Rebane's Ruminations

California Wildfires – Some Reflections

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  Isaac Asimov

George Rebane

The combined body count of the Camp and Woolsey Canyon fires has topped 100 with an additional 1,000 missing.  Perusing the lamestream media without second thought, one comes away with the understanding that, at best, the fires are one of the regular unpreventable disasters that regularly visit California’s wild lands due to natural causes out of our control.  At worst, we learn that the fires are really due to global warming which now has created the conditions for these inevitable holocausts.  Moreover, they could be prevented were we only to implement the prescribed surefire policies to stop, or even roll back, global warming.

As a lifelong (60+ years) California resident and a student of its land, weather, and horticulture, I join with those who have a radically different view of the state’s regular wildfires and public policies that can greatly reduce their frequency, magnitude, and cost to life and property.

The state’s weather record shows two centuries of periodic droughts which have dried the forests, given rise to infestations by various critters, and to wildfires mostly caused by lightning strikes.  The fall ‘Santa Ana’ winds have always done their best to spread the fires, but with limited success until modern times.  Why?  Over the ages our forests evolved not only to survive fires, but actually require their regular occurrence to continue their life cycles.  The major characteristics of the age-old forests was the irregular density of trees (into copses) that prevented long distance/perimeter burns and which densities were maintained by the burns that did occur.  A little technical reflection quickly explains why such configurations became the survivable ‘steady state’ configuration of the forests.  (A more detailed look at the changes in the Sierra forests is documented by George E. Gruell in the rather pricey Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.)

Then arrived the hubristic Regulatus Californicus who knew better than the established natural order.  Starting in the 1960s and building on Smokey the Bear (born in 1944), this rapidly evolving breed of humanity quickly latched on to ‘saving the ecology’ as their raison d’etre for launching an unheard level of regulatory controls over peoples lives and property, enforced by an ever-enlarging Leviathan in Sacramento.  In the 1970s they discovered catastrophic climate change to add to their causus belli on the rest of us Californians.  They initially took the wrong tack and argued ‘global cooling’ with the advent of a new ice age, caused by CO2 and other atmospheric gases linked to humans that were supposed to be reflecting too much sunlight.

But even with the state’s growing dumbth, it was hard to harness cooling as an adequate basis for enlarging the regulatory state.  So it was time to reverse the role of these gases from reflecting sunlight to retaining earth’s build-up of heat, and the great greenhouse gas gambit was born with CO2 now starring in its new role.  Some scientists quickly pointed out that we knew very little about earth’s carbon cycle and even less about long-term climate modeling, and most certainly not enough to reliably calculate (aka blame) any temperature changes on CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.  These scientists were quickly shouted down, and their grant monies to study the carbon cycle dried up.  And that has been their fate as the UN’s IPCC gathered the willing technocrats under its well-funded umbrella and became the voice of preventable man-made global warming.

The ‘true believers’ aka fanatical ecological nutcases, or simply econuts, now had a real arrow in their quiver – consensus science interpreted through selective faith-based lenses.  And they have been off to the races ever since 1995 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report – an evolving set of documents that now have had to be redacted, rewritten, revised, and re-issued many times over the years so as to keep the desired narrative in line with the vagaries of uncooperative weather patterns.

In the interval, the nation’s politically imperious progressive wave continued to grow as reflected in the staffs of federal regulatory agencies and, more importantly, in all elements of California governments ranging from Sacramento down to local leftwing NGOs funded to propagandize, monitor, and report on the state’s progress toward becoming 'green'.  And that, of course, included prohibiting any intervention, save heroic fire prevention and suppression efforts, in fostering the growth of high-density forests complete with huge ground level accumulations of duff and slash (“organic waste”).  All this has been done in the name of preserving the econuts’ vision of the natural order of fauna and flora on government lands, while in reality doing exactly the opposite as they created a wholesale unnatural order of wildland preservation never before seen on this earth.

And the bittersweet comedy continues unabated, as our progressive elites, in California and elsewhere, continue to blame the current spate of wildfires on climate change, even as they begin to evince micro-epiphanies, albeit sub-rosa, about the reality that decades of unnatural forest fuels build-ups is actually the dominant contributive cause of the devastations we have witnessed in recent years.  However, these leftwing central planners have yet to develop a public-ready narrative to effectively deflect the raw truth so that Californians – econuts and their voting legions of double dummy compliant constituents – can discover the cause of these holocausts by simply looking into a mirror.

(The Rebanes' up-close and personal experience with California wildfires was reported here, here, and here.)

Scattershots – 15nov18 (updated 17nov18)

George Rebane

A leftwing Union columnist most recently summarized the huge ideological chasm between the two polarized camps of Americans (see 15nov18 letters).  Writing in response to the Kavanaugh confirmation, the writer unabashedly blurted out a core progressive tenet that was in full display at the congressional hearings – “It is just as bad to assume innocence as it is to assume guilt.”  This violates the very basis of western jurisprudence, and has long been the norm for dictators as they attempt a forged judicial system under their rule.  Nowhere in recent memory have I seen such a stark reminder of how different we are, and how different will be our society were the Left to gain absolute control.

Defense spending and a strong American military has never been in the Left’s desiderata for all the obvious reasons.  Our military has suffered mightily under leftwing administrations, most recently under President Obama.  Today the Democrats continue their anti-military chorus, while they continue to entice their gimme constituencies with promises of more and mightier entitlements, most recently led by their efforts to implant a comprehensive socialized healthcare (“single payer”) program that has yet to demonstrate its sustainability in any land it has been implemented.  Their intended source of insufficient funds for such welfare projects is from our defense budget.  However, our military today has been so weakened that the non-partisan United States Institute for Peace has issued a landmark report ‘Providing for the Common Defense’ (download it here), which goes chapter and verse into the details of what we have let lapse along with the effects it has and will have on world order.  This state of affairs is an ongoing legacy of the Left, a gift that keeps taking.

[16nov18 update]  And then these little tidbits caught my eye this morning.

