Rebane's Ruminations

STEM education and careers – not for everyone

George Rebane

Our socially destructive culture has long done a number on students with the extraordinary capacity to study and make it in STEM careers.  Part of the socialist agenda for the US is to impress in the population a belief that we are fundamentally all equal, with all of us capable of anything as long as the state suppresses the bad angels of discrimination with which we, especially the whites, are burdened.  And to accomplish this we need to make sure that Billy and Jill grow up in an environment of mirror-fogging equity instead of merit-based equal opportunity in which today DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) is the chosen form of politically acceptable social environment.

Unfortunately, the realworld is fashioned on quite a different landscape where our capacities have developed differentially.  Today diversity is recognized, but in a highly qualified manner and under precisely and politically prescribed circumstances.  Diversity that leads to differential capacities to perform, especially in the cognitive areas, is not only rejected but also proscribed in some places by laws that may lead to incarceration.  Again, science confirms that in almost all dimensions that describe us we are created unique and develop unequally, and in some dimensions these differences are systemic and cannot be overcome by bending the twig according to the dictates of DEI.  

Nationally recognized scholar and political scientist, Harvard/MIT educated Dr Charles Murray, has written an illuminating essay about the extraordinary and special requirements for success in STEM education and subsequent careers.  His ‘The Roots of STEM Excellence - Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is a paramount goal.’ here in the 30aug24 WSJ will now be vilified by all the usual leftwing suspects bent on reducing America into a second-world country.  In this piece he continues reporting on research that established the human diversities we reported on in his previous work Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) which was equally attacked and rejected by the Left. (more here)  (I wrote a Union column on it at the time which could not be printed for reasons its then publisher took great pains to explain to me over one of our lunches.)

The basic thesis Murray presents is that success in STEM requires cognitive abilities that are relatively very uncommon.  The cognitive abilities demanded are present in only the top 0.01% or one in 10,000 people – it’s just the way the cognitive cookie crumbles.  The bottom line is that just being dedicated and working hard will not cut it as it does for almost all other professional pursuits.  It’s the equivalent of not being able to make it in the NBA if you’re short or in the NFL if you’re skinny and slow.  Not everyone has what it takes to make it in any desired career – the playing field is not level, and it was ever thus.  This is diametrically contra to what is told to our K-12 students in progressive public schools.

To nail the point and outline the problem, I will quote some paragraphs from the cited essay by Charles Murray.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence. They use “holistic” admissions algorithms that treat tested cognitive ability as just one of many desirable traits. That isn’t necessarily an educational disaster for the next generation of brilliant performers in the social sciences, humanities and nonacademic majors. They can develop their potential in an ordinary college or even without college. The STEM fields are different, for two reasons.

First, the raw cognitive demands are greater in STEM than other disciplines. People who are merely in the top few percentiles of overall cognitive ability don’t face insuperable obstacles in rising to the top of non-STEM fields given enough determination and hard work. Nothing in their college courses is impossible for them to learn if they try hard enough. That’s not true in STEM. Much of the advanced math required for performance at the top of STEM fields is literally impossible to learn for anyone without math ability deep into the top percentile. Determination and hard work can’t compensate.

America’s Downward Spiral – A Revealing Snapshot

George Rebane

Date Everything - Rebane Doctrine

In this election year which promises to be a political milestone (watershed?) two significant neo-Marxist messages from Democratic politicians blanketed the country yesterday.  Presidential candidate and VP Kamala Harris told the nation that her economic program (here) going forward would be based on government price controls in order to control inflation.  And Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA17) wrote an excellent article (here) in the 17aug24 WSJ contrasting his and VP candidate Sen JD Vance’s (R-OH) views on industrial policy.  Both progressive politicians cannot see America’s private sector making the country’s economy work without massive participation by the federal government that involves more regulatory controls, more directed subsidies, higher taxes on industry and ‘the rich’, and a heavily unionized workforce blessed with ‘living wages’ and price controls.

Rep Khanna’s piece is well written and very convincing to an audience mired in ignorance about economics, finance, human behavior, and the history of socialist governance here and abroad.  Unfortunately about two out of three Americans are so burdened as they attempt to make sense of the current daily tsunami of political punditry.  Khanna’s essay is both effective and impactive through the way he erroneously characterizes conservative thought, policies, and its ideological tenets.  He constructs excellent strawmen (i.e. lies) which are then readily demolished by his adroit wordsmithing.

One of the prime fallacies both Harris and Khanna promulgate is that government price controls actually work in managing a national economy to the benefit of its citizens.  Each presents that as an axiomatic notion of truth requiring no evidence to support it.  Central to their message to the benighted is that fixing prices does not affect supply and stifle economic growth.  The common thread from both politicians is that the Democrats have been and are the competent stewards of our economy who build factories and make jobs for main street.

No one of the Left understands any of the basic science of how nature manages complexity.  Their ideas about how complex economies work is based on a small trove of simplistic slogans and shibboleths that are demonstrably wrong.  And principles like ‘you cannot control what you cannot measure’ is also beyond their ken.  They still have no idea how primitive are our methods of collecting relevant, accurate, and timely economic data, and then using it to fashion information that would come close to supporting correct policy decisions made by a cohort of centrally controlling technicians.

As a coda to the above riff, I want to remind present day readers, most not all that interested in the view from my perch, that a prime motivation of this blog is to insert a collection of my observations into the great archive in the cloud – ‘the internet is forever’ – which may someday be dredged up by future data archeologists studying the mentality of the citizenry that allowed their great nation at its apex to go to hell in a handcart.

Neo-Marxism and Climate Change – the one-two punch

'The Death of Direct Democracy Has Been Understated', WSJ headline

George Rebane

The full court press of collectivist neo-Marxism in its progressive, woke, and Democratic Party versions pairs with the programmed hysteria of ‘Climate Change’ (nee global warming) as the two most significant and compelling worldviews being promoted across the globe by developed nations.  Both have now reached the heights of religion and actively reject any and all reasonable arguments to refute or falsify them – therefore both are ideologically and firmly anti-science.  Their maintenance in the public mind is through a steady and ubiquitous distribution of lies across the educational, entertainment, and news media.

A correspondent sent me a short piece (here) by Chris Martz on the current heatwave harassing the eastern part of the country.  Led by the notorious climate science high priest and master of the 'Hockey Stick', UPenn’s Dr Michael Mann, and his big lie du jour is again that such weather/temperature episodes are “unprecedented”.  Martz cites the four actual historically high June heatwaves that occurred in 1936, 1944, 1953, and 1988.  Nothing has matched them since, and he presents temperature data from several cities on the current heatwave demonstrating their non-sensational statistics.

If we take a slightly deeper look at just the four cited record-setting heatwaves, and treat them as Poisson arrivals (a correct and common approach to use with all kinds of sequentially occurring randomly independent events), then we calculate an arrival rate of 4 per 52 years or 0.0769 arrivals/year.  An even lower arrival rate can be argued if we extend the period covered by these four events to the present day, giving us the arrival rate of 4 per 88 years or 0.0455 arrivals/year.  Neither is exactly the blistering pace supported by the ongoing climate hysteria.

In fact, we can now use the well-known Poisson process formula for computing the probability that k = 0,1,2,3,… record breaking heatwaves should have occurred in selected time periods after the 1988 heatwave, given that the world was indeed getting alarmingly hotter.  (BTW, for the record my position on climate change remains anchored to the interpretation from the Copenhagen Consensus Center as proselytized by its president Bjorn Lomborg.)

So, without further ado the Poisson formula for the probability P(k) of k events in the time period in which arrival rate λ is calculated is simply P(k) = exp(-λ)*λ^k/k!.  For the 0.0769 arrivals/year rate we can examine the following 36 year period (1988-2024) during which time we would have expected an average of 36*0.0769 = 2.77 record setting heatwaves to arrive.

The graph below displays the calculated probabilities that at least the indicated number of heatwaves should have occurred in the last 36 years given that the climate process indicated by the recorded heatwave arrivals continues.  Of course, the argument made by the climate change calamatists is that things have steadily gotten hotter so that the arrival rate of record setting heatwaves should really have been increasing.  This would have upped the probabilities indicated in the graph.

