Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 31mar24

George Rebane

‘The Rise of Third-World U.S.A: An Immigrant’s View’  The rapid and visible decline of America under the ministrations of the nation’s socialists (aka Democrats) has long been an alarming theme of these pages.  Now this tarnishing of our shining city on a hill is even apparent to immigrants, at least of the legal variety.  Even Bumblebrain has had to relabel our land as one of “possibility” from its historical land of opportunity.  One immigrant observes –

“This demotion of America doesn’t happen all at once. Like the frog slowly boiled in water, we mistake the new conditions as tolerable. Creeping socialist policies in economics that fuel inflation, increase government control and misallocation of capital; the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents; the decline of law and order, from the border to our cities; the lowering of standards and enabling of bad behavior—it all looks too familiar to a third-world nation. It’s tragic because, after America, there is nowhere else to go.”

The rise of the burger flippers.  $20/hr is the new minimum wage mandated by Sacramento’s butt-stupidos.  The dictum goes into effect tomorrow in California’s fast food outlets, and promises to reduce employment while not decreasing poverty by one whit – oh yes, and you’ll be paying more for your Big Mac. (more here)

He is Risen!

George Rebane

Hearing that strong assertion, the Christian answers joyfully, ‘He is risen indeed!’

For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all Creation.

This is RR's annual message celebrating Easter.

For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all Creation.

This is RR's annual message celebrating Easter.

Sandbox – 26mar24

[What a bunch of journalistic wimps are the lamestream media.  Already famous for their selective censoring of news which conflicts with their fragile ideology, they now show that they cannot even tolerate a smidgeon of balanced views with NBC hiring and then firing former RNC head Ronna McDaniel when their vaunted cadres of woke talking heads became hysterical at the thought of sharing airtime with a conservative.  You really must have vacuum between your ears to let outlets like that be your news source.  gjr]

Scattershots – 24mar24

George Rebane

Some laments du jour that keep bubbling to the surface.

Progressives believe that there is no truth in or benefits from policy propositions that have not been tried and demonstrated to work.  That is the prime reason why there are few liberal entrepreneurs and why socialists are so risk averse.  Their best repartee for rejecting novel (to them) proposals is, ‘Show me where your proposal for undertaking XX is working.’  They also reject the failures of their own repeated policy mistakes by claiming errors in execution which will be corrected on the next attempt.

The leftists’ innate inability to reason is nowhere better highlighted than in promoting New York’s civil ‘fraud’ case against Trump, the outrageous cash judgement against him, and the intent to financially ruin/cripple him (and his presidential campaign) by granting him a ridiculously short time to raise almost half billion dollars in cash.  It is an act of punitive jurisprudence with no basis in law or fact, and no defrauded victims.  Yet it is justice embraced by all the progressive elites, and their thoughtless and lightly read Democrat constituencies.

No national conservative media really tells it like it is.  Led by Fox News, they are all reticent (afraid?) to point out the real reason why Democrats, led by Frankfurt school socialists, propose and implement anti-American legislation and regulations.  No one points out that their real objective is to eliminate American hegemony (the world’s white hat sheriff) and its opposition toward achieving an autocratic global government.  The apparent opposition of the conservatives only penetrates into arcane intellectual arguments of how unreasonable, unworkable, and/or silly are the machinations of leftwing governance.  In short, they characterize progressives as still good Americans who just have bad luck when they try to think.

‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’

George Rebane

F.A. Hayek was one of the world’s foremost economists and a giant among the original thinkers of the 20^th century.  In this post I want to interest readers in his ideas and works with a short discussion of one of his small and often overlooked monograms – The Intellectuals and Socialism - published in 1949, the year I arrived on these shores.

From the monogram currently published by the Mercatus Center of George Washington University we read,  “Friedrich A. Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1974, is best known for the book the Road to Serfdom (1944), which has been widely translated.  Receiving doctorates in law and economics from the University of Vienna, Hayek served on the faculties of the universities of London, Chicago, Freiburg, and Salzburg.  (His major books may be seen here.)  Hayek has attracted a growing body of scholarship, and in February 2000 a writer in The New Yorker observed that ‘it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.’”

One of the main lessons from the monogram is the reader’s ability to distinguish between the purveyors of ideas variously, and often carelessly, labeled as ‘theorists’, ‘experts’, and ‘intellectuals’.  The first two are people who originate ideas and those who are actually able to implement ideas by applying their skills.  However, it is the countless intellectuals with whom we should concern ourselves.  They are overwhelmingly of the Left and populate our media, academe, institutions, and bureaucracies.  Hayek defines them as follows.

“The term "intellectuals," however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer, and the fact that we have no better name by which to describe what we have called the secondhand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not understood. Even persons who use the word "intellectual" mainly as a term of abuse are still inclined to withhold it from many who undoubtedly perform that characteristic function. This is neither that of the original thinker nor that of the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.” (emphasis mine)

The intellectuals are the distributors and champions of ideas formulated by the elites.  They are drawn to the Left and socialism primarily because of its simplistic utopian vision of the future.  This is opposed to the Right’s ideology having always emphasized individual liberty and its manifold benefits.  In short, the Left’s intellectuals distribute simple easy-to-understand, high-level ideas to the masses, while those of the Right attempt to communicate their more complex ideas of, say, liberty, individual effort, and market capitalism on a person-to-person basis.