Khasshoggi’s killers to get the death penalty – well, not all of them, just the poor snuffies tasked to do the dirty work.  Imagine being a highly trained field agent for your country ordered to do a delicate little assassination of some ‘enemy of the state’ in a foreign land.  You go do the job that’s then discovered through no fault of yours, and you get tried and executed while the big kahuna(s) are untouched.  How will that affect your fellow agents as they contemplate their next mission to do the state’s dirty work?  (Work that into the definition of ‘patriotism’.)  But as ever, rank hath its privileges – some people just rank too high to fail, especially those whose enemy is our enemy, and who buy billions of dollars’ worth of guns and grenades from us.

“Hire sight unseen” is the MO of employers seeking to fill critical jobs in sales and STEM.  In this hot economy, the competition for even tentatively qualified labor is so high that all you need is to submit your creatively wordsmithed resume and pass a 25-minute phone interview (some with a robo-interviewer), and your offer letter appears in your inbox. (more here)  Of course, I assume that if you really bomb on your first day on the job, you’ll be let go equally fast.  I began my career as an aerospace draftsman in exactly the same way.  My phone interview with a job shop lasted less than five minutes during which I was told the address and contact person of my new employer.  Those draftsmen who didn’t make it were out on the street after the morning coffee break.

Woke progressives continue to mangle the language.  The latest casualty to politically correct newspeak is the use of ‘body’.  Humans, people, and persons are now reduced to bodies – e.g. “Bodies that migrate across borders undergo tremendous change.” in the NYT.  The use of ‘body’ joins many other words whose meaning has been folded in with a lot of other meanings, making for ever more murkier communications.  Matthew Hennessey’s piece ‘How to Read ‘Body’ Language’ goes into more detail.  (And in the below comment stream you can see my exchange with a commenter over some silly semantics.)

Migrant caravans made up of almost all military-aged males.  Has anyone else noticed the pictures and videos of the various proto-illegal alien caravans approaching our border through Mexico?  Count the women and children.  And who is paying for all the food, shelter, transportation, and organization to get these thousands of Latinos to their designated destinations?

[17nov18 update]  Ramirez again summarizes it in a manner that is clear, concise, and complete.  (H/T to reader)

Do California Wildfires Serve a Greater Purpose?

George Rebane

Over 40 dead and counting, plus thousands of buildings and homes burned, plus hundreds of thousands of acres of trees and wild critters of all kinds killed, plus untold amounts of public monies pissed away that could have been used for many better things for the common good.  And all of this as the result of an annually recurring insanity put in place by well-meaning econuts through programs that started long ago with Smokey the Bear.  Today the epidemic of this seeming ignorance has become endemic.

Once upon a time the U.S. Forest Service’s mission was to actively manage the federal government’s resources. Yet numerous laws over the last 50 years, including the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act, have hampered tree-clearing, controlled burns and timber sales on federal land. (13nov18 WSJ)

Today the Agenda21 driven political divide has been augmented by the use of ‘climate change’ to double down on dumb forest management policies.  Moonbeam Brown has led a chorus of progressive pundits and their legions of true believers, claiming that preventable man-made global warming is the cause of all the recent catastrophic conflagrations (more here).  Again, the data does not support such emotionally charged political arguments; there is no scientific basis for a causal link, only a political one. (more here, H/T to reader)

President Trump’s message about governments mismanaging our forests is spot on, no matter how crudely it might have been delivered.  We have to reduce the tremendous fuel loads in our forests through active programs of undergrowth clearance, harvesting timber, and prescribed burns.  One only need to look at the circa 1850 photos of California forests to understand what humans have done over the last 150+ years.  Back then trees in the mountainous west grew in copses separated by open spaces – lightning started forest fires burned only a few copses that had grown too close together, but that was it, the fire didn’t spread and go on burning miles of trees.  It took human foolishness to encourage cheek-by-jowl growth through aggressive firefighting.  Forest thinning wildfires were outlawed, but never stopped.

Now our ecological betters, using the government gun, have created critically flammable environments wherever they could identify an endangered critter or flower or fungus or … .  Put that together with population growth that has built homes and towns in the former wildlands, and anyone with an ounce of critical thought knows that the annual chance of disastrous wildfires quickly approaches certainty.  The reality is that the forests and chaparral will burn, no matter what.  The only choice we have is whether it will burn economically when and where we want it to burn, or whether it will burn when and where we can least afford to have it burn and at enormous cost.

The right choice should be an easy one.  So why hasn’t it been made?  There may be several reasons, but one of the most plausible explanations for our decades-long insanity in choosing badly is that such wildfires also serve a greater political purpose to aid the ongoing fundamental transformation of America.  If we consider public policies encouraging such annual holocausts in that light, then one can make the plausible case that our devastating wildfires are really the result of totally rational decisions toward an end which eventually will serve a greater common good – these wildfires are just another form of the eggs which must be cracked before our central planners can deliver their promised omelet.  It's worth a discussion.

[16nov18 update]  An environmentalists’ epiphany??? 

After decades of butting heads, some environmentalists and logging supporters have largely come to agreement that forests need to be logged to be saved. … Another dangerous factor, land-management experts say, is that forests have become overgrown with trees and underbrush due to a mix of human influences, including a past federal policy of putting out fires, rather than letting them burn. Washington has also sharply reduced logging under pressure from environmentalists. (more here)

Is liberalism really anything different from mental illness?  Why did it take decades for these people to recognize a solution known to the rest of us for over a century?  How many other such practical approaches to commerce, land use, and recreation do these people continue to deny America?  Does this epiphany represent some light at the end of this insane tunnel?

Victims of Communism remembered – 8 November 2018 (updated 9nov18)

[I post today’s ‘Presidential Message on the National Day for the Victims of Communism’ in memory of the 100-200 million people, including members of my family, killed by communists and communism over the past century.  This is the system to which today’s Left is repaving the road of return.  gjr]

On the National Day for the Victims of Communism, we honor the memory of the more than 100 million people who have been killed and persecuted by communist totalitarian regimes.  We also reaffirm our steadfast support for those who strive for peace, prosperity, and freedom around the world.

Since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, we have witnessed the effects of the tyrannical communist ideology—anguish, repression, and death.  Communism subordinates inherent human rights to the purported well-being of all, resulting in the extermination of religious freedom, private property, free speech, and, far too often, life.  These horrors have included Ukrainians deliberately starved in the Holodomor, Russians purged in the Great Terror, Cambodians murdered in the killing fields, and Berliners shot as they tried to escape to freedom.  The victims of these and many other atrocities bear silent testimony to the undeniable fact that communism, and the pursuit of it, will forever be destructive to the human spirit and to the prosperity of mankind.