As it stands, we should have had at least one additional record setting heatwave with probability 0.937 during this period, and we have had none.  This does not support the ongoing global propaganda of a rapidly warming earth.  (30jun24 more here)

California does not teach kids to read

'All people are naturally political animals.  Politics is a dominant factor in how we run our daily affairs in both the public and private spheres.  The individual who sniffs that they are above or not concerned with politics is simply delusional or worse.   For humans politics is fundamental.'  Charles Krauthammer paraphrased.

George Rebane

In the 22jun24 WSJ we learn that California public schools are even worse than what we have discovered over the years since Great Society policies were launched in the late 1960s.  Former English teacher Daniel Buck, now at the Fordham Institute, writes ‘California Will Teach Kids Anything Except How to Read’, wherein he describes the latest neo-Marxist turn of the screw on children entrusted to the state for their education.  The bottom line of our grade school reading curricula is that “Gender ideology, social justice and Marxist ideas are all welcome in the classroom. Phonics isn’t.”

Most recently – “In 2021 the state ignited a brawl over its mandated ethnic-studies curriculum. Its content and instructional practices have roots in 1960s activism against American hegemony; the goal is to “liberate” students from the oppressive forces of capitalism, patriarchy and settler colonialism.

In 2023 California implemented a new mathematics framework, the first edition of which included “whiteness” and “social justice” as topics for instruction. The goal was to raise the “sociopolitical consciousness” of students—in math class. A revised framework was notably less political but required teachers to use a quantifiably ineffective approach to teaching called “discovery” learning, where students must be left to “discover” their way into long division or algebraic equations.”

As we have long pointed out in these pages, the evil Democratic Party needs legions of double dummies ‘graduating’ from progressive run academe to assure the re-election of socialist politicians whose ideology and the impact of their policies are not understood by their usual cohort of constituents.  This beat, not only goes on, but becomes stronger by the year.  An example staring us in the face daily is the output of polls showing enormous support for our Bumblebrain president.  One wonders who are these tens of millions of very light thinkers who walk around in a brain fog with no ability to give a reasonable basis for their political beliefs.

Inflation? Most people don’t have a clue.

George Rebane

Evidence rolls in daily that Americans in the large do not have a clue about what is inflation and how it affects their financial wellbeing and quality of life.  This wholesale ignorance is constantly being reinforced by our news media of all political colorations and the Democratic Party.  The egregious journalists mostly congregate on the Right since they have no hidden agenda to hide the meaning and impact of inflation today spawned by Bidenomics.

The confusion arises from the use of the single misleading ‘inflation’ to variously describe three distinct and separate attributes of inflation – inflation level, inflation rate of change, and the change in inflation’s rate of change.  (Mathematically these are known as simply the first three derivatives of inflation’s price curve – respectively the zeroth, first, and second derivatives.)  The figure below illustrates.

Today we hear all kinds of reports citing inflation numbers that totally confound the average American – ‘inflation was xx% under the previous administration’, ‘inflation is now higher/lower, ‘inflation is going up/down’, ‘inflation is slowing’, and so on.  What almost no one understands is that claims that 'inflation is going down' is a bald-faced lie designed to fool the light thinkers.  Whatever the current level of inflation - i.e. Biden's 9% increase in market prices (here) - it is already baked in.  You will continue paying them and they will NOT go down as long as demand increases and supply does not.  So Team Biden's propaganda that they are 'reducing inflation' (#1) is utter BS; even if they reduce the inflation rate (#2), the current level of inflation will remain and prices will still go up.

Nobelist Milton Freedman and his forebears long ago advised us that inflated price increases are always a monetary phenomenon in which the government ‘prints’ and releases more fiat money into an economy to chase the same amount of goods and services, hence prices increase and we call the whole thing inflation.  The overall impact of inflation has always been that prices only ratchet up (increase monotonically) over time, and consequently the dollar in your pocket inevitably buys less stuff tomorrow than it does today.  But that is only the beginning of the story of government misuses of inflation to abuse and steal from its citizens.  Historically, great empires have inevitably laid themselves open to collapse and/or invasion by diluting/cheapening its money to the point that people no longer want to use it as the medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of wealth.  Hence, the economy’s wealth generation grinds to a halt and tax revenues can no longer pay for implementing public policies including maintaining its sovereignty with secure borders and an able military.

The real story of inflation is much more opaque.  Inflation is really a multi-level tax levied by governments that can no longer openly increase tax rates, so instead the steal money from their own citizens.  Notice that over the years the general level of people’s wealth has not increased much, if at all.  To be sure, enormous wealth has been generated in our economy by the commercial/industrial sector due to the invisible hand of market capitalism and ever-present competition.  And along with that, the quality of life for the broad population has increased by the introduction and affordability of all kinds of new products and services generated by corporations and entrepreneurs to whom justifiably the overwhelming majority of the new wealth accrues, since they are the ones who successfully invest their own monies and undertake the risks such ventures demand.  In spite of that, a large share of the population still lives paycheck-to-paycheck and has precious little saved for discretionary spending, investments, or a rainy day.  Increasing their debt and succumbing to more government welfare is their only alternative.

Looking under the hood of our economy and taking note of how our government inserts itself to gather tribute from the unsuspecting masses, it becomes clear that it is Big Brother run by sleazebag politicians and their deep state bureaucracies that effectively and continuously scrape off any ‘excess wealth’ that may accrue to the unsuspecting on main street who are lulled by a constant stream of bread and circuses from our political betters and their elites.  The whole program of mollification begins with a public education system that guarantees our young will be carefully taught to believe in the largess of government and the evils of private enterprise.

Two years ago I presented RR readers with the chapter and verse of how all this perfidy is executed in the public square.  You can and should review ‘Inflation Tax – Silent Rape by Government’, it will put some scary meat on the bone of the above arguments.  Unfortunately the bottom line here remains immutably unchanged.  We witness no awareness of all this by our friends and neighbors – you have yet to see protesting throngs with pitchforks and torches demonstrating in front of government buildings across the land.  (Also check out this post's comment stream.)  No one is aware of what is being quietly vacuumed from their wallets by the various levels of government ranging from local to federal.  All is well, just reduce your carbon footprint and embrace DEI wherever it may next be introduced – behave yourself.

America’s Mass Suicide in Progress

[The following is a recent commentary by Victor Davis Hanson, an academic and national intellect familiar to RR readers.  In it he again summarizes the socio-political travesties that America’s Left, abetted by our foreign enemies, daily visits upon our people most of whom ill-prepared by their schooling to understand, let alone resist, these propagandized assaults.  VDH’s commentary was first posted on townhall.com.  gjr]

Victor Davis Hanson

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice.

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges.

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign - while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely "Russian disinformation." That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multi-year audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden's purported tax irregularities.

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden's appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar "reparations" payout to the state's Black residents.

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have.

One of the reparations board leaders asserts Blacks might be willing to accept an "installment" plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a "travel alert" advising Blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' announcement of a presidential bid.

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis - all outside Florida - have the highest Black murder rates in the nation.

Florida by contrast, with a Black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of Black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP's board of directors is himself a Florida resident!

Black Lives Matter has just announced it lost millions of dollars in investments and ran up huge deficits. The culprit was its former corrupt leadership.

Its extravagant spending, plush homes, and family hangers-on have nearly bankrupted the advocacy group. It cannot account for the millions of dollars in corporate guilt and protection money it leveraged following the George Floyd riots in 2020.

In New York, a threatening subway career criminal with 42 prior arrests was subdued by a bystander and died during the confrontation. The criminal is now deified. The would-be Samaritan is charged with felony manslaughter.

The deceased's uncle is vocal about his late nephew's confrontation. But he himself was just arrested with stolen property and armed with a knife. He was mysteriously still roaming the streets despite 70 prior arrests and current active arrest warrants.

In almost every American city and town, biological males, with enormous advantages in size and musculoskeletal mass, routinely win women's sporting competitions.

They are systematically destroying decades of progress that sought to ensure parity between men and women's sports.

Corporate America has joined this cultural revolution hysteria. Companies are apparently now hellbent on destroying their brands, profits, and net worth.

Under pressure from the LGBTQ activists, the Los Angeles Dodgers reinvited the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to celebrate Pride night at Dodger Stadium.

