Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations – 17jan22 (updated 18jan22)

George Rebane

A zealot is one who identifies intimately with his message, and opposes all efforts to reasonably falsify the message because doing so would also falsify him.

A brief compendium of current observations for the record.

Conservatives are (fascists, racists, white supremacists, … pick one or more) and work constantly to have government limit individual freedoms, diminish America’s liberties, and promote an autocratic government – so goes the progressive/Democrat/lamestream narrative.  This is witnessed daily and well documented in progressive activist literature like ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ by George Lakoff.  The latter is actually a best-selling leftist communication handbook into which is marbled the Marxist/socialist manifesto.  What the leftwing elites count on is the ignorance of their audience who cannot connect the dots between an autocratic state and big government based on central planning and control.  This deficiency prevents them from seeing that all conservative efforts in governance and public policy are directed in exactly the opposite direction – a minimally funded smaller government with fewer laws and regulations based on federalized maximum local control.  Such governments cannot generate and maintain collectivist public policies which need a massive government to enforce and implement.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

America’s Left and their Democrat Party public face are desperately attempting to pass federal voting legislation (HR1, ‘The Voting Rights Act’) that will foster and facilitate the entrenchment of a political monopoly based on Marxist/socialist ideology.  The selling point, hysterically touted by Team Biden, is that America’s current election laws limit voting rights, especially those of protected classes.  The evidence to oppose this attack on constitutional federalism is abundant and readily available, but totally buried by the lamestream media.  Only conservative outlets inform their audiences of how the states’ voting laws compare, and about public attitudes that favor policies which restrict the voting franchise to American citizens, and minimize opportunities for election irregularities and fraud. (more here)  Our Left tells Americans that such voter integrity policies are racist/fascist/etc designed to limit voting access to minorities, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine have fallen victim to Mammon and politics of the most reprehensible, insidious, and deadly kind.  Both medicines have been widely used worldwide as a prophylaxis and treatment for a number of maladies, including Covid – extensively reported in these pages – but proscribed by our federal government and big pharma.  The former to establish precedents and new avenues of government control, the latter to keep effective off-patent medicines out of reach so that high margin patented medicines remain the only alternatives to combatting the pandemic.  The effectiveness of IVT and HCQ have been demonstrated in countless studies and clinical cases.  It’s now so bad that Covid patients on death’s door cannot be administered either medicine by court order (more here).

The death rate of Covid ‘vaccines’ is another scandalous cover-up by our federal government.  In the program to maximize vaccinations, the data on vaccine-related deaths is withheld by the CDC and the FDA.  No vaccine is entirely safe, and every one has its own mortality rate due to various complex – mostly anaphylaxis – reactions to the prophylactic.  According to government data, the death rate within 14 days of being vaccinated for standard flu is about 120 per 100,000, and for shingles it is about 21 per 100,000.  It turns out that for Covid, the equivalent death rate within 14 days of getting jabbed is 190 per 100,000.  When this rate is applied to the millions of people vaccinated, then the Covid vaccines have killed over 388,000 Americans alone.  And with the incidence of breakthrough infections, the efficacy of the vaccines is yet to be determined.  One thing is certain, no government agency wants to talk about this, and all continue to stonewall legitimate queries submitted to them.  (more here and here)

The destruction of the FBI by the Left is almost complete – they are now being repurposed as the nation’s new Stasi.  As evidence, consider that today the FBI finally acknowledged that last week’s attack on the Texas synagogue was an act of Islamist terrorism.  They were the last to know what was immediately obvious to the man on the street across America when informed that one Malik Faisal Akram was the attacker who demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, another convicted and jailed Islamist killer.  AG Garland did the best he could to bamboozle the American public as long as he could before national ridicule made him tell his FBI lackeys to announce that the attack was “a terrorist-related matter”.  No kidding Kemosabe.

A more standard law enforcement fare for today’s FBI is launching domestic terrorism investigations of parents who go on public record to oppose local school boards about the content of the curricula – e.g. the tenets of CRT - taught to their kids.  On such matters the FBI is right on the spot ferreting out those subversive parents who don’t toe the line laid down by leftwing dominated teachers unions.  Gotta get those parents out of the way of our educators who are concerned first about their students right after they have their pension negotiations in the bag.  Actually, there may be an issue or two, like paid days off for Covid safety, that may still consume their attention before they get to the kids.

[18jan22 update]  Open and free critique of government is a fundamental principle upon which America was founded.  And the continuance of that right has been the mainstay of our republic since its birth in revolution, which itself is the ultimate critique of government by its citizens.  All roads to tyranny start with the state proscribing the critique of government.  We in the United States have a long history of criticizing our government, its policies, and actions both domestic and foreign.  Everyone has exercised that right, built into our founding documents, without second thought of suffering retribution from any institution of government.  This is not to say that it hasn’t happened (e.g. the IRS going after conservative 501c3 organizations).  But when such illegal retributions have been discovered – usually uncovered by an alert media - they have been roundly rejected by all Americans, resulting in public censure, ending of careers, and even legal actions against the perpetrating scoundrels.  Those days are gone.  Today, firmly on the doorstep of autocracy, we have the Democrats in power openly deploying federal intelligence and law enforcement organs to punish critics of its rogue and radical politicians and policies, and even those opposing state and local leftwing authorities illegally mandating laws and regulations about schools, the pandemic, academe, border porosity, elections, and corporatist enterprises that seek government favor. (more here)  What portends even worse for the republic is that a large share of Americans now favor such government reprisals that formerly were the hallmarks only of communist and fascist governments, and tinpot dictators of backward (e.g. shithole) countries.

Democrats’ Newspeak – 13jan22

George Rebane

George Orwell and Mao Zedong both knew that a person can only think thoughts supported by his language, a cogito-linguistic principle first introduced as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Orwell introduced it to broad audiences in the form of Newspeak in his 1984 classic.  Newspeak was a continuously revised and government mandated English that systematically removed/revised words that supported thinking about rebellion or anything antigovernmental.  It worked very effectively in the novel, and motivated Mao's attempt to replicate a Newspeak version of Chinese to a large illiterate population after communists took power in 1949.  Mao began by reducing published Chinese to 2,000 carefully chosen ideographs (out of more than 800,000), the recognition of these would make a citizen compliantly literate and able to read government issued dicta and ‘news’.