Today, we remember all who have been denied the great blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under oppressive communist regimes.  Together, we mourn the unbearable losses so many have endured under communism, and we renew our pledge to continue advancing the cause of freedom and opportunity for all.

[9nov18 update]  From one of our more prominent leftwing commenters - “almost 30 years ago one wall came down in Berlin and today another one is going up here.” (see comment stream below)

That is the reason our two polarized sides can no longer profitably talk to each other.  From what I and others of the conservetarian bent see, there is nothing that we can say to the now radicalized Left which today 1) has an enormous intellectual deficit regarding shared history, and 2) little or no ability to incorporate elemental reasoning into their conversations.

These pages are witness to repeated assertions by the progressives that securing our border with a wall is exactly the same as how the communist dictators secured their borders with walls.  No matter how many times here, and in other publications and broadcasts, people have patiently sought to explain to the terminally deficient that the two kinds of walls serve diametrically opposite functions – communism’s walls are built to keep their citizens IN, i.e. from escaping tyranny so as to prevent emigration; the border walls of liberal democracies are meant to keep illegal aliens OUT, and are built to minimize illegal entry so as to control immigration.  This enormous distinction has always been too difficult for a liberal mind to comprehend – for them a wall is a wall, and even more so if they can glibly ignore that significant nuance to promote their anti-capitalistic message to those equally dense.

From such simple distinctions, things go down when the conversation turns to more complex subjects such as the forms of governance, their dynamics and provenance.  For example, when now and again such leftwing worthies dip into their rich trove of historical knowledge and attempt to, say, deny the socialist underpinnings of the Nazis.  Here they go one up on the walls question, and claim that the American right, which wants to maximize individual liberties and reduce the size of government, is equivalent to Germany’s Nationalist Socialists who did everything to minimize individual liberties and maximized the size of their government.  Simply mind boggling.  And they want us to think like they do!!

The Migration Mess (updated 28oct18)

George Rebane

[This is the updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 October 2018.]

A recently updated dictionary defines ‘migration’ as the “movement of people to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions.”  And not by accident, this sounds like something all good-hearted people should encourage and support.  Today we are suddenly presented with the prospect of over 5,000 Central Americans having mysteriously been massed and marshalled to march north illegally through three countries with the objective of overtly overwhelming our southern border controls, and illegally forcing their way into the United States to become wards of the American taxpayer.

Common Core = Obamacare of Education

George Rebane

More test scores keep rolling in telling those paying attention what our educational systems have done to the newest generation of America's students – and it isn’t pretty.  The only ones still genuflecting to our union dominated public schools are the nation’s progressives (including our local lefties) who dare not let light shine on the truth for fear (completely substantiated) that it blows up their social narrative.

In the meantime PJ Media reports ‘Common Core: ACT Scores for Class of 2018 Worst in Decades’.  Bottom line – our students’ scores in all subjects declined, but we took the worst hits in math.  There the “the average score on the ACT math test dropped to its lowest level in 20 years — 20.5 on a scale of 1 to 36. American students scored 21.1 in 2012 and 20.7 last year.”  We weren’t that hot to begin with, and now we’re just sinking lower than ever on the world stage of competing countries where STEM acumen counts most. (more here)

The latest big problem in our education, of course, is Common Core.  The propaganda on CC was that it would just establish some standards, but not dictate curriculum – wrong! 

Congressman Andy Thompson of Ohio has been, from the start, attempting to minimize the damage done by CC.  He says, "I think testimony we took during our attempts to eradicate Common Core showed the dumbing down of curriculum, the social justice indoctrination, the emphasis on social-emotional learning, reduced quantity and quality of reading, emphasizing screen time rather than classroom instruction."  Thompson went on to explain that the "destruction of proper math" has also been a contributing factor. … (CC proponents) place a higher priority on indoctrination than education."

None of the Common Core contamination of curricula makes any sense on the national scale, save for how it neatly dovetails into the objectives laid out in Agenda21.  (H/T to reader)

Climate Change Revisited

George Rebane

‘Climate change’ is one of the unfortunate labels that a nation dominated by dumbth uses to simplify and therefore profoundly misunderstand a very complex process that is made even more confusing through the injection and overarch of political ideologies.  The hoi polloi are salved and saved from all this confounding by being taught that science is a singular absolute, and that ‘science is settled’ on climate change.  There is nothing that will change such minds outside the opinions of their chosen political betters who insist all credible scientists warn us that earth is headed for a thermal catastrophe unless we quickly adopt a set of draconian public policies, enforced by a bigger government, that must needs change our fundamental lifestyles.  Assessments and evidence that contradict such consensus science are loudly sourced to flat-earthers, creationists, and others categorized as intellectual troglodytes.

When the semantic onion is peeled back, climate change is really the short label for preventable man-made global warming (PMGW), about which you shouldn’t bother your little head as long as you concur with the new laws, regulations, taxes, and fees required to ‘prevent climate change’.  Climate change is also the perfect and only storm that must not be wasted on our road to a global Agenda21 (q.v.).  However, the rest of us know that –

1) earth’s climate change is perennial and ongoing;

2) the greenhouse effect is real and greenhouse gases (especially CO2) in earth’s atmosphere are constantly varying, and have done so over broad ranges for eons;

3) earth’s carbon cycle is poorly understood at best;

4) humans do contribute an unknown proportion to atmospheric CO2;

5) the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and ‘earth’s temperature’ is an unknown dynamic process;

6) the temperature of the earth is a number produced by any of many algorithms, and then politically selected for public consumption;

7) our understanding of the dynamics of weather and climate are poor and a work in process, definitely not ready to support public policy making;

8) general circulation models (GCMs), cobbled together to generate and support weather and climate predictions, are many in a field of ongoing research, and are intensely politically mediated for use in public policy making;

9) today’s GCMs barely work for predicting near-term weather, and are useless for predicting long-term climate changes;

10) earth’s weather and climate are large-scale, complex chaotic processes, the long-term predictions of which today are not possible to any degree of usable reliability, and for several technical reasons having to do with physics and computability, such usable reliability may never be possible;

11) the presented evidence for PMGW has been demonstrated to be fraught with fraudulent manipulations and interpretations of historical and topical measurements along with ad hoc estimates, and there is no evidence that the claimed climate change is preventable;

12) the overwhelming ‘thousands’ of the UN’s IPCC scientists, who have neither the expertise nor understanding of things outside their own narrow disciplines correctly, make no such claims, especially when it comes to the workings of any of the GCMs du jour that incorporate their particular inputs for making predictions in the large;

13) all of the above has also been communicated by a body of competent scientists and engineers who are both beholden and not beholden to politically correct government grants.