Catholics and Christians had objected to the invitation because the group's notoriety hinges on its sexualized and often pornographic mockery of Catholic ritual, the Holy Trinity, and Christian faith.

The supposedly courageous group would never dare extend its street-theater blasphemy to other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus.

The Dodgers apparently do not care that Greater Los Angeles may be home to 6 million Mexican American citizens and resident Hispanic immigrants. Most are Catholic and many were avid Dodger fans.

Anheuser-Busch has nearly destroyed its best-selling Bud Light brand by hiring transgender performance-art activist Dylan Mulvaney to hawk the brand - and his own transitioning - to America's working classes.

The Disney corporation, for decades, has enjoyed multibillion-dollar concessions and a veritable 40-square mile private fiefdom gifted from the taxpayers of Florida.

No matter. Disney has rebranded it films, amusement parks, and television offerings to reflect radical transgender, gay, and race advocacies.

The results so far are billion-dollar losses in Disney stock, subscribers, and viewers.

A woke CNN has all but destroyed its once-global audience. It now has fewer viewers than certain popular podcasts.

All these implosions are not just shocking but surreal. Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide - to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?

Stupid is in residence

George Rebane

Robert Summa, the new minder and regional editor of The Union, is a functional idiot.  Gold Hill California Media, the new owner of the newspaper, is on a rampage buying up small town newspapers all over the west with the aim of introducing neo-Marxism to the heretofore conservative hinterlands in laying the groundwork for the advent of Agenda30 (aka Agenda21).

Certain of his emails censoring reader letters discussing CRT and Wokeism (here) have been made available to me.  The man refuses to publish such communications on the basis that he is not aware of what wokeism is beyond a rightwing dog whistle that denigrates progressive ideas.  Really, he is so auto-insular that he has never heard the Left use or discuss the notion and concepts of wokeism (here) that have swept the land from academe to the military, of which he will “not continue to platform conspiracy theories and disingenuous arguments that lead to violence or is purposefully spreading misinformation or disinformation to harm others …”.

His ignorance binds him so tightly that he has not even heard of the multi-edition, best-selling leftwing manual to promote wokeism – Don’t Think of an Elephant – and its author, nationally celebrated progressive philosopher George Lakoff (here).  Nor is he aware of the massive response from the country’s Right to counter wokeism – e.g. Counter Wokecraft.  In this sense, in addition to ignorant, we must add ‘stupid’ to his assemblage of professional attributes.

‘Democracy Dies in California’

“To impose a new burden on fast-food restaurants, the state plans to ignore the constitution’s right of voters to review laws.”

George Rebane

California suffers a continuous stream of social, economic, and political disasters.  All of these are formulated, brought to bear, and implemented by the state’s virulently anti-American Democratic Party.  Most of the public policy tragedies arrive unknown and unannounced to the state’s shrinking share of maker residents.  The takers don’t care since they know that all the wealth transfer programs, no matter how scurrilous, all go to buy and pay for their votes.

The latest of these promises an historic change in how California’s referenda will now be treated.  Slated to go into effect tomorrow (1jan23) – “The law creates a state council to dictate wages, working conditions and benefits, among other things, for fast-food workers who aren’t unionized. The law is intended to coerce fast-food franchises to surrender to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).” (here)

What’s different is that this law was passed late in the legislative session to deny Californians any reasonable review of the matter.  However, an astute watchdog organization, Save Local Restaurants, has gathered over a million signatures on a petition opposing the referendum and filed it with the state.  According to California’s constitution “a law is required to be put on hold once a referendum petition with enough signatures is filed.”

The constitution is very specific about this 1911 amendment which reserves “to the people the power to pass judgment upon the acts of the legislature, and to prevent objectionable measures from taking effect.” Once a referendum is filed, “no such act or section or part of such act shall go into effect until and unless approved by a majority of the qualified electors voting thereon.”

The state is ignoring its constitution, and has stated it will “temporarily” implement the law until the signatures are verified, a task that will be completed sometime in October 2023.  At that time the law will either be withdrawn or made permanent.  Such an unconstitutional, temporarily-in-effect provision has never been attempted before.

If allowed to stand, this legislative tactic – passing bills late in the legislative calendar in order to limit their opponents’ ability to stop them from taking effect - will become yet another tool and precedent for our monopoly political party to continue its destruction of California.  Sleazebags on parade.

The only remaining hope on this is an order by a state judge prohibiting enforcement of the law until a hearing is held in two weeks.  Else “businesses would have to temporarily comply even though the laws may be later suspended once signatures are verified and eventually overturned by voters.”  So it is no surprise that we continue to witness large numbers of our businesses and people vote with their feet by leaving California.

Enduring Impact of Imported Cultures

George Rebane

As we anticipate the horrendous impact of abandoning Title 42 for managing the current tsunami of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, George Mason University economics professor Garett Jones comes out with The Culture Transplant (2022), a major essay on the enduring impact of cultures brought in by America’s immigrants.  In the book review (here) we read –

… cultural traits can persist for generations after migrants arrive in a new country. Newcomers don’t simply assimilate to their new homes; as the book’s subtitle puts it, they “make the economies they move to a lot like the ones they left.” It’s a thesis that is at once highly provocative and a restatement of common sense: Poorly chosen immigrants can undermine a country’s success; cultures don’t disappear when people move from place to place.

A point long made in these pages, the presentation of this research underlines the damage, not only possible, but to be anticipated from the hordes of millions of illegals that have been released with no effective controls into all corners of our land.  More ominously –

… even after four generations in the U.S., immigrants continue to hold attitudes toward trust that are significantly influenced by their home countries. On a host of other matters, such as family, abortion and the role of government, fourth-generation immigrants on average converge only about 60% of the way to the national norm. “Overall,” Mr. Jones contends, “that low level of conformity is a bad sign, unless you think most immigrants come from countries with better political attitudes than Americans currently have.”

The bottom line is that immigrants from bad and backward countries don’t leave their cultures behind.  They continue to embrace and practice them here, especially when they gather in ethnically homogenous enclaves.  The resulting disunity impedes the falsely touted assimilation, and gives lie to the progressives’ chant that ‘Our diversity is our strength.’  In this shibboleth Jones writes “you’re hearing the cultural equivalent of second marriages: a triumph of hope over experience.”  As demonstrated over the centuries, first and foremost, people like to live with their own kind, no matter where they locate.

In this work Prof Jones has introduced a migration-adjusted SAT (state, agriculture, technology) score which usefully predicts the assimilation attributes of our immigrant ethnicities – e.g. predicts more than 60% of modern day income differences between the groups as derived from their countries of origin.  It turns out that the technology component of SAT is the most impactive.  Correlating with their home countries -

Technology also seems to be the best long-run predictor of government quality. So the main story seems to be about technological development persisting over time, and of people bringing their technological capabilities to new places. 

Continuing to allow uncontrolled entry of millions of illegals portends a cultural and existential disaster for America – “These concerns are immediate and tangible, not preoccupied with the effect of immigration generations from now. To address some of the more compelling worries, we might start placing greater emphasis on skills, perhaps implementing a points system, as Australia, Canada and the U.K. do, to grade potential immigrants.”

But first and foremost, to implement any of these factors into an immigration policy that sustains America, we have to secure our borders.  This is also understood by our neo-Marxist and anti-American elites who will fight tooth and nail to maintain our borders in their current dysfunctional state that promotes, nay invites, the uncontrolled invasion by millions of illegals who will implant their own counter-cultures in this fair land.

Twitter blackout

George Rebane

Last week Elon Musk released a tranche of Twitter internal communications to conservative blogger Matt Taibbi.  Since then, more has been released through Taibbi.  These missives between top and middle management at Twitter during the summer and fall of 2020 are damning evidence of how the Democrat Party, government agencies, and corporatist entities worked hand-in-glove to deflect the election toward Biden by censoring and discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop evidence of high-level corruption and government influence peddling.

As RR and its regular Ruminators have long-cited and argued, this case of carefully constructed and directed lies was most certainly the biggest ‘irregularity’ from which the 2020 election suffered, and still gives cause for many of us to consider that President Trump would have been re-elected had the laptop imbroglio received the timely national coverage it deserved.  Many legal minds and national commentators opine that the significance of how the Biden laptop was censored and propagandized makes Watergate look like a walk in the park.  I strongly agree.

