In fact, things aren’t—and won’t be—anywhere near as dire.

The entire history of climate reporting has been a mire of politicized fraud.  RR readers learned years ago that all the prognostications about PMGW are based on a collection of incoherent, incomplete, and essentially broken general circulation models (e.g. we don't understand earth's CO2 cycle).  The have been twisted beyond recognition by true believers and fraudsters to yield the gee-whiz graphs and endlessly repeated, hysterical talking points.

It is already easy to see things in this report that you almost certainly won’t learn from the general media coverage. Most important, the model muddle continues. We are repeatedly told “the models say.” But the complicated computer models used to project future temperature, rainfall and so on remain deficient. Some models are far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than others. Many also disagree on the baseline temperature for the Earth’s surface. … The latest models also don’t reproduce the global climate of the past. The models fail to explain why rapid global warming occurred from 1910 to 1940, when human influences on the climate were less significant. The report also presents an extensive “atlas” of future regional climates based on the models. Sounds authoritative. But two experts, Tim Palmer and Bjorn Stevens, write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the lack of detail in current modeling approaches makes them “not fit” to describe regional climate. The atlas is mainly meant to scare people.

The other big bamboozle involves pointing to unusual weather as confirmation of climate change.  These assessments and dire pronouncements are made daily by innumerates who have no idea what science is or how it can substantiate something.

Extreme weather events are invoked as proof of impending disaster. But the floods in Europe and China and record temperatures across regions of the U.S. are weather, not climate—singular events, not decadeslong trends. Both Europe and China have experienced equally devastating floods in past centuries, but these are forgotten or deliberately ignored. The drought and wildfires in the Western U.S. are part of a trend going back a few decades, but forest management and expanding human presence in the forests are perhaps more important than climate change in causing these events. … The report expresses low confidence in most reported hurricane trends over the next century, and it remains uncertain whether there’s any trend beyond natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes. In other words, we have no scientific proof that humans have made hurricanes worse, despite what many say.

The IPCC report reveals very little that is new.  It is mostly the repackaging of past reports by a legion of contributing authors, each working within their narrow field.  The almost 4,000 page tome has been read by very few, and understood by even fewer.  Nevertheless, AR6 will feature prominently in the upcoming November UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.  So it’s important to understand both the nature of its contents and misrepresentations about PMGW that are always prominent in the executive summary and conclusion sections of what the IPCC publishes.  Here is the AR6 Headline Statements from the Summary for Policy Makers.

Refreshingly, the report deems its highest-emissions scenarios of the future unlikely, even though those are the ones you’re mostly likely to hear about in media reports. The more plausible scenarios have an average global temperature in 2100 about 2.5 degrees celsius warmer than the late 1800s. The globe has already warmed 1 degree since that time, and the parties of the Paris Accord arbitrarily agreed to limit further warming to another degree. But since humanity’s well-being has improved spectacularly, even as the globe warmed during the 20th century, it is absurd to suggest that an additional degree of warming over the next century will be catastrophic. In fact, the AR5 report from 2014 says even 1.5 degrees of additional warming by 2100 will have minimal net economic impact. … Good science is characterized by detail, data, proven models and reasoned debate. That takes time. Meanwhile, we should be wary of the torrent of hyperbole that is sweeping the globe.

Belief has been banished

George Rebane

Equity is the enemy of liberty.

In the days of yore we had a national institution called the Fourth Estate – professional journalism.  It was staffed by reporters taught by their editors to be ‘curious, hard-bitten skeptics’, always seeking alternative sides to what they were being told.  In a recent piece (here) by national columnist Gerard Baker, “The good reporter doubted whatever he was told, even what time it was. He’d weigh competing accounts and explanations and actively seek out alternative versions. Read the bios of great reporters from the past and they’ll be scattered with adjectives like ornery and insubordinate.”