Democrats and other would-be autocrats worldwide have been envious of this method of thought control effected by the bureaucratic elites of collectivist governments.  And in the last few years we have seen America’s progressives begin implementing the 21^st century version of Newspeak.  A more sophisticated and harder to detect aspect of Newspeak is to reduce the information carrying capacity of the language.  This is achieved by contracting authorized word usage and making the meaning of surviving words more ambiguous.  (Languages expand their information carrying capacity by introducing new words to identify new things and capture more nuanced meanings so as to efficiently communicate them – think of ‘the cat caught a mouse’ vs ‘the domesticated furry, four-legged predator with claws caught a mouse’.)

A recent ratcheting of Newspeak is found in Gov Newsom’s new spate of laws for California, as described in Terry McLaughlin’s column in the 13jan22 Union (here).  Starting this year, the word ‘alien’ will be struck from government materials (as already picked up by the lamestream media), to be replaced by ‘non-citizen’ and ‘immigrant’ to describe people in America who are not citizens.  With these newly restricted usages, the reader cannot distinguish between, say, a legal tourist or business-person, and anyone illegally in the country; or a recently arrived person under a legal two-party agreement, and anyone who came here in violation of our laws.

Again, the Democrats’ motivation here is clear – not only make it hard to distinguish but also to think about illegal aliens flooding through porous borders to weaken America’s traditional culture, its sovereign nation-statehood, and to ensconce a growing electorate that will ultimately guarantee a one-party monopoly in the United States.  And Newspeak, promoted widely through our government and academic institutions, co-operating corporatists, and unionized public schools, makes it all possible.  As an exit exercise, consider also the new meanings of ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘insurrection’, ‘the rich’, ‘nazi’, ‘socialist’, ‘violence’, … . To confirm the success of this insidious program, just have a conversation with anyone under 30 years old.

As former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker observed in ‘The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’, “We are facing nothing less than a concerted, sustained and comprehensive effort to re-educate Americans in service of a radical ideological agenda.”

Ignorance that passeth all understanding

George Rebane

The Biden administration in attempts to climb out of its shithole of bad policies has the latest excuse for the inflation surge – it’s the fault of American businesses, big and small.  You see, they all got together and decided to start raising prices at the same time.  Another capitalist conspiracy if there ever was one according to our socialists cum communists (that has been their message for over a century now).  It is incomprehensible how the simple economic principle of supply/demand and its effect on prices (and economic behaviors) continues to elude them.

This aspect of their profound ignorance ranks right up there with the Left’s eternal shibboleth that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior.  Where are their intellectual luminaries like Cass Sunstein, of Nudge (2008) and Noise (2021) fame, when Bumblebrain and his redheaded shill put out such garbage for national consumption?  It has never taken much between the ears to understand why socialism and widespread misery correlate so well - more socialism, more misery.  Assemble just a handful of their tortured tenets on human behavior, and you can not only write the economic histories of their disasters, but also predict the nature of the next disaster given their latest policy WIP.  Their BBB (Bring Back Blight) legislation, now in limbo, is a perfect redux of the Titanic’s last night at full speed in iceberg infested waters.

As part of the carefully intended and hidden blights in the BBB, consider that one of its many disastrous provisions calls for the feds to subsidize the nation’s journalists’ salaries.  The wraps would finally come off these lamestream lackies of the Democratic Party – they would finally be put on the payroll to write the ‘news’ as dictated by the DNC - so much for the sham of a free and impartial press. (more here) The American electorate is judged to be in such dire straits that the Left no longer needs to hide or deny such fundamental transformations of America.

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

In the last Dark Days Diary (here) I highlighted a short dissertation on the spread of communism by a former KGB agent.  As we have frequently pointed out, and he confirms, the spread of that evil ideology is made possible by its acolytes initially gaining control of a target nation’s public educational system.  This is from the Marxist-Leninist playbook – ‘let me educate one generation of your youth to assure communism’s triumph.’  In the United States we are now educating the third generation with a curriculum that ranges between pure trash and insidious collectivist propaganda – e.g. Critical Race Theory.  And this is done in our public K-12 schools and also academe, which has for the most part eliminated all dissenting voices and thought on their campuses.

Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson makes the extensive case (here and here) that this onerous task is being carried out by teachers’ unions and faculty associations which have wholeheartedly embraced the goal of a socialist world order.  Their success can be measured by the fraction of our graduates who are profoundly ignorant of their American heritage and equally lacking skill sets which enable their entry into a productive workforce.  A disturbing share of them find work with government as the employer of last resort.  There they immediately fit in with the correctly thinking and compliant deep state extension of the Democratic Party, doing its work no matter who currently happens to control Congress or reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

For the Left, this fortuitous outcome is to a large extent the fault of our ‘go along to get along’ Republicans.  Over the years they, as the conservators of our Constitution, have shown little interest to understand and a backbone to resist the nation’s ratcheting of anti-American public policies.  The Republicans appear to measure their political progress by how good they feel when grumbling and griping about the Left to their likeminded constituents in cloistered gatherings.  These pity-party nodding sessions motivate only a trickling of attendees, if that, to take an active stance to counter the encroach of socialism in their communities.  The rank-and-file Republican then returns to his homestead to continue living a productive and non-contentious life minding his own business.

The only plausible road back (from beyond the tipping point to the Great Divide) is to regain local control of educating our children.  Rebane Doctrine has long taught that to do this is to change education policy so that in the public funding of education the money follows the student, and parents determine where the students are schooled.  This calls for a restructuring of our education industry into a more open-market, capitalistic format, and away from the rank socialist structure of today.  In the main, K-12 education should be available to parents in the same manner as is the choice of a college education.  This means that schools would become transparent for-profit institutions that make their performance (quality of their product) accessible to their clients.  Overall, given today’s cost of education, such a change would significantly reduce costs, and increase the relevance and quality of the delivered education.

Our leftwing knows that Sapir-Whorf’s theory of language enabling thought (q.v.) is correct as was made public by Orwell and put in practice on a national scale by Mao et al.  Today’s public educated true believers can neither believe in the existence of alternative ways to organize a beneficial society, nor understand where our nation’s present path is taking us (e.g. evidence of that abounds in these pages).

No one knows the truth of all this more than does our Democratic Party which has viewed their support of socialized education as required maintenance of their private manufactory of an ever-increasing horde of compliant constituents and unquestioning voters.  The last thing our Left will tolerate is making school choice possible and letting parents decide where their children will be schooled.