For some time now the climate change debate has been politically polluted beyond any reason-based redemption or resolution.  Instead, it meticulously mangled by the media before being resolved in the public square through the vicissitudes of an ephemeral and mostly fluid public comprehension, one that expresses itself variously in the nation’s ballot boxes.  Democracy at work indeed.

For these reasons I remain a skeptic about PMGW, and treat all new information as a Bayesian.  To characterize people like me as 'not believing' in climate change immediately extinguishes further discussion and debate.  Such accusations are invariably either agenda driven or simply ignorant.

(The portents are more compelling for a near-term episode of global cooling.  Perhaps the politicians will respond when we witness, say, a couple of years of a crop-killing June frost on the Great Plains.)

Socially Just STEM – it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

While the Dems have the nation tied in Kavanaugh knots and Russia collusions, they are also making quiet progress on other fronts.  In their constant efforts to weaken and then destroy the United States as a sovereign nation-state, our progressives accelerated shift to socialism today adds a new program to stifle and dilute STEM education in the nation’s high schools.  This innovative federal pilot program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and “will promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) high school curriculums that are steeped in the context of social justice.” (more here)

NHS has granted $1,009,762 of taxpayer money to train the initial cohort of 24 teachers from Drexel University to mangle the math curriculum in the Philadelphia school system.  The stated goal for the new and improved STEM curricula is to “promote social justice teaching”.  Internationally, US students’ STEM performance already ranks in the dire straits region, but nowhere in this new initiative is the improvement in STEM performance included as a stated objective.

In the new socialist order, "the long-term and far-reaching benefits to society of this project are the potential to document and share sustainable approaches, steeped in the context of social-justice, for recruiting and preparing STEM majors to provide success in learning mathematics and science for all middle-grades students in a high-need school district."  So, our learned left-lurched educators at the federal level have concluded that the solution to our poor performance has been due to the lack of social justice emphasis in teaching STEM.  This will all be improved when “the (new) foundation of the math and science courses will be based on ‘understanding students' cultural communities as a foundation for classroom culture.’”  (H/T to reader for the heads up.)

‘Choose capitalism’

George Rebane

So argues Manny Montes in an excellent piece in the 6sep18 Union (here).  Mr Montes, who lives in Auburn, is a kindred spirit we have cited before in these pages.  He begins by reminding us how the lamestream media misleads and purposely spreads discontent (‘enemy of the people’?) by continuing to imply that the ‘rich’ don’t get taxed enough and therefore don’t pay their ‘fair share’.  Citations of concurring Democrat congress critters abound; even some who militate to taxing 70% of the first million you earn, and make the point “… if you can’t get by on $300,000 in a country where so many …”.  Never mind that of the federal tax burden "the top 1 percent shoulders 40 percent, the top 10 percent, 71 percent, and the top 20 percent, 87 percent."

He points out the fundamental reality of how socialism is like a cancer that is “inextricably dependent on the producers for their viability”, and “like a cancer, feeding on healthy cells, the progressive socialist must inescapably feed … off the producers of wealth. … Their animal kingdom counterpart is the leech.”  And in its inevitable end, as we have repeatedly seen, socialism is a “cancer (that) essentially commits suicide, feeding on its host until the host has no more to give.”

Montes also cites one of our favorite leftist pundits of plunder, Saul Alinsky, who in Rules for Radicals instructs his acolytes ‘How to Create a Socialist State’, wherein Rule #2 states “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.”  This “morally repugnant” dictum has been followed to the letter by Democrats who long ago launched the nation’s greatest multi-decadal social bamboozle called the ‘Great Society’, whose policies and programs went on to destroy minority families and create poverty wholesale in our cities under their decades of seemingly misguided administrations, abetted by Washington, that actually hewed to chapter and verse of Alinsky’s teachings.  (Of course, those read in history know that Alinsky was himself a student of Lenin, and, in turn, the ideological mentor of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The Left continues its lame attempt to pass off Alinsky as just “the father of community organizing”, which he was not, since the Bolsheviks perfected that art of pernicious public persuasion a century ago.)

Mr Montes reminds the reader in his takeaway on capitalism, that as a counter to collectivism, “there is only one economic system which provides the greatest opportunity for all to achieve self-reliance, and that is capitalism. The flip side of the capitalism coin is individual rights. This is the moral basis of capitalism. The right of individuals to live as they see fit with respect for the rights of others to live as they see fit.”  And as we often conclude such sentiments on RR, the reader is again invited to revisit and meditate on Bastiat’s triangle of rights.

Luxury Communism, the Siren Song

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 August 2018.]

Among an alarming fraction of today’s younger generation, capitalism has become a dirty word, and communism has lost all of its historical barnacles.  Along with socialism, today communism is viewed by our millennials as a more socially just system, a version of which should replace capitalism as our society’s organizing principle for wealth generation and commerce.  Millennials, also known as Gen Y, are the generation born between the early 80s and the late 90s.  Today they number about 80M in the US, and academically they have tested and demonstrate themselves as not our brightest generation.  (more here)

When they assemble to support politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, and Alexandra Ortega-Cortez, they frequently become an unruly and violent mob to express their anger through assaulting university speakers they don’t like to smashing shiny store windows representing the capitalistic wealth of our nation. (more here)

Today there is rising the idea of a ‘fully automated luxury communism’ or FALC that paints a future of humanity living lives of leisure in harmony with communally-owned advanced technology that does all the work and produces all the wealth that is equitably shared by the people.  In that world, no longer is anyone stressed striving to labor in order to own property that makes possible the good life.  Today, organizations such a Plan C are expanding young memberships, inviting these to work for a world “centered on the commons” in which people will ‘naturally’ behave unnaturally as altruists.