More than ever, today the country is faced with major crises, manufactured and managed in the media – Covid pandemic, open borders, unbounded debt, preventable man-made climate change, catastrophic crime rates, race relations, CRT school curricula, accelerating dumbth of the electorate, rogue ‘deep state’ departments destroying businesses and lives, retreat of US hegemony, and on and on.  In any sense of the word, facts about these are no longer reported.  “‘Reported’ is a misnomer. They aren’t facts; (instead) they are sacred revealed truths, unchallengeable arguments invested with epistemic certainty and moral clarity.”

“Journalism is no longer about trying to tell us what happened; it’s about telling us what we must believe, on pain of moral peril. On every major topic, … every story blares out at us with censorious didacticism, the journalist’s smug disdain for the unbelievers pouring through (their) prose.”  (Full disclosure - as declared here years ago, I am NOT a journalist.)

With journalism in the bag, it didn’t take long for other national institutions to corrupt everything that they were supposed to inform us about.  Everything coming out of our law enforcement agencies, public health institutes, justice departments, the judiciary, legislatures, environmental bureaus, commerce, elected politicians, …, everything they declared, stated, published, etc had a short half-life as truth.  Many of the lies today are so blatant that they scarcely last through the news making interview.

Leaders in this downfall are what we here label as the lamestream media.  These are broadcast, internet, and hardcopy outlets that overwhelmingly toe the Left’s progressive narrative, and serve as the reliable trumpet of the Democratic National Committee and leadership elites.  They package and embellish only the part of the news that serves to cement leftwing talking points du jour.  This is easy to tell from both these pages and simply comparing news items (no matter how reported) from both rightwing and leftwing outlets.  As the liberals here daily confirm, the lamestream covers only a subset of items that are found on rightwing outlets like Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, and associated websites.

(The latest tactic to assure that the future generations of voters are compliant double dummies, anti-education Democrats, led by Oregon governor Kate Brown, who has now surreptitiously signed a law that makes reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates.  One can never have enough uncritical, true-believing constituents.  I expect this initiative to be replicated in other Democrat led states – more here.)

Rightwing outlets, led by Fox, claim to be “fair, balanced, and unafraid” of the censorious Left and their rampant cancel culture.  But unfortunately that also is not true.  There is plenty of evidence that rightwing outlets have a healthy fear of political incorrectness and retribution.  A timely example should suffice to spread the blame.  MyPillow’s Mike Lindell is a longtime staunch Trump supporter, and a leader in the rightwing movement claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.  Lindell is sponsoring a limited attendance 3-day Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls that started today (more here).  Almost every leftwing outlet of any stature has been dunning and denigrating the conference as another rightwing attempt to once more convince the country of the fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election.  Lindell has been a big advertiser on Fox News and also wanted to advertise his symposium on the network.

FN said no, and not only no, but it didn’t even include mention of this otherwise covered conference in its news broadcasts.  For a change, you had to watch CNN and MSNBC to learn of Lindell’s latest effort to keep the election fraud pot boiling.  Not only did FN’s news programs shun Lindell’s gathering, but so also did that king of conservative commentary on Fox, Tucker Carlson, “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.”  Carlson has taken on the Left on some pretty controversial and damning issues.  He advertises himself as being Mr Balls-to-the-floor himself when it comes to reporting what others hide.  But Tucker has been too scared to even mention Lindell or simply report the massive vituperation thrown at him on the lamestream.  This reflects poorly on Carlson and doubly so on his colleague Bret Baier, FN’s lead news anchor on their flagship news program.  I am saddened by all this duck-and-cover fear in a network I used to hold in high esteem.  (We’ll see what Tucker says tonight.)

Gerard Baker concludes his piece with – “The modern journalist is different. His primary ambition is to be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite, happily swaddled in all their shared nostrums. He’s most content when he’s wagging a finger at the selfish fools who continue to doubt climate extremism, express skepticism about vaccines, or deny their innate white sinfulness. … His virtue thus signaled, he luxuriates in the knowledge that he’s on the side of the chosen ones. It’s just a pity it’s no longer journalism.”

So, who are we supposed to believe today?