Dinner table topics (updated 16dec21)

George Rebane

At our house the conversation turns to politics after the usual householder topics are covered and resolved.  Both Jo Ann and I are political animals.  Readers know my beliefs and propensities, there is here a long record of both, one that is regularly ignored by those of the Left.  Not so many here know about the wife of my life.  She is a longtime hardworking volunteer in various philanthropic organizations and in charge of our family’s giving.  She is also a member of the NC Republican Central Committee, the Union’s editorial board, and the Nevada County Republican Women Federated.  The latter is the local chapter of the largest organization of grassroots Republicans, and next week she will become the new president of the NCRWF.  Did I mention that she’s also the family matriarch with our two daughters, six adult grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren?  Me?  I now try to devote as much time as possible to master the lifestyle of a classic flâneur of the Taleb school – you see, I have been blessed as a kept man by a very capable woman.  Enough.

Recently we dissected the abortion issue (again).  It’s a topic much discussed in these pages, but not so recently.  The so-called ‘pro-life’ anti abortionists continue to miss the dominant argument to abet their cause.  The ‘pro-choice’ promoters base their entire case on the mantra ‘A woman has a right to do with her body as she will.’ – my body, my choice.

The entire basis of the abortionists is that there is only one body and one life involved.  That’s not true in any sense of the word, most certainly not clinically, and in many places, not legally.  What the pro-lifers should continually point out is the singular ‘body’ in the pro-choicers’ mantra, and ask ‘how many bodies (lives) does your choice affect?’  Getting them to admit to the correct answer will change the nature of the debate on a pregnant woman’s rights, subsidizing abortions, who should be involved in the decision, especially in the pregnancy of a minor, and so on.

All ideologues, no matter their coloration, agree on the importance of controlling language as part and parcel of controlling thought (Sapir-Whorf and all that).  The ongoing onslaught of the Left to cancel western culture requires strict adherence to language control, especially as it is taught in schools, used on the lamestream, and pontificated by progressive politicians.  The tsunami of illegal entrants across our open southern border is a case in point.  These arrivals are no longer illegal aliens, or even illegal immigrants.  Today they are simply migrants.  Everyone knows that people have innocently migrated here and there for ages, that’s how the world got populated.  And the migrants from the south are simply people who decided to move to the United States, so what’s wrong with that?  Read the poem on the Statue of Liberty.

In the same vein the press has banned Christmas tree.  The thing we light and decorate in our living rooms during Christmas is now relabeled as the “holiday tree”.  None of that European western culture need be acknowledged in lands both ancient and colonized.  Today a new global world of equity is dawning.  But a little attention reveals that the culture cancelling is very precisely directed.  No one yet dreams of calling the menorah of Hanukkah a ‘holiday candelabra’.

And then there are pejoratives like ‘white supremacist’ and ‘racist’ which must only be used for their implied meanings but never ever defined.  For to offer definitions, no matter how imprecise or ludicrous, would quickly torpedo their entire narrative in pursuit of social justice and equity.  Substance in support of socialists’ apologetics is definitely not their strong suit.

We both could not help smiling (more like snickering) when we heard the latest report on NPR about BLM leaders going on media to lament that ‘armed white people are now running amok’, thereby making their rioters and pillagers to feel unsafe during their public activism.  As odd as that may seem, we hope that more law-abiding people would carry in public, and have the strong belief that rioters assaulting innocents should not feel safe as they are promoted politically on the lamestream.

[13dec21 update]  Ivermectin's effectiveness subrogated to landing a $40M grant.  A leading virologist and researcher, Dr Andrew Hill, republished his favorable findings on the life-saving effects of Ivermectin in order to satisfy the politically correct requirements for obtaining a sizeable grant for Liverpool University.  Given the demonstrated performance of Ivermectin in saving lives during the Covid pandemic, Hill worried about changing his report that could then cost about a half-million lives since his research was one of the main inputs used by the WHO to recommend Covid therapeutics around the world.  You can read all about this tawdry and deadly saga here.  (H/T to reader)

‘Bend over and spread ‘em.’  Our State Dept admits this was the reception our diplomats got when arriving in China and succumbing to their government’s C19 tests via anal swabs.  Understandably Foggy Bottom has been very silent about this new level of contempt Xi has for Team Biden.  This latest foreign policy embarrassment was instituted in February 2021, immediately after Bumblebrain got sworn in.  The insult was first discovered by The Hill to whom State admitted that it was carried out but under protest since the State Dept “never agreed” to the Chinese ignominiously swabbing our diplomats where the sun don’t shine.  This was confirmed by Judicial Watch which filed a lawsuit after State stonewalled a FOIA request.  (more here)

[16dec21 update]  No disaster remains unattributed to climate change.  The know-nothing activists are doing their best not to let the recent Midwest tornado disaster go to waste.  They will be haranguing us with a passel of made-up tales that the whole thing is more undeniable evidence of preventable manmade global warming.  However, suppressed historical data tells a markedly different story of huge multi-state tornado systems with hundreds killed that have devasted that region since white settlers started keeping records in the early 1800s.  But such counter-narrative evidence is no match for the bullshit that now saturates lamestream outlets. (more here)

The Glasgow Climate Change Kabuki

George Rebane

President Biden heads to Glasgow with an empty quiver this weekend in a futile effort to demonstrate that his administration is still hanging on to some vestiges of global leadership here and there.  Most nations have either written off the United States as a worthy ally, or most certainly as a hegemon to be respected.  And Bumblebrain accomplished all that by himself.

Climate change is no longer on the list of important concerns for Americans, and even less so for people of other lands.  However, our leftwing lamestream media keeps up the drumbeat of global warming hysterics with lies ranging from the sublime to the ludicrous.  A major one that hits close to home is the progress of destructive wildfires, the frequency and size of which are supposed to be growing without bound due to manmade preventable global warming.  In Biden’s new spending framework there is $500B or so allocated for various green bamboozles designed to fool the foolish and enrich Democrats’ favorites.

But as Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, reiterates what these pages have reported for years – the acreage of America’s annual wildfires continues to decline, and has been declining since record keeping was initiated in 1900 (see nearby graphic).  This fact has been quietly reported by the World Wildlife Fund, and vigorously ignored by our lying politicians, environmental activists, and media.