Spokespersons such as Aaron Bastani of Novara Media teach listeners that “there is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions, … in recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.”  Bastani sees FALC achieving something closer to that — “a society with collective control over its own high-tech, work-reducing gadgets. He believes what little work will be necessary in the future, such as optimizing 3D-printers and agricultural robots, will be organized much the way editors currently manage Wikipedia — in a decentralized, non-hierarchical fashion.”  Students of history recognize this as the achievement of the Marxist/Leninist communist ideal in which all humanity lives in unregulated harmony after the then superfluous state has withered away.

But what none of these pied pipers talk about to their eager young audiences is the nature of the path required to get us from here to there.  After listening to the animated exhortations of over-zealous speakers, these audiences, innocent of history, leave such emotional rallies to gather in the streets to proclaim the advent of their new world.  But what none of them realize nor are prepared for is the draconian aftermath that must now come when the exhilaration and excitement of street demonstrations end.  Then must begin the real fight, or as Bastani says, “if you want this, what you need to do is seize the means of production. We need to get automation and make it subordinate to human needs, not the profit motive. It’s about seizing the bakery rather than stealing the bread.”

Then will begin the long civil war required to take what’s not yours and kill those who resist such takings.  The road through the way station of socialism to communism has never been an easy one.  Revolutions such as occurred in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and many other lands, all took long, slogging years of civil war that spread wholesale misery across the land and took lives of millions, and then in the aftermath of devastated economies and terrorized societies, destroyed the lives of uncounted more millions for decades to come.  And in the end, for some reason not taught in our schools, the halcyon days that Marx and Lenin promised never came to pass in lands and among peoples who abandoned the fundamental rights to personal property, individual security, and shared liberty.

This is the real battle for the hearts and minds of Americans in which we are now engaged.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

‘Does Diversity Really Unite Us?’

George Rebane

The short answer to that important question is NO.  We have studied the arguments of scholars and thinkers on this for the life of RR and longer, and have found nothing to persuade us to abandon the blatantly obvious and common sense answer in the negative.   Unity is based on fundamental principles of cohesion – first and foremost, all peoples feel the greatest comfort, security, support from, and support for other people who in the aggregate share their beliefs and worldview.  The desire and willingness for such sharing has been the basis for assimilation and of America’s strength as an enduring idea, while other countries have sought to endure through maintaining their core ethnicity, no matter what form of governance they happen to fall under in the passage of time.  This belief is a fundamental tenet of what in these pages is filed under Rebane Doctrine.

I claim no originality here, but freely admit to being a student of my betters in such matters.  Most recently (11apr18) the distinguished political scientist and professor emeritus Edward J. Erler delivered a lecture on the titled subject to a national leadership seminar sponsored by Hillsdale College.  The transcript is also published in the July/August 2018 issue of the college’s widely read Imprimis.  From there I will excerpt some seminal points of Prof Erler’s talk.

… Progressive liberalism no longer views self-preservation as a rational goal of the nation-state. Rather, it insists that self-preservation and national security must be subordinate to openness and diversity. America’s immigration policies, we are told, should demonstrate our commitment to diversity because an important part of the American character is openness, and our commitment to diversity is an affirmation of “who we are as Americans.” If this carries a risk to our security, it is a small price to pay. Indeed, the willing assumption of risk adds authenticity to our commitment.

… Our progressive politicians and opinion leaders proclaim their commitment to diversity almost daily, chanting the same refrain: “Diversity is our strength.” 

… This should not be surprising. Greater diversity means inevitably that we have less in common, and the more we encourage diversity the less we honor the common good. Any honest and clear-sighted observer should be able to see that diversity is a solvent that dissolves the unity and cohesiveness of a nation—and we should not be deceived into believing that its proponents do not understand the full impact of their advocacy! (emphasis mine)

… The American people can, of course consent to allow others to join the compact that created the American nation, but they have the sovereign right to specify the terms and conditions for granting entry and qualifications for citizenship.

… Immigration policies should serve the interests of the American people and of the nation—they should not be viewed as acts of charity to the world. Putting America first is a rational goal. It is the essence of sovereignty. And the sovereign nation-state is the only home of citizenship—as it is the only home of constitutional government.

Democratic Socialists = proto-communists

Some mistakes are just too much fun to make only once.

George Rebane

The left-leaning Associated Press reports ‘Democratic socialism surging in the age of Trump’.  The article is a well-written, comprehensive review of what the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are and their recent growth spurt as the Democratic Party lurches hard Left.  (We note that know-nothing local lefties are still in denial about that.)  What they are - according to the AP, other observers, and now even some dues-paying members - is socialists, plain and simple.  But even that doesn’t go far enough.

DSA’s paid up membership has surged from about 6K to 45K in the last year or so, and now includes in its ranks more than a handful of Democrat politicians running for office.  DSA used to be “on the fringes of the liberal movement’s farthest left flank.”  Today they are a “significant force in Democratic politics” that overwhelmingly dominates the public direction the party has taken and openly advertises as its future.   On the DSA’s website we find, and AP corroborates, that there is “little distinction” between ‘democratic socialism’ and just plain good old-fashioned ‘socialism’.  But wait, there’s more to this telling.

When you read the DSA constitution, you learn that “its members as socialists reject an economic order based on private profit and share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”  In short, they are really a new and improved modern day movement of communists who are temporarily hiding under the more acceptable socialist label.  When the time is ripe, they will dispense with this half-way house and co-opt the political pimple that today still calls itself the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

The real question is how far will the Democratic Party play along with this headlong rebirth of communism via the waystation of socialism.  Many Democrats, and we all know who they are, have already thrown in their lot with the DSA, and many more Dems are standing by, nervously fingering their hats as they prepare to toss them into the DSA ring.  The times, they surely are a-changin.

The only speed-bump on the road to complete government control of everything seems to be the label ‘socialist’ that some Dems running for office fear that “people do associate (socialism) with bad things in history”.  Now if we can only hurry up and convince these inconvenient history troglodytes that socialism was really not all that bad, and that we’ll do it right this time around, then we’ll have it made in the shade.  Why?  Because our government educational system has already taught the younger generation that capitalism is bad and socialism is good, and the lamestream media is reinforcing that daily.  It's those damn older folks who can still remember yesterday who are the problem.