[Later]  Neither Bret Baier nor Tucker Carlson on Fox News made mention of Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium which continues for two more days.

Ruminations – 6aug21 (updated 11aug21)

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.

George Rebane

Socialist economists don’t understand why millions of workers’ real wages have not increased in the last, say, thirty years.  The answer is simple.  Labor is a cost, why increase that component of cost when it has contributed nothing to the increase in productivity.  That wages are tied to delivered productivity is an economic concept totally lost on socialists, and even more distant for their local double dummies who believe that somehow you should be paid more the longer you can hang on and keep fogging the mirror.

The Bumblebrain Bunch doesn’t think that Republican governors who cut off government checks to the unemployed had anything to do with the big increase in July’s employment number.  This is another illustration of inter-ear density by the Left that can’t connect consumer money flows to their economic behavior.  For them it has been an eternal mystery since the days of Marx.

Texas governor Greg Abbott is being dunned by the Democrats for the state’s spike in C19 cases.  None of these worthies are aware of the ongoing border crisis and the hundreds of thousands of illegals, thousands of whom are infected, being gratuitously released into the country.  The more important aspect of this is that their millions of terminally ignorant constituents have no idea that this has been going on and is only getting more critical with every passing day.  All part of their anti-American program to destroy the US as a sovereign nation-state.

[7aug21 update]  ‘College Was Supposed to Close the Wealth Gap for Black Americans. The Opposite Happened’.  “Black college graduates in their 30s have lost ground over three decades, the result of student debt and sluggish income growth.”  Nowhere in such articles is pointed out the kind of degrees obtained by blacks vs whites/Asians.  For example, the ratio of black-to-whites who graduate from college is pitiful, and of those black graduates, how many get degrees that provide employable skillsets.  Not all college degrees are created equal, and that goes double in today’s academe awash with ‘soft majors’.  To that we add intellectual demographic distributions, the impact of which is most devastating. And finally, today it’s not possible to examine this problem to discover its real contours and where public policies can do most good.  (more here)  The Left will stand for none of it; they depend on the status quo of victimhood.

[8aug21 update]  African-Americans in TV commercials.  Ever notice that the overwhelming majority of TV commercials, say 80%, feature blacks and often other people of color.  Blacks make up about one of eight Americans, yet they are extremely prominent, way beyond their ‘equity’, in our public face.  That I and other non-blacks don’t mind this nor demand equity in such displays should be accepted as more strong evidence that America is not a racist country.  I just wish that people would take more notice and joy from such evidence.

[9aug21 update]  More on C19 vaccines, vaccinations, and face masks.  To demonstrate how unsettled science is about this dreaded pandemic, here is a video of some expert testimony from a physician and virologist. (H/T to correspondent)

[10aug21 update]  The march of the double dummies gathers momentum.  Oregon governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill last month that made reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates – ‘Oregon governor signs bill suspending math, reading proficiency requirements for HS graduates’.  Our Democrat proto-Marxists are firming the foundations of the United Socialist States of America by ramping up the level of ignorance and control of the next generation of their compliant constituencies.  And they know that people with even vestiges of critical thinking skills would object to this blatant demolition of our public education, so it all happened hush-hush.  Let’s see how fast the other states start picking up such advances in equity.

[11aug21 update] The CBO on Trump’s tax cuts as reported on Fox Business.  Just out from the Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s corporate tax cuts paid for themselves in 18 months, and his personal income tax cuts almost paid for themselves by the eve of the pandemic (and would have easily provided more government revenues had the pandemic not happened).  This should silence our liberal readers who have long maintained that tax cuts, especially Trump’s, never pay for themselves, therefore more taxes are always necessary to pay for more vote buying (aka government “investments”).  And the takeaway is still, ‘corporations don’t pay taxes, people do’. (more here)

Speaking Algoristically

George Rebane

[Reading some recent papers on the current problems in the advance of deep learning, and causal inference as the next quantum leap in machine intelligence, I ran across a lot of discussion about what are still called algorithms.  It recalled the summary of a more facile syntax that I and several others have been promoting.  More to be said later about the contention between the ‘data fitting’ of neural nets, and ‘data interpretation’ capability of causal nets.]