Here we have two distinct issues at work – laptop evidence of Biden family corruption, and corporatist cooperation with political opposition to influence the outcome of a national election.  These working together gives a perfect example where 2+2=5, and why the DNC and Democratic leadership pulled all stops to bury the evidence before voters could hear of it.  The details of the story, especially as it involves collusion of the FBI (weekly meetings with Twitter) and a cadre of former intelligence officials, make for movie material reading (more here).  And, of course, the case is not closed yet if congressional Republicans will grow a pair and open a wide-ranging investigation in January.  Stay tuned.

Finally, what this illustrates once more is another example of how Americans live in two distinct and separate worlds.  Those light readers who consume mainly lamestream media will not have even heard enough to give this matter a second thought.  More observant leftwingers continue to consume the lies that there is no there there; most certainly not of government censorship since Twitter is a private company.  Of course, Twitter’s close coordination with the Biden WH and FBI, as the evidence now shows, is never mentioned in the leftwing outlets’ reports.  Through corporatism the government has been overwhelmingly involved in First Amendment censorship.

For a coda, put this coverage and the polarization it maintains in the context of finding common ground, of coming together again, or of the oft-repeated notion that there are more things that unite us than separate us.  No there aren’t.  (More here)

Ruminations - 15nov22 (updated 22nov22)

George Rebane

How a communist thinks and talks.  Listen to CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil come up with a new plan (here) how rich guys like Bezos should dispose of their money - give the extra back to the government where it will be spent "democratically".  Well, actually it's not a new plan.  Marx and Lenin thought of it first, and starting with Stalin communist countries have been implementing it ever since.  Their method was even more efficient, the state didn't pay you enough for anything to be left over; they took their democratic share right off the top before you even got the left overs.  You can bet the ranch that is exactly what our woke progressives would ultimately implement here.

[17nov22 update]  California is anticipating a $25B budget deficit, due to revenue shortfalls from a diminishing population of our top wealthiest quintile, who, along with their businesses, have been leaving the state in droves.  All in an environment of complete denial by the Left's monopoly party in Sacramento, and their legions of bought-and-paid-for gimmes that populate California’s hustings.  But not to worry, that market for acquiring dependent votes continues in full swing, including the promise of no service cutbacks for our growing cohort of illegal aliens.

“Political Gridlock is Poised to Return” in Washington.  Hallelujah!  Given the damage done by Congress in recent decades, a good helping of gridlock is just what the country needs now.

[22nov22 update]  Well, it took a while for us to join the billions of infected, but Jo Ann and I tested positive for Covid today.  We returned from visiting our Northern Tribe in the Seattle area on Sunday, and both of us felt a little queasy with a persistent cough when we got home.  And yesterday morning Jo Ann was really symptomatic, with my joining her in the evening.  We started our own federally countermanded curative regimen, and amazingly both of us already feel that we have passed the low point.  Then again, maybe this bug has multiple minima, we shall see.  Anyway -

The time has come, the feds all say,

to talk of many things;

Of salves and pills, and even a potion,

that relief from Covid brings.

But make no motion to include any notion

of some bygone promotion

that to IVT and HCQ still clings.

The Kennan/Byrnes Foreign Policy Conundrum

George Rebane

I recently finished reading a most fascinating and informative account of the international geo-strategic process of decision making by the Allies during WW2.  The work titled Speaking Frankly (1947) by James F. Byrnes (here), diplomat, jurist, and politician extraordinaire, was a command performance and hit the top of the charts when it was published in October 1947.  (In these pages we first met Byrnes in ‘America’s Foreign Policy’)

Byrnes concludes his ‘diplomatic chronology’ of the war with new challenges for making and keeping the peace after hostilities ended in 1945.  The problem was the USSR.  Dealing with them had been difficult during the war since they were ousted from the Axis powers by Hitler’s double-cross in 1941, after which they quickly became the second (some say ‘first’) front of the Allies against the Nazi war machine.

Byrnes concludes his considerable tome with the Book IV chapters ‘Building a People’s Foreign Policy’, ‘Control of Atomic Energy’, ‘What Are the Russians After?’, ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’.  It is the last two chapters that concern us.

But before we consider these, let’s turn to George F. Kennan (here), accomplished and enigmatic diplomat with some outrageous social views.   More importantly, he was our Russia expert, fluent in Russian, who during the war in 1944 was made ‘deputy chief of mission’ in Moscow under ambassador Averill Harriman.  During this service Kennan developed a detailed and highly accurate understanding of the USSR, Stalin, and the international communist movement.  He was the vociferous critic of America’s foreign policy who launched his post-war career with the now famous ‘Long Telegram’ (1946) which he sent to President Truman through his then SecState boss James Byrnes.

So here comes the conundrum.  Byrnes, who experienced the long, detailed, and frustrating negotiations with the Russians firsthand during and after the war, concluded that Soviet leaders were a bunch of totalitarian lying sonsabitches who could not be trusted to carry out the provisions of any treaty that they finally deigned to sign.  Time and again he watched the Soviets undermine duly elected/established post-war, east European governments, and bring them under communist regimes in preparation for ultimate membership in the USSR’s expanding coterie of soviet republics and compliant client states when the Iron Curtain finally dropped in the spring of 1948.

Yet Byrnes kept trying to wring out of the Soviets the remaining and still missing peace treaties with major governments like Germany and Italy, which were now occupied countries under martial law administered within the framework of the existing armistices that each signed after the guns were silenced.  Truth be told, an overarching reason for Byrnes continuing to treat the USSR honorably was to employ and promote the functions of the then nascent United Nations, the institution in which many in the free world had faith in becoming the successful international peacekeeper.

A One-Party Humanitarian Crisis (updated 17sep22)

George Rebane

‘Humanitarian crises’ in ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions set up by progressives across the land.  Sending a few scores of illegal aliens from overcrowded border towns to sanctuary cities and exclusive enclaves is trumpeted as a “humanitarian crisis” by the Left and their lamestream media.  To do that is a “cruel, inhumane way to treat people” who have been enticed by the Biden administration to travel thousands of dangerous miles, paying cartels and coyotes their life savings to chance getting across our border without being raped, human trafficked, or killed in the process.  None of what the Democrats are putting the poor of the world through to get them illegally into America is seen by progressives as the greater humanitarian crisis compared to the final plane ride or comfortable bus trip to a community that advertises itself as a welcoming sanctuary.

What’s more galling is that so-called conservative commentators are unable to compare and contrast all this to their audiences.  They are joined by the eternally dumbfounded Republicans in ignoring the ongoing travesty, not even being able to point out how Democrats ignore the secreted midnight planes rides they sponsor to transport unannounced illegals to various cities in Republican governed states.  And all this is done to the continuously headlined Big Lie from the White House that “our border remains secure” and the problem is our “broken immigration system” which was caused by then President Trump.

And the biggest tragedy, as we approach the election, is that half the electorate that is eternally ignorant and/or consumes only lamestream outlets has no idea that all this is going on pursuant to a purposed and dedicated Democrat policy which is part and parcel of their ongoing successful program to fundamentally transform America.  The eternally timid and out-to-lunch Republicans have given us a one-party country that now openly operates under a dominant neo-Marxist ideology.  This means that the other half of the country has no effective representation in national politics and policies.  The Republicans were the only game in town to stop the march of collectivism over the last half century, and today they have demonstrably failed to deliver.

[17sep22 update]  National Conservatism – we encountered news of the new direction in America’s conservative circles in the last Scattershots (here).  Now we get the announcement that the venerable Heritage Foundation has announced this ideological tweak in its socio-political philosophy (here).  I find nothing outrageous in this change, and have long encourage a more robust use of limited government resources by the Right to direct and implement socio-economic policies in our republic – and mainly for the Republicans to get off their collective ass and start making themselves heard on our behalf, especially in the face of the Left’s now desperate campaign of wall-to-wall lying bordering on ‘save democracy from semi-fascist, white supremacist, domestic terrorists’.