You can bet the farm that the Deep State “patriots” are already all socialists since their livelihood depends on it.  The only kerfuffle slowing things down is the current lack of a definitive Democrat leadership behind which the young and stupid can join ranks.  Current Dems jockeying for position, like Schumer, Pelosi, Sanders, Warren, Biden, and Waters come across as marginal work products from some second-rate embalming school.  It’s the new cohort of the likes of Ocasio-Cortez, Kaniela Ing, Kamala Harris, etc who are the emerged and unabashed socialist face of the Democratic Party.  And the platform to which they all have signed up sees the abrogation of the Constitution and its defined voter franchise as Job One.

Women Taught to Shun STEM

George Rebane

While great effort is being made by universities and the state to attract more women into STEM careers, their massively progressive humanities departments at literally all of the nation’s colleges are doing their best to convince women to reject STEM.  The message of these liberal academics is, “STEM is only for those who enjoy “rote” work. Engineering is not creative. There’s only one right answer. You’ll live your life in a cubicle. It’s dehumanizing. You’ll never talk to anyone. And, of course, it’s sexist.”

Engineering professor Dr Barbara Oakley gives us the lowdown on these not-so-subtle forces in academia that are working to minimize STEM knowledge in favor of topics, majors, and careers in feel-good fields that require ‘skills’ for which no one or very few are willing to pay with money out of their own pockets. (more here)  The anti-STEM professors have not the slightest clue about the level of creativity required for STEM work, nor the nature of the fulfilling careers that STEM fields provide, and, most importantly, that STEM careers are the prime engines of wealth building vs wealth redistribution in society.

Professor Oakley’s only weak argument is the belief that her light-weight “humanities colleagues unthinkingly malign math and science as the province of uncreative drones.”  I don’t think there is anything “unthinking” going on here.  No matter how ignorant they are of STEM and its careers, the light-weights know they are on thin ice.  Were their female students to be exposed to the truth of the real exhilaration that STEM professions can provide, and the creativity required to succeed in such careers, and the real contribution they would make to society, and the life-changing possibilities that would then be open to them, those smart enough would switch out of their humanities majors in a heartbeat.

But the real truth here is that the Left has never promoted STEM for the masses because it creates too many problems in their implementation of a compliant governance for the new world order.  With a smattering of STEM, their pedagogically cultivated drones may start having independent thoughts in areas best left untrammeled by inquiring young minds.  What is doubly wasteful in today’s progressive bureaucracies and institutions is that on the one hand we establish and promote  programs – from kindergarten through grad-school – to attract females into STEM subjects and careers, and on the other hand operate a quiet yet pervasive propaganda campaign in academia to denigrate STEM-based thinking and opportunities as somehow being socially deficient and limiting.

Scattershots – 6jul18 (updated 8jul18)

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. - Bertrand De Jouvenel

George Rebane

Liberal logic juries.  Reviewing some of the ‘Russian interference’ comment streams to confirm the kind of logic our leftwing readers accept and present as evidence that Russia did indeed throw the 2016 election to assure Trump’s victory, it occurs to me that many, probably most, of our empaneled juries across the country enjoy a majority of liberals.  Their thought processes and ability to think critically are not lost on lawyers.  We already have long years of evidence that our judicial system suffers from significant corruption by legal professionals implementing jurisprudence to solicit erroneous verdicts by playing games with both process and evidence.  Now I wonder how much of the justice system mess is contributed by juries whose ability to reason and understand evidence is similar to what we often witness in these pages.

Left/Right civility side-by-side in the 5jul18 Union op-ed page.  Take a look at the Other Voices ‘Vote Blue in November’ by a Ms Betsy Wobus who simply exudes raw hatred of President Trump as a reason to vote Democrat, and then compare that to the neighboring column ‘A Threat to One Person’s Free Speech is a Threat to All’ by Ms Terry McLaughlin.  One contains only baseless vituperation, and the other a reasoned presentation of government’s ideology-based impact on First Amendment rights.  A more vivid example of the people on either side of our widening political gulf would be hard to find.

For all the fans of Single Payer (Socialized) Medicine, we have the latest report – ‘Reform the NHS before it kills again’ - about the UK’s much-vaunted National Health Service.  Researcher and author Rupert Darwall runs through a toe-curling litany of recent evidence and ongoing investigations of how the NHS has for years conducted a quiet policy of euthanasia on its patients.  As we have pointed out here, and Mr Darwall reinforces – for government-run health services, especially the de facto monopolistic kind like the NHS, patients are a cost to be minimized.  The obverse is true for private (for-profit) health care services for whom patients are the revenue source to be kept alive, cared for, and cured so that more patients will select the services of such enterprises.  (To confirm such a difference here in the US, revisit the evidence about the healthcare that our VA provides veterans.)

Our country’s multiple identity-based cultures are diverging (becoming more “heterogeneous”). Researchers Klaus Desmet and Romain Wacziarg at the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research have completed “a systematic quantitative study of cultural convergence and divergence in the United States over time” to “assess whether cultural values have grown more or less heterogeneous”.  Among a lot of other things, in their jun2018 paper ‘Cultural Divide’ they conclude that the cultures of 11 distinct groups, into which they divided the American population, became more homogeneous from 1972 to the late 1990s, and then reversed and started becoming more heterogeneous thereafter.  In short, our various identity group cultures have now been diverging for the last 20 years or so.  This, of course, does help explain why we are having more difficulty in communicating and accepting each other’s public policy solutions.  Whoulda thought?

Earth during last half of June 2018.  This YouTube video was sent to me by Russ Steele, RR reader and fellow blogger (here) who closely follows and compares the global warming hysteria to what is actually happening but missing in the lamestream media reports.

[7jul18 update]  ‘If America Is Divided, So Is Europe’, so argues Tunku Varadarajan in a revealing WSJ essay.  Their divisions are similar to ours, with their Left also working feverishly to bury western civilization by any and all means in order to create the chaotic change, as necessary, from which a new global collective may arise to the carefully managed, compliant, and approving cries of their great unwashed, amply augmented by hordes of Islamic and sub-Saharan migrants.