In ‘Climate Activists Blow Smoke on Wildfire Fears’ (28oct21 WSJ) Lomborg cites data and again points out how the hysterical scenarios on climate change consistently fail to incorporate the most salient and significant factor that mitigates and ameliorates the predicted catastrophes – human adaptation.  In such loudly trumpeted forecasts, humans do nothing and quietly accept whatever nature has in store for them.  Over the millennia this never has been the case, and most certainly won’t be in a technologically and resource rich future that we can and are building for ourselves.

What our average citizen has trouble parsing is the difference between the frequencies and size of wildfires, and the property damage done by wildfires.  In a 2016 study Nature reported, “Contrary to common perception, human exposure to wildfires increases in the future mainly owing to projected population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in burned area.”

Lomborg concludes – “Helping future wildfire victims has little to do with strict and expensive climate policies, and everything to do with simpler, cheaper measures like better forest management and building codes. There’s no good reason to terrify children with stories of apocalyptic firestorms.”  All of this will be ignored during the Glasgow kabuki.

The Onslaught of the Politically Dormant

"The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living." Anonymous

George Rebane

We have been told many times that democracy works only so long as the takers can’t use the government gun to derive their livelihood from the makers.  Staged governance in a democratic republic was conceived to prevent (delay?) that from happening.  But leftwing autocrats have also known that for over a century, and have always attempted to convince the masses of the non-existent benefits of a pure democracy applied wholesale across the land – it is the fastest way to secure enduring political control by unprincipled authoritarians.

Today we witness what appears to be the beginning of the end with a ‘fundamental transformation’ of our republic.  The Deep State of autocratic elites and their central planners has become firmly ensconced in our government through 50 years of elections by an increasingly under-educated and politically dormant electorate.  California’s failure to recall Newsom is undoubtedly the nation’s posterchild of such misguided elections when we look at the condition of the state and his horrible ongoing policies.  Consider (here) that in just one region –

• SF retailers (e.g. Walgreens) closing stores because their city lets thieves clear shelves of goods and openly haul them away;
• People are moving away in numbers that leads to an enrollment drop in SF schools;
• Polls show that more than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave permanently.

Given Newsom’s overwhelming repulse of the recall, it is clear that the added level of pain to cause a sea change in people’s attitudes is yet to be determined.  And that again brings to question the ability of voters to understand the source and sustenance of their pain.

‘Tax the Rich’ – a momentous Democrat lie

“… until you run out of other people’s money.”  M. Thatcher

George Rebane

The momentous lies retold daily by the Democratic Party are now getting too numerous to count.  Among the most impactive on Americans is their assertion that the $5T+ cost of their new government growth and spending programs “will be zero”.  How’s that?  Well, they’ll just tax the crap out of “the rich” and corporations.  ‘You, Mr/Ms Main Street Snuffie won’t have to pay a penny; what’s not to like?’

For our informed and educated neighbors such claims are truly head-spinning as is made clear again by economists Phil Gramm (also former senator) and Mike Solon in the 15oct21 WSJ (here).  There we are reminded again that “the wealthy already bear far more of the burden in the US than they do in other developed countries.”  The chart below compares the ‘fair shares’ paid by the top 10% earners in the US, France Germany, and Sweden.  Note the enormous imbalance in what our socialists are demanding to what we already are paying to keep the vote buying programs funded.  The tax burden in other developed nations (including the vaunted Sweden) is more equally shared by incorporation of a nominally 15-20% VAT on all purchases.  So it turns out, as Gramm and Solon show, that the US already has the most progressive tax system in the world, thereby giving lie to the claims that somehow the ‘rich’ are getting away with murder at the expense of the remaining 90% of Americans.

Their public copy aside, what the Democrats’ new tax proposals do is continue to favor the top 1% who lower their tax rates by charitable giving and investing in tax-favored securities and sectors promoted by our government.  These provisions actually favor the very rich – i.e. the top 1% of earners, not the 10% - and none of such bennies will be affected by the new ‘tax the rich’ rates designed to hit the less wealthy down the income ladder.  No lamestream outlet is allowed to tell us this.

In the meantime we are having a problem finding enough workers to support robust economic growth.  “Since the War on Poverty started in 1965, the labor-force participation rate of bottom-quintile earners, who now receive more than 90% of their $50,000 average income from government transfer payments, has fallen from almost 70% to 36%. With the Build Back Better Act proposing to explode unearned benefits and shower them on middle-income Americans, how long will it take for the current U.S. labor-force participation rate of 61.6% to fall to 55%, as it is in France, or 50%, as it is in Italy? Who then will pull the wagon and pay the taxes to fund the American welfare state?”  This is what we mean when we talk of the takers and makers.  And who do the takers vote for, and which party wants to maximize the people (citizens and illegals) who draw ever more of their succor from the government?

(And these worthies have no idea what’s in store for them regarding their contribution to labor, once the nation, any nation, falls under the tender mercies of a single party state.  History read is a great teacher; not so much history ignored.)

We are reminded again by Gramm and Solon that “corporations don’t ultimately pay taxes” – their customers and their risk-exposed owners pay the whole kit and kaboodle.  “If there is anything economists agree on—and there isn’t much—it’s that all taxes imposed on corporations fall in part on the consumers of their products and in part on their stockholders and workers. Workers pay between 50% and 70% of the corporate tax that isn’t passed on to consumers in higher prices. The record growth in real wages after the 2017 corporate tax cuts, especially among low-income, minority and disadvantaged workers, bears this out.  So when corporate tax rates are raised, it’s workers and their pensions, retirement accounts and insurance investments, which own 72% of America’s stockholder equity, who pay most of those taxes.”

Again, the indominable man-in-the-street who votes Democrat has no clue of this, or at best considers it to be another rightwing piece of fake news put out by rich capitalists and big corporations.  However, when you run the numbers, you see that “not surprisingly, with much of the 2017 tax cuts made up of corporate rate reductions, child tax credits and a doubling of the standard deduction, the Trump tax cuts made the tax code more, not less, progressive.”  When was the last time you heard that on any of the lamestream outlets?

We can put a ribbon around all this by citing the most recent big three feel-good economic accomplishments out of Bumblebrain’s teleprompter – 1) he has created 5M+ new jobs, 2) unemployment dropped below 5%, and 3) wages have gone up.  Well, not exactly.  Employment gain has been anemic due to government handouts, industry is stifled for lack of workers.  Unemployment dropped only because more people dropped out of the workforce -  i.e. they quit looking for jobs.  And the buying power of wages has declined due to not keeping pace with the big jump in inflation.  Americans’ real wages have declined for the first time since the big Obama dip in 2013.  And all of this is due to self-inflicted harm brought to you by Team Biden and his ballyhooed Build Back Better policies which have a snowball’s chance in hell of kicking in.  But to Bumblebrain, all this is "progress".