According to Heritage, the new direction will engage in “promoting a more restrained approach to foreign policy and a more active government role in the regulation of big tech, while moving away from the conventional wisdom that conservatives shouldn’t use government power to advance their interests.”  We’ll see how the rest of the Republican leadership adopts and implements this change.  And there will be more to say on all this.

Need I be fearful of most black people?

George Rebane

My clear answer is yes – let me explain.  Yes, I am physically afraid of blacks in the urban neighborhoods.  They have demonstrated to all that there is inherent danger to life and limb in neighborhoods where blacks rule the streets.  This same sentiment has been publicly acknowledged by black leaders such as the Rev Jesse Jackson.  The criminality of young black males is now well established, and it is not a minor fraction of the population.  Their historical arrest and incarceration rates attest to this.

But perhaps my greater fear of blacks is when they join the ranks of the America’s voters and make their presence felt at the ballot box.  They have now demonstrated across many generations that they do not vote to promote their own best interests.  They elect dismally stupid, corrupt, cynical, racist, rapacious, and/or simply crooked people to represent them in the halls of political power.  It would not be so bad if their voting habits only impacted their own communities.  But that is not the case.  Black-elected politicians (no matter their color) extend their unfortunate ethics, socialist ideologies, and corrupt practices far beyond the precincts that voted them into office.

To be sure, black communities suffer most from the ministrations of their political leaders.  No one has done more harm to our African-Americans than the politicians who regularly garner their votes through promises of ineffective policies or those never kept.  And again, as history has shown, no learning takes place from one election cycle to the next.  Generation after generation, they send the same people to occupy the same seats of power and expect different results, while decrying their carefully taught lamentations about white supremacy and systemic racism.  It is these politicians with black constituencies who join with those voted in by ignorant whites et al that have launched national programs to usurp American culture over the last half century by engaging in the ongoing fundamental transformation of our country.

I write this in response to the column by Mr Daryl Grigsby – ‘Need I be fearful of most white people?’ – which appears in the 27aug22 Union.  As an African-American, Grigsby goes on to answer the question with a YES, and then continues to back-up his sentiment with yet one more diatribe against Trump, filled with the familiar ignorant tedium comprised of all the usual unsubstantiated allegations.  He opens with –

I am troubled by this possibility (of fearing most whites). As an African American who has lived all over this nation, I have seen and experienced much that raises this question. At the same time, my life has been enriched by generous, affirming, justice-seeking white Americans. … Yet, the opening question often plagues me. By “most,” I don’t mean the overwhelming majority. I do mean some number more than half. Anything more than half is “most.”

… and closes with -

Republican candidates who stand against Trump lose their seats, voting in Black communities is a hurdle instead of a right, Anti-CRT movements flourish. The real question is, do we want a just and multi-racial society, or one of white privilege and dominance?

And what of Black Lives Matter? Professor Treva B. Lindsey says, “to even have to proclaim ‘Black Lives Matter’ and know that people will dispute it, or counter with ‘all lives matter,’ is a result of entrenched and learned anti-blackness. In what world would saying ‘Black lives matter’ prompt a rejoinder? A fundamentally anti-Black one.” I am hopeful we can create a society different than described by Professor Lindsey.

No amount of skulduggery(sic), lies, treason or corruption deters millions of white Americans from supporting Trump. What explains that devotion? Anger? About what? Fear? Of who(sic)? As white militias grow and the internet rumbles with threats, I fear the majority is silent. I believe but a small fraction of white America is prone to racist violence. That small group, however, is dangerous if the majority does not stand up. … Believe me when I say, I don’t enjoy thinking this, and frankly, I would be happy to be proven wrong.

His reasonable tone withstanding, it is clear that I and mine have a lot to fear from the Grigsbys of America who cast their ballots within the collectivist glow of goodness and light, as they send the next tranche of corrupt fools to the nation’s capitols.  The exoduses from California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey are exhibits of their political accomplishments.

Double Dummies on Daily Display (updated 24aug22)

George Rebane

This is really a critique of the American electorate, and how low it has sunk in its capacity to discern and vote for political leaders sufficiently competent and principled to maintain our republic as the world's shining city on the hill – “A republic, if you can keep it.” B. Franklin.

I am simply astounded by the parade of incompetent, duplicitous, and just plain ignorant politicians that parade across our TV screens daily.  My latest pique occurred yesterday when FN’s Trace Gallagher was interviewing Sec Energy Jennifer Granholm, specifically about the administration’s new Inflation Reduction Act bamboozle. (here)  I have no idea why anyone would allow that woman to come before a live mic.  She demonstrated no idea about what the Dems’ new law would do, and what Americans really care about as November approaches.

What she did corroborate is the Biden administration’s ongoing incompetence in everything it has touched since January 2021, and their ability to generate the most stupendous list of lies about what has happened and what is going on now.  The term for this is ‘gaslighting’, and Team Bumblebrain is front and center daily taking advantage of an already poorly educated electorate by filling them with stuff that simply ain’t so.  And the tragedy of it all is that it appears to be working.

Victor Davis Hanson covers the matter in the more germane details as only he can in his ‘The Worst and the Stupidest?’.  Unfortunately, the only game in town opposing the evil anti-American Democrats are a bunch of mostly spineless Republicans who have little or no idea on how to appeal to the masses of main street Americans.  Our border remains open to millions of illegals, crime is fostered by the justice system, foreign policy is in shambles on three critical fronts, black lives don’t matter, meritocracy is white supremacist, and our educational systems at all levels are being co-opted by neo-Marxists.  The only remaining hope is that the existential pain in America’s wallets remains sufficiently intense so that people will seek something different at the ballot box this Fall.

[24aug22 update] Elizabeth Warren discovers that free money is popular.   Pursuant to Bumblebrain’s cancelling of at least $10K of everyone’s student debt, she said, "Look, I’m not at all surprised that Mitch McConnell is attacking this. The reason he’s attacking it is because it is very, very popular. Popular among Democrats, independents, Republicans – popular.  You know why?  Because I don’t think there’s anybody left in America who doesn’t know somebody who is not struggling with student loan debt. This has become a part of our country now. People for whom their only sin was to want to try to get an education and not be in a family that could afford to write a check for it."  After also claiming that it will be “good for our economy”, I have no idea why anyone would let her near an open mic.  Well, maybe those Dem leaders who believe their constituents overwhelmingly are really, really stupid.

The ‘Party of Science’ aka Idiot’s Delight (Addended)

George Rebane

Well, the cat is finally clawing its way out of the bag, bit by piece.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is beginning to admit that it has completely mismanaged the major pandemic of the 21^st century.  As numerous observers, analysts, and scientists have repeatedly pointed out over the last four years, the agency has “failed in its core responsibility, which is to track diseases, collect data to inform decision-making, and deploy resources to support local public-health responses.”  Instead, it became the lackey of the evil Democratic Party which has long proclaimed itself as ‘the party of science’ and used the CDC as its willing political pawn.

CDC’s main mama, Dr Rochelle Walensky, can’t quite bring herself to admit the utter catastrophe that she launched with the aid of Dr Anthony Fauci, spiritual advisor who only spoke ex cathedra with words directly from God.  America put up with their gobbledygook for almost four years, and continues in some measure to follow it today.

As data kept pouring in from all over the world that contradicted their various and varying policies dictating masking, social distancing, lockdowns, vaccination, boosters, etc, they remained steadfast in their own ‘science’ which supported the command and control stance of the Democratic Party hard on the heels of hunting Donald Trump.

Lowest Rung Problem with No Good Solutions

George Rebane

To solve a problem, first you need to correctly define it.

The 1aug22 WSJ had an entire section that examined ‘Why Black and Hispanic Workers Get Stuck on the Lowest Rung’.  In these pages we have covered related aspects of this issue over the years.  Last year noted scholar and political scientist Charles Murray (reviled by progressives) published Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021), which I reported on extensively in ‘Equity Denies Reality’.