[8jul18 update]  Agenda21 alive and well and advancing.  A reader sent me this update on the implementation and progress of A21 that was posted on Anthony Watts’ ubiquitous blog – ‘Whatever happened to Agenda 21 and Climate Change Policy?’  There Dr Tim Ball writes -

It’s alive and well in your backyard. The entire policy of using anthropogenic global warming as a false front to implement global governance and impose how we will all live is working with remarkable success. The plan was set out by Maurice Strong as Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams because the people he arranged to implement it are unaccountable to anyone.

In ‘History’s Bad Ideas are an Inspiration for Progressives’ Victor Davis Hanson describes “the new illiberal ethos” that we witness in our daily round and on these pages.  In there he details the Left’s hubristic asymmetry in public life and our nation’s affairs.  VDH even explains why “supposed liberals keep revisiting discredited illiberal practices from the nation’s past.”

National dumbth on parade, again (updated 1jul18)

George Rebane

Today the nation will witness ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Americans demonstrating against what is represented as “Trump’s immigration policy”.  The demonstrations are sponsored by the usual leftwing anti-American and socialist organizations, and will focus on the ‘separation of children’ aspect of US Code (including our extant immigration law) that requires the separation of children from people (American citizens and illegal aliens) taken into custody – we have never thrown kids into jail with criminal adults.

This aspect of US law is totally denied and suppressed by today’s leftwingers who will shout themselves hoarse.  The reporting on this is so one-sided and misrepresented on the lamestream media that, in addition to riling up the leftwing base and those lightly read on social justice, that some more moderate and even conservative media dare not put these emotional claims into some kind of realworld perspective.  We have reported on this and discussed it extensively in these pages (here, here, and here).  Locally, as well as nation-wide, the Left does not want to even recognize their information-free and illogical position on this, because the real agenda here remains the maintenance of incivility against our duly elected president – all this answers the call to now put their “bodies on the line” to oppose anything and everything this administration does.

In today’s (30jun18) Union, Nancy Garcia takes up our incivility and asks (here), “Why is it OK to not serve someone because of their political affiliation but not OK to discriminate against race or creed of customers?  Why is it OK for a past president to put children, who crossed the border illegally, in caged detention cells, but not OK for a sitting president to house them in a safe, secure and caring environment?  The immigration laws were created by Congress, not the president. It will take Congress to change them.”

That the hordes attending today’s demonstration have been carefully taught to ignore such questions is another confirmation of national dumbth solidly in place and on the rise.

[1jul18 update]  Well, as part of our national dumbth in its upper reaches, we have a major op-ed piece in the NYT decrying ‘How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment’.  The fools in their editorial department are so ignorant of constitutional principles that they don’t even realize that the First was meant by our Founders to be used as a weapon against any insipient tyranny arising in the land.  And nowhere is that more obvious today than what the progressives have done and are doing to our national dialogue in academe, our public schools, business, and the media.

Formerly fierce promoters of free speech, the Left today has its mammaries in a pinch with a bitter harvest of what it has sown.  The notions now being discussed by progressive elitists include the total revision, if not abrogation, of the First Amendment and free speech, because (wait for it) it turns out that the Constitution hinders free speech.  Apparently the rich and powerful are now using it to make arguments for which the progressive pinheads have no reasonable counter, and they and theirs are made to look like the fools they are in even their own lamestream media.  The solution for them is always the government gun in the attempt to put a stop to the whole thing.  I can already see proposals for a federal Free Speech Commission through which public speech must first be cleared before being posted, published, or broadcast.

And while this is going on, the Left, exemplified by our local loonies, continues to call for inclusion and diversity as they howl for opposing voices to be silenced, or at least denied forums in which their ideas can be disseminated.  As they accuse us of being divisive, we witness calls by our own alt-Left to silence Union columnist George Boardman, cartoonist Bob Crabb, and of course, yours truly.  And I am sure such calls are echoed across the land as we now prepare to witness the most vicious political fight of our lifetime as our national socialist will fight tooth-and-nail to stop anyone and everyone that President Trump nominates to replace Justice Kennedy on SCOTUS.

The Diaspora of Dumbth in America

A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Nothing in recent memory highlights the dumbing of the American mind like today’s hysteria about separating kids from adults (parents or coyotes) who criminally enter the United States.  Led by the Left, our news media, both lamestream and conservative, have now started supporting the narrative that such separation from illegal alien adults taken into custody is something new, unique, inhuman, permanently damaging, and not the American way.  In reality nothing could be further from the truth.  America has never jailed kids with adults in whose custody they were at the time of incarceration.  We have always separated the kids and put them into appropriate care institutions until they could be reunited with parents, relatives, or placed with other legal guardians.

Today the insane notion has spread across the land, a diaspora of the belief that somehow illegal aliens who criminally enter our country deserve special treatment that is not now and never has been afforded American citizens.  Our laws, and especially border security laws, have always called for equal separation of alien children brought illegally and surreptitiously into the country by criminal adults who have been arrested and taken into custody.  Here’s a letter in the 25jun18 WSJ from a defense attorney that reinforces what I introduced on these pages in ‘Separating kids from parents’.

Regarding your editorial “The GOP’s Immigration Meltdown” (June 19): I am a criminal defense attorney and can say with confidence that hundreds, if not thousands, of parents and their minor children are separated in this country every day by the criminal justice system. What was happening at our southern border is routine.

It is not uncommon for criminal defendants to bring their minor children to court with them for bail hearings, revocation of bail hearings, revocation of probation hearings and sentencing hearings. Perhaps they think that the presence of their children will influence the judge. It has been my experience that it will not.

If a criminal defendant is denied bail, has his bail revoked (as Paul Manafort recently experienced), has his probation revoked or is sentenced to prison, he will be taken into custody and, by definition, separated from his children (the children don’t accompany the defendant to prison). If a family member or other guardian isn’t present to take the children, the children will be taken by a state agency that is charged with caring for children who have no adult to care for them.

Illegally entering the U.S. is, by definition, a crime. If the parent is taken into custody by law enforcement for the crime of illegally entering the U.S., that parent will be separated from his minor children, just as any other criminal defendant in the examples above.

As an attorney, I don’t understand the current outrage. Parents have been separated, are being separated and will continue to be separated from their minor children by the criminal justice system. Why should there be an exception for noncitizens who have been arrested for the crime of illegally entering the U.S.? As far as I know, there is no exception for any other crime.