Climate Change Policies – Costly and Ineffective

George Rebane

Bjorn Lomborg (q.v.) enlightens us again about the realities of the much-ballyhooed policies to fight what is sold as preventable manmade global warming. (here)  The bottom line is that the agreed on policies of the recent Paris accords, and those to be adopted next month in Glasgow, are both enormously expensive and will not make a hill of beans difference in the future anticipated as calculated by the UN and reported in Nature.  We should also note that no one is even on track to meeting their Paris commitments signed under Obama.

If the whole country went carbon-neutral tomorrow, the standard United Nations climate model shows the difference by the end of the century would be a barely noticeable reduction in temperature of 0.3 degree Fahrenheit. This is because the U.S. will make up an ever-smaller share of emissions as the populations of China, India and Africa grow and get richer.

America’s goal, according to the Biden administration, is a 95% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, which will come in at a cost of 11.9% of GDP annually.  The Left claims that polls show Americans are all for reducing carbon emissions, and even willing to pay up to $200 annually to achieve that.  But the actual cost per person breaks down to $11,300 per person per year.  That means that the annual bill to an average American household of 2.53 people is over $28,500, and no one is willing to pay even close to that by almost an order of magnitude.

Polls are mostly worthless pieces of legerdemain because their questionnaires are ideologically wordsmithed, represent dynamic attitudes, and their results are misunderstood by their innumerate audiences.  Few would answer ‘No’ to ‘Do you favor policies to reduce future crop scorching temperatures and rising sea levels?’ or ‘Should CO2 levels be reduced to what we had in 2005 to stop global warming?’  With one-sided questions like these, no one knows either the effect or the cost of achieving the stated goals.  And yet the policy promoters in government and the media state with grave authority that ‘85% of Americans favor policies to significantly reduce future carbon levels’.  This then is supposed to be the public’s support for draconian increases in our taxes, economy stifling regulations, and added restrictions on our freedoms.  Sleazebag politics at its finest – “A nation ignorant and free …”.

Alinsky Abridged (Edited)

George Rebane

Saul Alinsky is one of the Left’s modern intellectuals and still a guiding light who died back in 1972 after having written Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals.  He was admired in print by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  One of the ‘practical’ guideposts he bequeathed his disciples, now grown into the millions, has been coagulated into a set of eight rules for restructuring the country into a compliant socialist state.  The Democratic Party has embraced these in their entirety and are working hard today to bring the country to heel before this decade is out.  It is visible everywhere that they are making progress that even exceeds their expectations.  Here are Alinsky’s rules that we see assiduously implemented today in America by socialists of all hues, no matter where we look.

1)  Healthcare - Control healthcare and you control the people.

2)  Poverty - Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.

3)  Debt - Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.

4)  Gun Control - Remove the ability of the people to defend themselves from their Government. Thus less (or no) resistance to a police state.

5)  Welfare  - Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).

6)  Education  - Take control of what people read and take control of what children learn in school.

7)  Religion  - Remove the belief in God from the government and schools.

8)  Class Warfare  - Divide the people into “wealthy” and “poor,” causing discontent:   It will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.

WHO: Economic Development Trumps Climate Change

George Rebane

In his regular WSJ column on climate change issues, Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus and Stanford's Hoover Institution shines a light on the little reported aspects of the World Health Organization’s analysis of factors affecting the health of the world’s poor in the coming decades. (here) The bottom line, hidden by the Left and its lamestream media, is that more lives will be saved (by millions) through continuing the current course of global economic development, than will be saved by adopting the stringent climate change policies as prescribed by the Paris climate agreement and at next month’s Glasgow Climate Conference.  All such policies are based on utility functions which overwhelmingly favor policies that are ‘deemed’ to reduce global warming over other factors, primarily the effects of economic development on the QoL and health of the world’s poor.

The lives saved annually in 2050 by implementing existing and anticipated global warming accords is projected at 85,000.  However, over a spread of economic growth scenarios impacted by policies seeking to reduce preventable manmade global warming, the annual deaths range from 300,000 to 2,000,000 from malnutrition among the world’s poor.  If saving lives, especially among the poor, ever becomes important in these politicized and dubiously scientific considerations, then sanity advises avoiding draconian approaches such as contemplated in the Green New Deal and the additional socialist diktats on our lives and livelihoods planned by the Biden administration and amplified by established radicals such as are ensconced in Sacramento and Albany.  Per today’s dominant media and government narratives, these conclusions remain invisible to the general public.

Ruminations – 6oct21 (updated 9oct21)

George Rebane

The autocratic state advances. ‘Government secretly orders Google to track anyone searching certain names, addresses, and phone numbers’.  The Deep State on the march under a very supportive administration.

‘Domestic Terrorists’ is the DoJ’s new designation for parents and citizens attending local school board meetings to protest teaching Critical Race Theory, gender-bending, and revisionist history to young students.  The FBI, acting more like the STASI every day, will be investigating and arresting Americans who still believe that the state does not own their children.

‘The Woke Left’s Primitive Economics’ are described by Paul Rubin in the 6oct21 WSJ.  When examined, it becomes clear that liberal thought in its acute embodiment ‘wokeness’ requires the adherent to first become butt stupid in most things about how the realworld works.  These pages have chronicled this phenomenon for over a decade.

[updates] Ivermectin manufacturer Merck dunned that drug for C19 therapeutics and is now promoting a new therapeutic that it is pre-marketing and will soon introduce (more here).  By its own admission it will be about half as effective as IVM (which costs about $3 a course).  But you can bet the farm that the new pill will be many times more profitable.  (H/T to reader)

Braindead journalists on Fox News and Republican politicians in Congress have yet to ask germane questions of the Democrat elites who are siccing the FBI on American parents on the pretense that they are ‘domestic terrorists’, parents who openly and legitimately protest the local schools’ curricula during public school board meetings.  The critical unasked question is ‘Show ONE example of evidence of “intimidation”, “public threat”, “violent action”, “threat of violent action” toward elected school boards on which you base your case for federal law enforcement intervention against the publicly protesting parents whose children are being subjected to unmitigated socialist propaganda during class periods in which they should be learning the basic skills ultimately required of an educated and informed electorate?’  The Dems’ attempt to answer that question should expose them as the pariahs that they are.