Sandbox – 17mar24

[Happy Saint Paddy’s Day!  Putin won this Sunday’s election in Russia, giving him another six years (at least) in power with a mandate to insure the resurgence of the Russian Empire.  He will now be the longest ruling Russian leader.  The west trembles.  gjr]

We are a Republic, NOT a Democracy

George Rebane

The country’s socialists and globalists have found the corruption of language to best serve their purpose of blinding Americans to the critical aspects of our society and culture.  First and foremost is today’s established custom of considering precise semantics to be somewhere between irrelevant and unimportant, and most certainly politically incorrect.

As an example, many of us have come to accept open borders on the basis of promoting ‘immigration’, firm in the knowledge that today’s invasion of illegal aliens from countless countries violating our law is somehow similar to the process that populated our empty lands in days gone by, for are we not a country of immigrants?  No one from the highest levels of government to main street wants to acknowledge that immigration is a two-party process between willing participants – a pact between a discriminating government and the alien seeking residency in a new land.  Using the correct legal term ‘illegal alien’ to describe those wading across the river (formerly also known as wetbacks) has now become proscribed and not for proper use in a public forum.  Instead the naked term ‘immigrant’ is now the norm in lamestream media, and the right-of-center outlets barely use the appended ‘illegal immigrant’, all preferring more obfuscating labels like ‘migrant’ to describe the foreign lawbreakers crossing our borders.

Other similar examples can be offered to illustrate the desecration and demeaning of our language over the last several decades.

Perhaps the most egregious and dangerous of such examples is the new idea promoted by collectivists, especially of the woke variety, that our nation is a democracy that promotes (civil) equality.  Our Founders were keenly aware that democracies, promoted under the banner of indiscriminating equality quickly devolve into autocracies cum tyrannies.  This is the reason that they conceived and formed our nation to hold liberty sacrosanct within a constitutional republic, governed under a document that severely limits the powers of government.  As the thinking reader knows, universal equality and liberty are incompatible.  Our founding principles recognize and promote equality in the sense that we Americans are equal only under our laws and in the eyes of God.  Elsewhere, most certainly in our Constitution, equality is not mentioned and liberty is supreme.

Our socialists know this truth, and have twisted our public education, abetted by the media, to preach their unquestionable glories of equality cum equity in all things.  The damage to our republic that this perversion has caused was already evident almost sixty years ago.  Dan Smoot was one of the nation’s leading conservative commentators back then, and in 1966 he recorded this very clear and succinct 10-minute commentary about the real difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic (here), and the danger of our citizenry remaining confused about the two.  Today that confusion has been replaced by total ignorance.

Scattershots – 6mar24 (updated 8mar24)

George Rebane

The specter of California’s AB5, and raising the state’s minimum wage to $20/hr, are again and predictably wreaking more havoc in our small business community and providing another shot in the shorts for consumers.  A shot close to home arrived yesterday in a letter from our beloved Union.  On 2 April next, the newspaper will cease morning delivery of its pulp edition and start using snail mail instead.  Why?  Because AB5 and $20/hr will “restructure our ability to use carriers to deliver the newspaper.”  Note the compliant and uncomplaining manner in which this latest action of California’s butt-stupid government is described by a compliant and well-behaved leftwing business.

‘The rate of inflation is decreasing’ is today’s celebratory trumpet from the Biden campaign.  The message is perfectly designed to keep the nation’s marginally informed in perpetual ignorance about the impact of Bidenomics.  What these folks totally miss is that Biden’s inflation has already increased the prices that we pay every day, and these are not going down.  Slowly decreasing inflation will not fix another full-fledged feature of Bumblebrain’s economy – that wages have not kept pace with the baked-in inflation, and the buying power of all Americans has gone down under this administration, that in total contrast to what they did under Trump’s stewardship.  This adds to the Democrats’ lies that Trump’s reduction of regulations and taxes only benefitted ‘the rich’.  Exactly opposite of what government data shows happened – businesses prospered, middle and low income taxes were reduced, upper income people continued to pay more, and government revenues increased.  (Can everyone spell ‘Laffer’?)  And then came Biden.

[7mar24 update] 'Why Black Voters are Ditching Democrats'  Had lunch with a liberal friend who unsurprisingly was not aware that not only blacks but also other non-white voters - Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc - are realizing that life has been bad under Democrats, and has gotten worse under Joe Biden.  Basketball great Charles Barkley explains the matter to those who will listen (here).

[8mar24 update]  Re last night’s SOTU – the corrupt sumbich just can’t stop lying every time he opens his mouth.  Check out ‘Fact-Checking Biden’s State of the Union Address’.

US Drops to 25th Place in Index of Economic Freedom

George Rebane

The Heritage Foundation published its 2024 edition of its Index of Economic Freedom (here) for all the countries of the world.  Thanks to Bidenomics the US continues to drop in the prestigious ratings to its historically lowest place.  And the alert reader is already aware of California's rank in the various freedoms being in the toilet among the states as recently reported in Cato’s ‘Freedom in the 50 States’ (here).

What continues to shake the confidence of so many Americans in their ignorant and/or socialist neighbors is that they have no clue that the more a nation or state restricts economic freedoms, the lower is its citizens’ standard of living.  Our leftwingers just continue voting for Democrats who promise to curtail business activities, reduce personal freedoms, and ‘tax the rich’ while expecting bigger checks from the government.  The graphic below summarizes it all.

Sandbox – 4mar24

[Dear Readers, place your bets.  Before the sun sets on Wednesday 6 March, Nikki Haley will 1) suspend her campaign, 2) keep running in hopes of hope that … .  gjr]