The WSJ looked at the lowest rung problem from several angles, with lots of stats showing that the country’s 12.4% Black population is not matched in the 8% of entry level jobs held by Black workers.  Apparently, in the literature these are called “front line workers”, a politically correct euphemism for those on the lowest rung of the employment ladder.  And very few of our larger companies employ even 10% of Black workers.  From there the record gets murkier with smaller shares of front line minorities being promoted to higher positions in mid-management and top slots in corporate leadership.  The unstated thesis of this reportage is that we are falling short on the equity scale in America’s workplaces if we don’t achieve pro-rata population shares of Black and Hispanic workers at each level on the corporate ladders.

Unfortunately, these analyses all ignore some seminal factors needed to understand this employment issue – these being intellectual capacity and intellectual ability.  All the articles in the section make the tacit but questionable assumption that all people have an equal intellectual capacity from which, through education and training, various intellectual abilities can be acquired.  Everyone having equal intellectual abilities flies in the face of government data as reported by Charles Murray and others.

It should be clear that an individual’s capability to acquire intellectual abilities is determined by his intellectual capacity.  Intellectual capacity, also known as ‘cognitive ability’, has various metrics, the most popular being IQ now suffering from bouts of political correctness.  Over populations consisting of all racial and cultural cohorts, average IQ has been normed at the average value or mean of 100, with a standard deviation of 15.  (In a bell curve 68% of the distribution lies between +/- one standard deviation of the mean.  That means that 68% of humans have an IQ ranging from 85 to 115.)

The figure below is from Murray’s Facing Reality.  As can be seen, there is a relative paucity of ‘Latin’ and ‘African’ people, i.e. workers overall, and of those even fewer in the higher cognitive ability (intellectual capacity) region.

This data says that if pro-rata equity is going to be enforced, then companies will need to hire and promote minorities who do not measure up to the existing intellectual standards required to fill upper-level jobs.  The obvious result of that is an expected decline in corporate performance wherever such mandates are implemented.

The woke extremists will continue to claim that there is no difference between cognitive abilities based on race, that the government and academic data is somehow biased and deficient.  But the reality is overwhelming when we take in the K-12 academic performance of the various races cum cultures.  Blacks and Hispanics continue to perform significantly lower than the Asians and European, that happens to be an easily discernible fact also in the workplace.  One can argue that all this is due to the minorities getting the short-end in our public schools, but that is not a factor in the present discussion.

However you come down on our public education and its delivery to, say, whites vs minorities, that is not the point.  We are here discussing ONLY the existential results of the schools’ output as it enters and survives in the workforce.  It would be beyond silly to presume that minority workers as a whole do not bring with them the deficits they demonstrated while in school.  And so far, corporate and government post-school remediation programs have been an utter failure in both their acceptance by the minorities and their effectiveness.

Now that doesn’t mean we should give up and accept race-based promotions or keep the minorities on the low rungs of the workplace.  But it does mean that continuing to do what we have been doing and expecting different results guarantees that we as a society are behaving insanely.  And you can bet the farm that not acknowledging the real dimensions of the intellectual capacities vs abilities reality will continue to prevent us from correctly defining the problem which we as a country have to solve.

Social Science Sucks

George Rebane

Harvard and Exeter social scientists just published a new study the implications of which go far beyond the answer to, “Did pandemic stimulus payments harm lower-income Americans?”  The correct answer was a clear YES, and for all the reasons that most RR readers would have predicted.

The study was done professionally, involving over 2,000 in the experimental group and over 3,100 in the control group, all properly controlled for the important societal parameters.  The bottom line was that those receiving the no-strings-attached handouts were not encouraged to practice “better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles. The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet. The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite.” (more here)

In fact, the free money recipients did exactly what most sane observers of human nature know – “Handout recipients fared worse on most survey outcomes. They reported less earned income and liquidity, lower work performance and satisfaction, more financial stress, sleep quality and physical health, and higher levels of loneliness and anxiety than the control group.”  Whouda thunk?

This finding (corroboration?) casts a serious shadow on the impact of contemplated guaranteed minimal income policies.  As RR has argued for years, the penultimate motivator of human behavior is to be relevant within and to one’s society.  Reducing relevance or becoming irrelevant is akin to being shunned by your fellows.  And no one really believes that you deserve to have your hand in others’ pockets just because you can fog a mirror.  They know that you contribute nothing and consume the wealth others create – you are a parasite.

If we peel back the social onion one more layer, we come to the real answer – the culture of the recipient group.  It is culture that determines how social groups behave in various environments of material and financial wellbeing.  Nowhere in human history was this demonstrated more explicitly than in the post-war displaced persons camps of West Germany which were home to tens of millions of east European refugees fleeing communism.  Under UN administration almost all the camps were culturally homogeneous and received equal amounts of aid; refugees were not allowed to work on the German economy and were simply wards of the ‘state’ awaiting determination of their fate over a period of approximately five years.  Many studies were done and books written on how the people in the camps organized themselves and what kinds of activities they pursued.  The spectrum ranged all the way from virtual prisons ruled by indigenous criminal mafias to flourishing societies that replicated the refugees’ native lands and allowed them to develop and pursue education, arts, trades, crafts, etc, some of which they were allowed to sell to GIs stationed in numerous military bases.

But returning to the real point I want to make here is that social science is a broken profession practiced by so-called ‘social scientists’, most of whom have not the most basic understanding of what motivates and rewards human behavior.  This sad condition exacerbates the making of public policies, especially those we are subjected to by leftwing politicians and legislatures.  Citing the results of the Harvard/Exeter study found no difference between the free-cash and control groups. 

But remarkable was the collateral finding, one that will be swept under the rug by the lamestream, that “These findings contradicted the predictions of 477 social scientists and policy makers the researchers surveyed. That’s not surprising. Most liberal academics and politicians believe government handouts are the solution to all problems. If transfer payments were a ticket to the middle class, the War on Poverty would have succeeded long ago.” (emphasis mine)

In sum, we see again that today’s social science is a farcical pursuit populated by the blind leading the blind – these guys are firing blanks and bamboozling both their students and policy makers.  At least half the population of our fair land would have correctly predicted the outcome of this experiment.  But in this light what should concern all of us is the portent of future wealth transfers being able to keep the peace as more and more workers become systemically unemployed, wards of the state, and conspicuously irrelevant.  And nobody cares – yet.

Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

I was shocked to read in the 75^th anniversary issue of ACM Communications, the flagship publication of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery, that computer science education in the US needs to be revamped.  Three maximally woke socialist (communist?) professors of education spell out their proposals in ‘Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship’.

Computer science is a vast field that encompasses and entwines many technical disciplines.  It has boggled many capable minds in the task of developing undergraduate CS curriculum that fits into a four-year baccalaureate program.  Now there has started a neo-Marxist initiative in education that seeks to inject into the curriculum the propagandizing of students with the tenets of critical race theory, social justice, equity, and inoculation against white supremacy, racism, and other social sins that originated in white Europe.

To accomplish this added and/or integrated layer of indoctrination will require the elimination or diluting beyond recognition of core subjects required by entry level practitioners in the field.  The authors already specify that merit and acquiring technical skills must be moved aside due to their longstanding systemic racist and white supremacist taint.  Time must be made instead for integrating students’ race, cultures, and life experiences which should shape the revised curriculum.  Added to that, the students will be encouraged (required?) to consult with their “community elders” to make sure that their CS training encompasses community, criticality, and citizenship.

The introduction of leading-edge technology has involved taking risks as the bugs are worked out of early-adopted commercial products.  Well, if something goes wrong with, say, an autonomous vehicle involved in an accident, then the new-age CS practitioners should be able to critically assess and assign blame to the appropriate participating agents ranging from the vehicle’s design, all the way to the way it was fielded to drive on the roads.  Our triumvirate of educators expand on this –

In order to bring such criticality to computing education, we will need to move away from focusing solely on developing technical skills and move to understanding and challenging the role of CS in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices. As a first step, we must engage educators in critical conversations that explore their own identities in order to move away from color-blind approaches to teaching CS. In addition, we must support educators by developing curriculum and pedagogy that challenges the “unbiased” and “objective” nature of computing. As educators develop their own critical computing competencies, it will lead them to “create spaces for collective development of critical consciousness, help develop plans for action to make the world a better place, and develop a sense of agency among learners.”

One thing is certain.  The Russians and Chinese are laughing their collective asses off, and doing everything they can to fund, through well-oiled circuitous channels, more of these woke initiatives to infect STEM education in the US and the west.  Read the short article to get a better picture of what we're up against.