[7oct21 update]  Women in clodhoppers and combat boots.  In these days of topsy-turvy sexes and genders, women’s fashions have adopted a distinctly counter-culture currency.  And nowhere more violently than in their new footwear rage – gone are Melania’s elegant pumps, and in are shoes and boots with multi-inch platforms and styles with trench warfare uppers and soles with treads more commonly found on military Humvees.  My great-aunt Tante Alvi, a recognized fashion expert during the pre-war era in Europe, enunciated the de rigueur of women’s footwear – ‘Ladies do not appear in public sans heels’ (with the usual exceptions of course).  My sainted mother and my beloved sweetie-pie were/are strict adherents.  And fortunately, especially for us men, that dictum held until the current societal disintegration began.

Terry McLaughlin's column on the Hyde Amendment in the 7oct21 Union (here) will be an eye-opener for most readers concerned about the federal funding of abortions.  Attempting to end run its inclusion this year is yet another about-faces which the Dems are doing as they reconfigure their party in its Great Leap Leftward as called for by their growing socialist faction.  McLaughlin's succinct and clear description of the goings on is worth a read.

[9oct21 update]  The leftwing Quinnipiac Poll respected by all leftwingers came out with a typical report of Bumblebrain’s numbers diving for the mud.

• Overall opinion of administration: Approve 38%, Disapprove 53%
• On ‘Immigration’: Approve 25%, Disapprove 67%
• On Foreign Policy: Approve 34%, Disapprove 58%
• On Economy: Approve 39%, Disapprove 55%
• Overall assessment on running the country: Incompetent 55%

Note that our drive-by liberal poll commenters remain totally silent on the nationally recognized and reported disaster of the Biden administration.  I don’t follow polls per se, but I’m told these numbers are historic.

On Our Road to Serfdom – 10sep21

George Rebane

We Americans have been on the road to serfdom since the launch of President Johnson’s Great Society programs in the late 1960s.  Our progress toward an authoritarian social order was an almost imperceptible creep during the early years starting in the 1970s.  With the passing of the decades, our loss of freedoms has now become a gallop, especially highlighted by the state diktats, we quietly succumbed to during the Covid pandemic.  Specifically, I’m really talking about the battering suffered by the Bastiat Triangle of Rights (q.v.) – Liberty, Security, and Property.  These rights form the seminal legal structure upon which ALL other rights are based and secured; none can be weakened without a concomitant weakening of the other two, and, of course, the weakening of the rights deriving from these.

A beguiling danger on the road to serfdom is that its many disarming byways and slowly enlarging chuck holes are not readily noticed by travelers being drawn by descriptions of the promised land at its terminus.  By the time the journey becomes so difficult that even the lightest thinkers notice, it is too late to turn around and go back.  In America, our socialist elites have successfully brought a compliant and undereducated electorate to such a milestone on the road to serfdom and totalitarianism.

Noted Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, along with Milton Friedman of the ‘Chicago school’, each warned us of the ultimate disaster that would result from an embrace of collectivist governance based on central planning and control by elites.  The disasters of practiced fascism and communism highlight pre-woke and pre-CRT history books.  That both arose from initial adoption of various forms of Marxian socialism is today clouded by the Left’s resurgence and its citation of the Scandinavian experience.  Nowhere is mentioned Scandinavia’s actual unsustainable experience with socialism, along with their ongoing attempts to retreat from their extreme flirtations during the 1960s and 70s.

The US, on the other hand, is rushing toward a neo-Marxian socialist future on a disintegrating chariot pulled by global warming, open borders, and critical theories.  The party in charge of this rush to misery are the Democrats dominated by their left-wing zealots.  A socialist future is now openly presented as the objective of the country’s fundamental transformation.  And the road is already littered with authoritarian mandates that would have gathered our forefathers bearing torches and pitchforks in the public square.  With more of us arriving daily.

This week we heard that CDC has expanded from controlling our rental market to overruling relationships between Americans and their physicians.  As relayed by a reader who went to the local Rite-Aid drugstore to fill an Ivermectin prescription by her doctor, the pharmacist told her that they are rejecting such prescriptions because the CDC has deemed Ivermectin to have suddenly become harmful and not to be used as a C19 therapeutic or prophylactic.  So these unelected, politicized bureaucrats have now injected themselves into our country’s doctor/patient relationship starting with using a demonstrated lamestream hoax to prevent physicians from prescribing lawful medicines to their patients.  And no one has made a peep.  The lamestream has, of course, remained mum, but even the so-called rightwing outlets have yet to pick up on this latest rollback of our freedoms.  We have become so inured to having our rights casually cancelled by any politician or bureaucrat at literally any level of governance.  We are already serfs who comply with our master’s voice.  No second thought is given.  We are even enthusiastic enforcers of such mandates, ready, willing, and able to turn on our neighbor when we see noncompliance.

The Nobelist Hayek was most eloquent and clear in the warnings he issued, beginning with The Road to Serfdom (1944) and continuing throughout his life after he went to the University of Chicago and became part of ‘the Chicago School’ which also included Nobelist Milton Friedman.  A perusal of Serfdom yields some of his more important sentiments about socialism, collectivism, and totalitarianism.

• Western democracies, including the UK and the US, have "progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past".  Society has mistakenly tried to ensure continuing prosperity by centralized planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

• Socialism is a hypocritical system, because its professed humanitarian goals can only be put into practice by brutal methods "of which most socialists disapprove". Such centralized systems also require effective propaganda, so that the people come to believe that the state's goals are theirs. As with communism, Hayek argues that the roots of National Socialism lie in socialism.

• Centralized planning is inherently undemocratic, because it requires "that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people".  The power of these minorities to act by taking money or property in pursuit of centralized goals, destroys the Rule of Law and individual freedoms.  Where there is centralized planning, "the individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as ''socialized welfare' or the 'good of the community'".

• Hayek opposed regulations that restrict the freedom to enter a trade, or to buy and sell at any price, or to control quantities. Nevertheless, he acknowledged the utility of regulations that restrict legal methods of production, so long as these are applied equally to everyone and not used as an indirect way of controlling prices or quantities, and without forgetting the cost of such restrictions.