al·go·rithm n. A step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established process for solving a problem or accomplishing a task in a finite number of steps. (more here)

When we relieve ‘algorithm’ of its codal baggage, we are left with the simple, compact, communicable, and elegant ‘algo’.  In this form the entire enterprise and field of algorithmics (better ‘algoristics’) can be efficiently communicated, bypassing current attempts to twist its ‘rithm’ tail into tortured forms like “algorithmatized” or use many other words to describe what can be expressed directly.  Consider the following little dissertation on the subject.

Any process is algorizable and can be algorized by an experienced algorist.  Algorized processes benefit from being readily teachable and passed on to others.  Developing algos is also an art because there is usually more than one algo that can algoristically capture the essence of a process.  Algoristically speaking, most algorized processes can always benefit from additional algorizing.  The history of algoristics is full of such algoristical efforts of developing ever more efficient algos.  In the affairs of Man never disparage algorization, for it simply is the heart of the matter. No light bursts forth in your mind save in an algorizable form, for without the ability to algorize we proceed as the blind. It always pays to be an algophile instead of an algophobe, for expressing and retaining knowledge, it all comes down to algoristics.

One of history’s greatest algorists was Henry Ford.  He took the notion of interchangeable parts (first developed for the manufacture of military arms) and algorized the manufacturing of cars into the assembly line.  Realizing the algorizability of automobile manufacturing, his algorized assembly line was algoristically so structured that parts didn’t come to the assembled car, the car went to the parts.  That was the breakthrough algo that changed a country and then the world.

• Algo
• Algorist
• Algoristics,
• Algoristical
• Algoristically
• Algorize
• Algorized
• Algorizable
• Algorizing
• Algorization
• Algorizability
• Algophile
• Algophobe

River Fire Reflections

George Rebane

Kudos to Yubanet.com for being the most heads up and informative website for wildfire information.  At the same time, government falls short of its function as is apparent to anyone visiting mynevadacounty.com.  Starting yesterday (4aug21) afternoon, all of us in western Nevada County have been on tenterhooks watching the River Fire started by someone at the Bear River Campground near Colfax.

For Jo Ann and me this kind of annual firewatch and evacuation preparedness has been a way of life ever since we moved to Simi Valley in 1968, and then into the Santa Monica Mountains in 1978, and here to Nevada County in 2002.  Every year it’s the same ol’ same ol’ – are we going to lose our home this year?  And frankly, after over fifty years of this and at our age, we’re starting to get a little tired of being puckered up every summer and fall.

Sandbox - 4aug21

['If Biden is Serious About Covid, He'll Protect the Border' writes Manhattan Institute scholar Jason L. Riley.  gjr]

Scattershots – 1aug21 (updated 4aug21)

The redistribution of wealth does not affect its creation. - Democrat/Marxist shibboleth

George Rebane

According to its director Dr Rochelle Wolensky, CDC’s new national mask guidance – even vaccinated people should wear masks in regions of high C19 incidence - is based on data from a spike of cases that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts.  Well, it turns out that the data is a bit more than skewed.  The data was compiled subsequent to Bear Week, an annual gathering of thousands of gay men who congregate for socializing, entertainment, and sex.  The CDC did not point out Bear Week nor that 85% of the new cases recorded were men.  It confirms that the more CDC attempts to inform the public, the more muddled are its messages.  (more here)

National Propaganda Radio has finally gone public with a policy that allows its ‘journalists’ to also be political activists and report on their supposedly non-partisan efforts opposing racism and white supremacy while promoting social justice, equity, and the usual leftwing list of progressive policies.  Meanwhile, they continue to maintain that they remain a government-funded, non-partisan news and information outlet.