Scattershots – 21jun22 (updated 25jun22)

George Rebane

Solar Tax – California, as regular as the sunrise, is again showing the world that it knows how to expand its unchallenged butt-stupid ways to govern possibly the most blessed land mass on God’s green earth.  Sacramento, led by our idiot governor, is contemplating levying a tax on homes that have installed solar panels.  These are housing units that use less electricity from the grid, and also pump back electricity into a grid that is already overloaded, poorly maintained & managed, and expensive to boot.  Instead of encouraging the installation of more environmentally friendly photovoltaics, the state wants to dun those who already have them, and provide more reasons why not to install more of these home power-generating systems.  Call your governor and tell him what you think of the Democrats’ latest brainchild.  (info here)

Right vs Left – what distinguishes us (updated 17jun22)

George Rebane

Of the several correspondences in which I am currently active, one is on the perennial topic of the Great Divide and America’s irredeemable polarization.  In these correspondences with two of my left-leaning intellectual friends, we are attempting to create a mutually acceptable inventory of ideological belief tenets.  These would form a starting point for another attempt at finding any common ground to support dialogue from which some form of rapprochement could result.  This is a work-in-process in which I think some of our readers might be interested, and to which they could contribute their own thoughts toward progress in this enlarged conversation.

I attach the following pdfs for your critical comments and perhaps even reading pleasure.  The first piece - 'Versions of Fundamental Transforms (2020) - serves as background, and the second piece - 'Right/Left Belief Inventory' (v14jun22) - is a WIP currently in discussion with my correspondents.  Notwithstanding general interest, I do want to include these in the RR archive.

Download VersFundTransforms

Download BeliefInventory_220614

[17jun22 update]  A longtime RR reader posted the link to an important or possibly a milestone essay – ‘Heading Toward the Abyss’ - by David Horowitz on the nature of the Left, and particularly the Democratic Party, with which America is contending today for its survival.  The points that Horowitz expands on are familiar to RR readers.  I highlight the essay in this update so that it does not get lost in the comment stream below.  H/T to Mr Tozer.

The Many Ways to Regulate Militias (updated 21jun22)

[This post also appears here in the op-ed pages of 14jun22 Union.]

George Rebane

In his 10jun22 ‘Read it yourself – ‘A well-regulated militia’’ Union columnist Taylor Carey seems focused only on the interpretation of the nation’s leftwing anti-gunners.  The Left has always held that the Founders' intention for the Second Amendment was that members of the local militias were to be unarmed until their government decided to assemble them and issue guns from the local armory.  That was and is the only mode of regulation that makes sense to the big government, command/control progressive.

Private possession and ownership of guns is not necessary in a well-regulated and organized collective because the government will fulfill all functions of internal security and external defense, arming trained citizens to augment the standing LE and military only as and when the leadership determines that the need arises.  Being at the mercy of armed criminals or the insane until, or if, LE arrives is just the price people must pay to live in a civilized society.  Your personal safety is the responsibility of the collective, and your home is definitely not YOUR castle.

And perish the thought that either the state or its LE cadres go rogue.  In the socialist ideology there is no provision for such an eventuality, no matter the abundant historical evidence to the contrary.  A centralized state under the leadership and administration of educated elites dedicated to the proposition of their interpretation of common good, that benefits everyone equitably, there is no provision for such roguish contingencies – by definition, the state is always fair and just, and as such, brooks no challenge to its power to organize and administer society.  Revolt and revolution by an armed populace in the embrace of a “rabidly corrosive cult of individuality” is “inimical” to such governments that deliver and sustain “ordered liberty” according to Mr Carey.

Inflation Tax – Silent Rape by Government (updated 10jun22)

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."  Will Durant

George Rebane

The ongoing rape of America by the evil party has more dimensions than just government induced inflation and higher taxes.  Victor Davis Hanson gives a short yet comprehensive summary in his ‘The Subordinate Citizen’ of this unbelievable yet ongoing injustice against all Americans, perpetrated by our federal government under the Biden administration and the Pelosi/Schumer Congress.

In these pages we have covered extensively the impact of taxed inflation on investment returns, and made the quantitative case showing how inflation is an added tax that is confounded with the apparent IRS and state-quoted tax rates.  The details are found here, here, and here.

In this little review I want to draw your attention again to the four important formulas that let you calculate the impact of taxed inflation on your own finances.  These are given in the figure below.  The image is from a spreadsheet tool I made that allows you to change the blue numbers denoting R, the nominal return on an investment, the inflation rate I during the investment, and the overall tax rate R_T that must be paid when realizing the nominal return.

Here R = 10%, I = 8.5%, R_T = 30%.  Note that inflation reduces the effective return of the investment to RI = 1.38%.  But now comes the hit.  The 10% nominal return is taxed at 30% which further reduces the actual return to a negative 1.38%.  This is what really happened to the buying power of every dollar you invested.  Not only did you not make any money, you lost some.  In this situation you would have done better by keeping it under your mattress.  Your invested dollar now buys only 98.62 cents of stuff.

In this double whammy inflation/tax environment you need to make at least 12.14% just to maintain the buying power of your invested dollar.  And, of course, 12.14% returns don’t come without any risk.  Does that turn on any lights in liberal heads as to why the economy suffers under government induced inflation and rapacious tax rates?  Since Karl Marx the answer has been a resounding NO.  Socialists have no clue as to what causes inflation, and they all know that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.

This preposterous situation arose because, as we see in the figure, the effective total tax rate, R_ET, in the above scenario turns out to be a whopping 113.82%, taking all you nominally gained and then some.  And all of this outright larceny is so well hidden from the average Joe, that it doesn’t even make a visible ripple.  Joe just bitches a bit about the high prices and that he’s not making enough money.  His government tells him that it’s all the fault of the greedy corporations and the rich who don’t pay their ‘fair share’.  Apparently this is totally acceptable, as witnessed by the comment stream below.  But I may be wrong, and people really do care.

[10jun22 update]  Lest you wage earners with no investment portfolios think that you have been spared – ‘fraid not.  The inflation formulas above apply equally to your take-home pay.  Suppose you’re fortunate enough to have gotten, say, a 10% raise and your overall pre-raise tax rate is 20%.  We’ll let inflation stay at 8.5%.  When you bring home that paycheck containing the raise, it’s exactly the same as if you sold your stock portfolio that has increased 10% at the end of the year.  But fasten your seat belt, the results don’t look good.

Assume first that your overall tax rate stays at 20%.  Then your effective raise considering only inflation turns out to be 1.38%.  And taking out taxes reduces your effective raise into a pay cut of 0.46%.  You would have required a raise of 10.63% to just maintain your wage’s buying power.  When all is said and done, you have paid an effective total tax rate of 104.61%.  In short, the government took from you more in taxes and buying power than your employer’s raise, and then some.

But what if your increased wages now put you into a higher tax bracket, say, at 22%?  Then the above 1.38% remains unchanged, since it does not involve tax rates.  But your former effective pay cut now increases from 0.46% to 0.65%.  And now you would have required a 10.90% raise instead of the previous 10.63% raise to maintain buying power.  Finally, your total effective tax rate has now increased from 104.61% to 106.45%.  Oi weh!  

We must always remember that government revenues increase during inflation because inflation pushes nominal wages into higher tax brackets, which for the consumer/investor is the monetary equivalent of a tax increase.  And the final kick in the gonads is that the government knows that most average Joes out there don't do numbers, and therefore to them the above discussion is boooring.

There's also a Lucky Strike Extra for you fastidious number crunchers who have survived this far.  Fiscally pernicious governments like ours, that purposefully create inflation by flooding the economy with new money not supported by increased productivity, they get a bonus by being the first able to spend the new cash (the Fed prints it and buys govt bonds from the Treasury) which always has the buying power that is subsequently to be reduced by the inflation caused by the new tranche of money into the economy.  Inflation does not increase suddenly and in lock-step across a large economy like ours.  It takes some time for the new cash to work its way through the various commercial highways and byways, bidding up the prices of what is bought by successive handlers of those new 'crisp dollar bills'.  Or is it 'crisp dollar bits'? 