So today we have Biden and his CDC stumbling through one science-free policy after another in their misbegotten efforts to curb Covid.  None of them understand that the disease is now endemic and a permanent part of our health landscape.  We will fight it as we have other infectious diseases, by developing herd immunity through exposure and vaccines, but never by lockdowns and economic destruction.  Ignoring history and science while putting politics first, Team Biden now issues illegal and unconstitutional federal mandates to prescribe everything from masks, to vaccinations, to testing, to social distancing.  And again, we as the serfs we have become do not make a peep in opposition.  Half of us have become so compliant that they rush to denounce their neighbors who don’t toe the (Democratic) party line.

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’. 

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.

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.

Critical Race Theory – a personal assessment

“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”  Stephen Decatur

"... the ultimate purpose of  public education is to subsume the individual's will into the general will."  American Marxist (2021)

George Rebane

CRT is now blowing across the land, starting with our K-12 public schools and continuing on through our public and private institutions to its unbelievable terminus – our military.  Everything in between from corporations to governments at all levels have been infected by a new belief system that sees and describes America at every turn as a deeply flawed nation – to many of us as the world’s most reprehensible country.

CRT is being implanted and implemented in many of its variants.  Not one of them need to check every box in the list of its attributes.  And to the lightly-read with no critical thinking skills, this variability in its applications allows them to deny that CRT is rampant in the land.  These light thinkers are all children of the Left whose leaders and media outlets represent CRT as a culmination of correct insight into the nation’s history.

These insights all center around America as the world’s focused vortex of white supremacy that has kept people of color enslaved in various forms unto this day since it all began for them in 1619.  Our evil and/or ignorant half does not recognize America as the generations-long most desired destination for people of all colors.  They simply ignore the multi-generational mass ingress of immigrants and illegal aliens, and continue, louder than ever, their narrative and pedagogy of a reprobate America.

In these pages we posted many commentaries and comment streams that examine the impact and realities of CRT as it seeps through the most intimate inroads of our society’s public and private lives. (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) The Left has now successfully submerged even the most balanced criticisms of CRT.  To be caught criticizing, automatically pins the racist label on all who so dare.  This is now so strongly enforced in every level of media and politics that private individuals no longer dare speak their thoughts in normal conversations when they are out and about.  The result is, of course, an ever-widening of the already irredeemable chasm that separates us.

I focus on the damage that is done to our children when they are indoctrinated in public schools with the variants of CRT.  The most visible damage is to the students’ political values with which they matriculate, and then go on to interpret and accept the worldview fed to them daily by our lamestream media.  Absent in their acquired skillsets is critical thinking – the state of the country and world is summarized for them by a set of 17 (don’t hold me to this number) collectivist cum Marxist shibboleths, endlessly repeated and accredited by their political, entertainment, and sports celebrities.

The point here is that this growing cohort of citizenry sees very little about America that should be conserved, for them it is all bad and requires a fundamental transformation to make it right.  That is what CRT-based history has done and continues to do to our citizenry.  It removes the love of country and makes toxic its symbols, traditions, established curricula, and even our everyday language.  All of these are to be replaced by new norms of social justice, equity, and anti-western values.  Never mind that these notions remain undefined.  Without critical thought to light the way, the missing definitions never enter the mind - high-sounding labels suffice to inspire action.

So, call these CRT variants what you will, the bottom line is that people emerge from their indoctrination sessions with a jaundiced eye toward everything traditionally American.  They see little to preserve, and believe that in the transformed brave new world they will be better off in every dimension of human existence.  Most even believe that all this can be achieved with ever less intrusive governments as even neo-Marxist teach the ultimate perfection of Man and the final evaporation of governance.  None are aware of how many eggs had to be cracked in the attempts to make such omelets in the past.

According to my lights, an accurate history of America can and should be taught to our kids.  But it needs to be taught in such a way that on balance, even when recognizing our barnacles, they emerge seeing our country as being an historically exceptional social order.  One that has achieved for its citizens, and the world at large, an enormously increased quality of life, as it continues to be the destination of choice for not only the downtrodden, but also its industrious builders.

Global Tax Bamboozle

Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

George Rebane

Let’s start with an eternal truth, forever hidden from the lightly read and leftwing ‘economists’ – corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do.’  Today SecTreas Yellen is Team Biden’s point on the easy job of convincing the G-7 countries to establish a globally applied minimum tax on corporations that do business across national borders.  A 15% minimum on some line in a company’s income statement is being bandied about.  The EU countries are ecstatic about the prospects of taxing American companies for revenues generated withing their borders.  “The deal represents an intersection of Europeans’ longstanding dream to tax American tech companies and the Biden Administration’s attempt to bamboozle lawmakers into passing a competition-killing corporate-tax hike at home.”

But the whole idea for such a tax is a bad one from start to finish. (more here) Our anti-American Left sees it as a twofer – more revenues to support increased vote buying at home, and subrogating our Congress’ taxing powers to an international bureaucracy will take America another step away from sovereignty and toward a global government.

The bamboozle is particularly pernicious for the nation’s consumers, particularly those who are  both ignorant and poor.  For them the availability of needed goods and services will go down as their prices go up.  And all this is happening as they cheer on their scumbag politicians for delivering another tranche of social justice in making the corporations pay their fair share of taxes.  It’s actually a double tax on the corporations’ customers who then will have to pay higher prices and correspondingly higher sales taxes.

The international tax agreement, in whatever form it takes, will have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.  And what winds up getting through will be gamed to a fare-thee-well by the big corporatists.  You can bet the farm that their margins and, therefore, share prices will not be impacted.  What our socialists don’t understand is exactly how the corporations will game whatever new corporate tax policy is imposed here and abroad.  (Readers recall a fundamental Rebane Doctrine tenet - The bad part of capitalism is that they will always game the system, the good part of capitalism is that they will always game the system.  A corollary of this is that the corporatists have already gamed whatever change is planned for the system.)

Bottom line, don’t let any of this impact decisions on the disposition of equities in your portfolio.

The Great Divide – an updated review (updated 20jul21)

George Rebane

This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’.  The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’.  I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country.  And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine.  I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.

The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen.  Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border.  Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”

The Evil Party – more lives lost to the Left (updated 21jun21)

The fact that Joe Biden is even considering opening our southern border to a group of unvetted illegal aliens in a massive caravan – in the middle of a pandemic, while millions of Americans are unemployed – tells you everything you need to know about Democrats’ priorities.  - Anonymous

George Rebane

In voices hushed by the evil Democratic Party and their lamestream mouthpieces, evidence continues to pile in that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IMT) are effective preventatives and curatives for Covid-19 (more here and here).  Both are worldwide established pharmaceuticals that have been in constant use for various diseases for decades.  HCQ was initially approved by the FDA for treating C19.  Then approval was withdrawn due to a politicized study that itself was later shown to be faulty.  Since then, additional studies have been performed, cited, and censored showing the benefits of both drugs.