Gymnast Simone Biles’ withdrawal from competing in certain events at the Tokyo Olympics has the media abuzz.  Most reports and commentaries celebrate her “courage” for choosing not to compete due to mental issues.  This attitude is taken by all in the lamestream media, but also by some conservative talking heads.  Some on the Right are being less accommodating about the young lady’s decision, going so far as to view her decision as a national embarrassment.  It’s hard to tell how much of the division of sentiments is based on Ms Biles gender – would a similarly disposed male athlete garner equal rations of celebratory courage and embarrassment?  I can only imagine the pressures that Biles has been under to perform, and am told how important it is for gymnasts to have their head together in order to safely perform their routines that regularly threaten life and limb. IMHO, her decisions do not call for celebration nor denouncements of embarrassment.  In the age of ‘trophies for all’, no one wants to set a precedent of hailing athletes who refuse to compete as expected, a simple expression of disappointment should put such matters to rest.

Taking a knee or other ways of showing disrespect for America when representing our country at the Olympics is an altogether different matter.  I have no sympathy for athletes who take their highly partisan and dreadfully misguided political sentiments for exhibition on the world stage.  Such acts and expressions are blatantly anti-American, and do nothing but succor our enemies abroad, dispirit their more patriotic fellow athletes, and expand the partisan chasm that already rends our homeland.  Keep America’s internal politics in America.

[4aug21 update] Our beloved Union continues flying its true op-ed colors.  I am disappointed, not so much in its ongoing tilt to the left, but in its uneven application of the editorial corrections it inserts at the end of contributed commentaries with which it does not agree, and in which it detects an error about which readers need to be notified.  This morning’s Union has a piece by devoutly blindered leftwinger Richardt Stormsgaard (here).  He ends his piece with -

Much of the Republican Party has edged perilously close to outright authoritarianism. Hundreds of moderate and conservative national security and military members from current and former administrations have warned against this disturbing tendency under Donald Trump. … A majority of Republican voters still support Trump and his attempted coup even though the leading perpetrators of the “Stop the Steal” myth in court have defended their false claims in court documents stating, “No reasonable people would consider these statements believable.” … Despite these damning admissions, a major portion of Republicans is increasing their assaults on our democracy leading up to the next elections. There are disturbing similarities between the USA today and Germany in the early 1930s, including the attacks on the democratic rule, along with the personality traits of Hitler and Trump and their fanatical supporters.

Aside from the fact that it is and always has been the Democrats who attempt to drive the country from a constitutional republic to naked collectivist authoritarianism, Republicans are explicitly impeded from taking that tack because their proposals and policies all inhibit the growth of government and/or actively seek to reduce its size.  No authoritarian governance is possible without an ever larger, growing, and intrusive government, exactly the kind that Democrats have always sought to bring about.  The Union’s editorialists are unwilling to point out such glaring errors in the op-ed contributions they print.

And celebrated Union cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb does his part to underline the newpaper’s editorial policy with his latest cartoon, filched and presented below.

This Crabb contribution is an excellent example of soft vitriol against the Right.  Note the number of bases in the progressive narrative he covers with these cleverly constituted panels – a master’s touch.  And it behooves the rest of us to never forget that this is exactly what they think of us, and given the chance, how they will send us knuckledraggers to be re-ejikated in new institutions that will be built for our benefit.  The templates for all this have been operated by the Left all over the world since the turn of the last century.

Bernie Sanders answers ‘Why We Need the $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Package’.  He sidesteps the Democrats’ real answer – the biggest vote buying “package” in the country’s history.  Instead, he talks about oodles and oodles of goodies for everyone from the terminally unemployable to illegal aliens invited to continue their surge across our southern border in order to get free everything and citizenship to boot.  For our mis-educated youth, the law will establish a Civilian Climate Corps in the hopes they could be taken off the streets and stop murdering each other, and marshalled into more institutionalized settings in which they will work on approved progressive priorities and projects.  The last couple of decades have seen Democrats offer different proposals to set up institutions to politicize and propagandize the unemployed and unemployable.  The ultimate function of these nascent legions of brown shirts is not a mystery; we can already see them ferreting out ‘white supremacists’ and other undesirable irredeemables across the country.