“… to protect the children.” (addended with 9jun22 update)

George Rebane

That is the only slim thread of agreement that the Republicans and Democrats have for new legislation pursuant to the mass killing of students and teachers in Uvalde, Texas this week.  Yet the Dems’ solution continues to be to enact senseless gun legislation to stop senseless mass shootings.  Their entire initiative is based on appealing to the hoped for raw emotional response of their constituents to ‘do something’, or anything that can be used to advance the final objective of removing firearms from the country’s law-abiding civilian population.

The Dems’ entire argument is that since ‘guns kill people’, the “gun lobby” (aka NRA) wants more people killed through the unhindered sale of more guns.  For the Left there are no other considerations for the private ownership of guns, least of all the antiquated and misconstrued Second Amendment to defend against rogue government.  Every successive gun control measure is understood to be nothing more or less than a ratchet toward socialist autocracy’s final objective of an unarmed, compliant citizenry.

In a country with over 340 million variously un/registered firearms, there is no guarantee that a quietly deranged person with no previous criminal record or recorded history of mental instability will be stopped from a serendipitously inspired and spontaneously launched mass murder.  LE officials have told us for decades that no level of gun restrictions will bring an end to what happened in Uvalde.

What journalists and clear-thinking politicians don’t ask, during the inevitable gun control hysteria that follows every mass shooting, is ‘what is the evidence that this legislation would have stopped the previous mass murderers, or will stop them in the future?’  Posing this question will quickly reveal the real purpose for the newly proposed gun control measures.

The real solution – possibly unattainable – is what may be called a ‘cultural reset’.  The American culture of, say, fifty years ago prevented such mass murders occurring in a population equally populated with firearms – both semi-auto pistols and long guns.  Today, wholesale human life is cheapened and cheap.  With widespread and instant salacious news coverage, we continually hear of hundreds of people gunned down weekly without giving it much if any thought.  Unless the life belongs to family or close friends, the deaths don’t matter much irrespectively how they are snuffed out.

And our polarized society no longer supports community-wide solutions.  Remaining solutions have become very personalized – you pull up stakes and move to a safer place if you can, or you stay put, become insular, and hunker down while the killing continues around you.  That will continue in perpetuity as long as the state makes it so that only criminals have guns to use with impunity on an unarmed citizenry.  To various extents this has proven to be true both under so-called liberal democracies and police-state tyrannies.

A cultural reset, even if attempted, will take at least a generation to gain traction in our society.  In the meantime, IMHO we should recognize the ground truth that active killers with guns are stopped only by defenders with guns.  So, if we really have an interest to do something to protect the children, then we must always remember that when seconds count, LE is minutes (or more) away.  Actually, an hour away in Uvalde and similarly at previous shooting sites.  As far as the killer is concerned, LE has not arrived until he is assaulted with arms.  It doesn’t matter how quickly LE arrives on the scene, the clock starts when the killer perceives that his further intentions will now be curtailed.  For example, LE getting to the Uvalde school and dicking around for an hour before a Border Patrol agent confronted and shot the killer, means that LE effectively arrived an hour late.  So consider -

Policies that don’t work – place one security officer per school.  These have proven to be career-limited, marginally trained, timid people who either have no idea that killing is taking place in another part of the school, or who will not confront the killer until summoned LE people (‘back-up’) arrive to take control of the incident.

Policies that have a chance of working – Every teacher and certain staffers are trained and required to be concealed-carry armed when on duty.  This policy is then made public.  Israel has demonstrated the efficacy of such policy.  (more here)

[Addendum]  In ongoing discussions about solutions to such wanton and unpredictable massacres, it was brought out that there may be a significant share of teachers who will refuse to be trained and armed.  The point makes sense since so many teachers are liberals/progressives whose logic doesn’t always concur with reality – e.g. similar to those leftwingers who believe that declaring a building or facility a ‘gun-free zone’ will hinder instead of attract the manic mass murderer.  No matter, for whatever reasons, not all teachers can qualify or be relied upon to be armed and confront their students' would-be killer.

The alternative to concealed-carry teachers in the classroom is a cadre of volunteer CCW holders who would also receive the required additional training.  These would come from the students’ parents, grandparents, and (retired) friends or community volunteers.  I’d bet the farm that there would be more than enough volunteers to sit in the back of classrooms while instruction is going on.  Each school could have a ‘security coordinator’ volunteer to coordinate with the school’s administration, maintain the active roster, and manage the ‘duty calendar’ for the classroom security volunteers.  The marginal cost to the school district and community would be nil.

Given today’s mobile devices (laptops, pads, smart phones, …), the security volunteers can easily be productive on their own projects as they carry out their assigned watches.  I know from our family’s circle of friends and contacts, that almost everyone would volunteer who could pass the training requirements.  As an example, for years I was a member of the Banner Mountain firewatch team and pulled many a 4-6 hour morning and afternoon stints on the tower (until the tower was decommissioned).  It was a rewarding experience, as I’m sure it would also be to serve as a classroom security volunteer.

(For the record, America's CCW holders are the most reliable and law-abiding cohort of citizens when it comes to psychological stability, gun safety and proficiency, and criminality/gun violence.  Statistically, you are six times more likely to be assaulted by a rogue LE officer than a CCW permit holder.)

[28may22 update]  A commenter raised a valid question about the availability of sufficient volunteers to implement the above described classroom security approach.  I’ve taken a more detailed look at the numbers, and it appears to be doable.  These back-of-envelope calculations are available here -  Download Classroom Security Volunteers.  Readers thoughts are always welcome, especially as they point out any errors or weaknesses (not already covered in the comment stream below).

[4jun22 update]  Certify retired military personnel to serve as armed school security guards – so proposes Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC).  Above I have made case for such a solution that can be implemented more rapidly than any ineffective anti-gun legislation.  (more here)

The Left, of course, is dead-set against such a practical solution, and surprisingly they are joined by some folks from the other side who also think it’s the dumbest thing they ever heard of.  Nevertheless, that kind of solution, using trained and certified volunteer security guards, is staring us in the face with no reasonable opposition save ‘schools should remain a gun-free zone’, or more simply, ‘it’s a stupid idea that will never work’.

[9jun22 update]  Well, things may be looking up with getting more defensive guns into schools and classrooms.  Reports are coming in that in certain red states teachers are volunteering to carry guns (here).  And we now hear that even in progressive New Jersey militant parents are convincing school districts to hire off-duty and retired LE officers to serve as added security in schools (here).  These people will be paid.  So that brings us a few steps closer to the volunteer security concept outlined here as the affordable solution to protect our children.

BTW, does everyone notice that the ‘do something’ new gun regs coming out of the House have nothing to do with protecting the children?  (They’re just a desperate Dem election issue since everything else they propose is a demonstrable disaster for the country.)  And no Republican has the balls to resist the new ‘do something’ hysteria by asking why existing gun regs – from past ‘do something’ hysterias - aren’t being enforced and/or have proven to be totally ineffective in reducing ‘gun violence’.

Picking on Piketty

George Rebane

Admittedly not a difficult task.  I just finished Brief History of Equality (2022) by Thomas Piketty.  Darling of the international Left, we have encountered this French economist before in these pages (here).  Our American Left is in thrall with the man’s wisdom, prescience, and prescriptions for a better world.  Piketty’s thoughts and nostrums on economics and the future global order are important for Americans to understand since they form the illustrated intellectual basis for much of the Democrats’ social, economic, and even foreign policies.  Piketty’s extensive neo-Marxist works give our Left the veneer of legitimacy to sway the country’s center and undecided toward wholesale collectivism.

In my previous remarks on Brief History I concentrated on some of the technical points from his earlier works, specifically points that evinced his massive blindspots about human nature, especially when it comes to our economic behavior in the presence of monetary risk.

In this coda I want to put a ribbon around his arguments promoting the new world order he has invented and labeled “federalized democratic socialism”, along with various other derivative names.  This is a destination form of collectivism that Piketty describes as “decentralized” socialism, hence the appended ‘federalized’ attribute.  Such decentralization will result when the masses come together to “develop new forms of sovereignism(sic) with a universalist vocation.”  If you understand any of this ideo-babble, you’re a better man than I.