The latest is a study of patients already on ventilators who received HCQ in combination with Azithromycin (AZ).  The results showed patients receiving HCQ/AZ had a survival rate almost three times that of those who were denied the treatment.  Other studies that were not recognized in the US showed that both HCQ and IMT were also effective as treatments for C19 in the pre-ventilator stages of the disease.  There are countless reports of both drugs being used quietly by healthcare workers in unpublished subrosa protocols to save the lives of their patients.

When these performance stats are applied to the millions of C19 patients who have died over the past year plus (600,000 in the US alone), then the extent of this evil is revealed, and begins to compare itself to the order of magnitude of the Holocaust and other politically motivated genocides.  The political motivation in our country was TDS – denying President Trump any credit for his successful policies fighting the C19 pandemic.  In this light, our Democrats and their proto-communist factions are directly culpable for the readily preventable deaths of uncounted tens of thousands of Americans.

To our Left, these political sacrifices are merely the “few eggs that must be cracked to make their (socialist) omelet” - with a nod to Josif Vissarionovich.  And there are many more such cracked eggs to come as they continue their unabated fundamental transformation of America.

[21jun21 update]  “New Study Links Ivermectin to ‘Large Reductions’ in COVID-19 Deaths”  The number of lives that could have been saved by the anti-Trump Left not proscribing Ivermectin easily reaches into the hundreds of thousands.  However Teams Pelosi/Schumer/Biden abetted by Team Fauci were perfectly willing to sacrifice these thousands of lives to maintain their narrative driving toward victory in an election year.  For them there was no doubt that the end would justify any horrendous means available.  And as in any communist and/or third world country, no one will be held accountable – ongoing existential evil in our midst.

Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

Why promote a minimalist government – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”  Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

Anyone notice how student debt is propagandized as an act of nature that afflicts students who were innocent of getting into financial straits?  Even FN is bamboozled by the Dems and the almost hysterical reporting in the lamestream on this issue.  Those poor students played no part in voluntarily signing up for those loans.  No siree, they were struck down as if by a dreaded disease, blindsided into a terrible state of affairs, sorta like getting Covid or having your house devastated by Katrina.  And now the national response to those fiscally innocents wailing about their wallets has to be another vote buying dip into the public purse to forgive their debts.  And, oh yes, Trump is guilty for not having done it last year.  And here's the solution sent by a reader.

Biden’s spending spree is definitely designed to swing the nation’s double dummies into believing that he is the one who is reviving an already revived and ready-to-roar economy.  Again, the purpose is to buy some near-term votes for the 2022 election with a handful of good quarterly bumps to the GDP.  What the lightly reads neither understand nor pay attention to is what this massive near-term spending portends.  Even liberal economists agree that these initial spurts will guarantee that the rest of the 20s will be mired in ‘a future of secular stagnation’.  The next 8 to 10 years will then see GPD growth under 2%, hearkening back to the Jimmy Carter years.  The anti-American Dems are all for that because it will mean that the US will not have the money to properly fund its military against China and Russia, and to complete securing our southern border against all who will cross it illegally to a waiting basket of welfare benefits not available to American citizens.  The policy is designed to keep America divided with an increasing cohort of Democrat voters who will guarantee that we will become a socialist-bound one-party state, you know, sorta like California. (more here)

[8jun21 update]  The Dems and their constituents – both lightly read and dismally educated – are in terminal denial that America’s Left has put the country on the road to Marxism.  This strong belief is repeated continuously on their lamestream media, even though evidence ignored pours in daily.  The latest can be seen in their grassroots being convinced to pine for new and stronger measures of censorship to established for national media.   In the 8jun21 Union (here), local leftwinger Linda Schuyler Horning (“Fox News was established to launch its assault on American democracy.”) calls for re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine and formation of a new federal Truth Commission to specify and filter what you and I can consume from the news and entertainment media.  In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz writes, “What emerges from Dangerous Ideas is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd.” (more here)  As I said, the evidence abounds for our current march to authoritarian Marxism, and maybe worse.

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.

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)

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.

Quo tendimus? (updated 20apr21)

George Rebane

[My ‘Farewell Unity’ commentary was also published in the 3apr21 Union (here). Its lengthy comment stream made clear again that most liberals had trouble understanding my proposition for finding common ground.  Nevertheless, the piece has since then garnered considerable interest.  This week the newspaper printed on separate days not one, not two, but three op-ed columns by liberals delivering most revealing critiques of the future Americas desired by both sides – ‘Path to unity in America’(13apr21) by Elliot Schneiderman, ‘A point of near unity’(15apr21) by Paul Hauck, and ‘Finding Unity in America’(16apr21) by Nory Fussel.  When “retired scientist” Schneiderman took me to task, I responded with the piece below, prematurely, it turned out, since I was not aware of the subsequent op-eds by Hauck and Fussel.  I address the latter two in the addendum to this post.  Perhaps all this interest provides hope that the conversation toward unity, which I outline below, will start here or elsewhere.  20apr21 update - an edited form of this commentary was published here in the 20apr21 Union.  More here.]

I was halfway heartened to read ‘left-leaning neighbor’ Elliot Schneiderman’s 12apr21 ‘Path to unity in America’ response to my 3ap21 ‘Farewell Unity’ column.  It appears both of us support a future America that is persistently hailed by our Right, and seldom if ever described by our Left.  In fact, Elliot takes exception to the neo-Marxist future that I describe, and the one to which the current administration and the Democrat leadership publicly subscribe.  These disparate visions of America are well documented by the commentariats of both sides.  Elliot writes -

George quite wrongly states that “our neighbors on the left work feverishly for” this Marxist global government world view. I’m on our country’s left and will have none of it, I don’t personally know a single American that would ascribe (sic) to it, and I am convinced that the vast majority of our country’s left do not ascribe (sic) to it.

This remarkable view from the Left is easily explained by the recorded half-century decline of our progressive schools that have assiduously omitted any mention of such historic realities.  And it is easily confirmed through conversations with a sampling of your left-leaning neighbors, especially the ones cited by Elliot.