Ivars Lacis, Peachtree City, Ga.

The diaspora of this anti-American insanity was further expanded on and put into the context of an ongoing broader leftwing agenda in ‘The Existential Abrogation of Sovereignty’.  What I want to emphasize here is that more centrist and conservative media outlets have fallen in line, putting out news items about separating kids that do nothing to dispel the lies that 1) the whole policy was started by Trump, and 2) that such separations are unique to entering illegal aliens, who have been converted simply into “immigrants” no longer adorned with even the mildly clarifying modifiers of ‘undocumented’ or ‘illegal’.

And the under-educated of the land are lapping it up with manufactured visions of such huddled masses, as in days of yore, gathered at the foot of the Statue of Liberty demanding to be allowed entry simply because they and their neighbors have lost their native countries to criminals and corruptions.  All this time the alt-Left Democrats are also telling Americans what a horrible land the United States is, and no one has the ability to see the disconnect between that argument and the existential confusion at our borders where more than 1,000 illegals daily risk life and limb to enter.

The unexamined bottom line in the public forum, and now the proclaimed policy of the Democratic Party is that America should welcome one and all from across the world who illegally cross our borders with the complaint that they want, nay, demand a better economic future.  Promoting such open borders and automatic amnesty is the surest way for us to lose our national sovereignty and speed up our departure from the America that for the last two centuries has served as the gold standard of governance.

The Existential Abrogation of Sovereignty

George Rebane

Across this land we are debating the wrong thing.  There is no contention about separating kids from parents.  No one want to do that gratuitously.  But as a society, we do it when we must.  And we do it daily with American kids by the thousands when their parents are jailed or otherwise detained through legal proceedings.  We have done that for decades and today we keep hundreds of thousands of American kids in foster care separate from their parents.  But just focusing on the kids is not my point here.

America’s Left has found a new casus belli to attack the foundations of our republic.  Their goal, as stated here many times, is nothing less than the abrogation of America’s sovereignty as a nation-state (cf. Agenda21).  Let me start with some fundamental tenets of governance that I assign to Rebane Doctrine (continuing to collect these under this label and efficiently refer to them drives the local Left nuts; another benefit).

1. A nation-state is first and foremost sovereign only to the extent that it can determine and control the access of goods and people to its territory. Secure and non-porous borders through which ingress, including immigration, and egress are effectively controlled is an existential measure of its sovereignty.
2. Anti-American – a person who opposes American sovereignty 1) as an idea through impugnation, and/or 2) existentially by actively working to reduce/eliminate such sovereignty.
3. Anti-American sedition – activities intended to radically and/or rapidly change the existing character, make-up, and/or established order of America through extra-legal means.

Today the media is full of reports and interviews with progressive politicians unabashedly promoting open borders without (yet) daring to say it in those words.  What they volubly promote instead is a 1) catch, 2) keep the families together, and 3) then release policy for illegal aliens caught after surreptitiously crossing the border.  They are to be released on the basis of 1) having purposely violated US laws, and 2) on the fiction that all illegal aliens have a prima facie legitimate case for seeking asylum.

What gives lie to all this, and is known to our anti-American politicians is that only about 3% of the illegal entrants return for their asylum court hearings which would legitimize their stay in the US.  The other 97% know they have no leg to stand on, and that they would be taken into custody and deported were they to present themselves.  Their only hope for staying here is to remain a fugitive long enough until our anti-American Left (presuming the existence of a pro-American Left) can muster enough public opinion to force the federal government to designate them as the next 'DACAs' or 'Dreamers' or … in sufficient numbers so as to make their en masse deportation no longer feasible.  And voila! We have yet another new tranche of Democrat voters who have no love or understanding of the country into which they have infused.  Their loyalty is only to the globalist progressive cause and its visible political and opinion leaders who are bent on taking us to that new future.

George Boardman’s California

George Rebane

Intrepid left-of-center columnist George Boardman is one of our county’s recognized students of the human condition who regularly shares his observations and interpretations in the op-ed pages of The Union.  RR is proud to also number him among our regular readers and commenters.  In his 14may18 column – ‘California shines again, much to the annoyance of our critics’ – he paints a salubrious picture of California that goes a long way to explain why our Sacramento socialists see nothing wrong with what they have done to our state over the last few decades.  Not only that, but their sharing Mr Boardman’s view will not cause the loss of even a smidgen of momentum in our headlong rush towards the People’s Republic of California (perhaps even unto its status as a sovereign nation-state).

Mr Boardman’s analysis is supported mainly by ignoring the growing dumbbell shape of CA’s income demographic.  As I pointed out in ‘Solar Panels …’ and ‘California’s Common Core …’, the state’s population is growing slowly, mainly by the steady ingress of the welfare-seeking poor and succor-seeking illegal aliens, along with a thin cohort of knowledge workers joining the state’s unique high tech sector.  The slow growth rate is due to the concurrent exodus of middle class workers (especially in the second quintile) who can no longer afford to live here due to the low wages that their limited and rapidly redundant skill sets command.  What is left behind is a small hump on the high earnings end and a large hump on the low/no earnings end supported by government checks.  The middle earnings area is on its way to becoming a wasteland that is devastated by California’s high taxes and countless regulations which increase every aspect of our cost of living.

Now, what Mr Boardman points out but does not lament is that the people leaving California are of the vaunted middle-class that the Democrat politicians all celebrate and claim their policies are designed to help.  Well, you can’t get more Democratic than California, and that’s where the real rubber meets the road on socialist policies.  Pointing out that no one really wants to go live in North Platte, Nebraska is not exactly an example of keen insight.   Most people know the decline of regions generating wealth through agriculture, that require fewer and fewer workers, which actually started about 125 years ago.  Yes, cities are where the country’s wealth is generated in the modern age.  However, the record of Democrat governance of America’s urban areas is an ongoing and growing tragedy of the human condition.

To understand this as a socialist (or thereabouts?), Mr Boardman should examine the history of California’s Gini Index that measures the equality of income distribution – e.g. CA’s Gini Index is one of the nation’s highest and rose 18.2% during 1979 – 2012.  As technology accelerates and California attracts more and more low/no earners (1 of 3 US welfare recipients live in California), the Left-fostered income inequality will continue to ramp upward.  Given the strong correlation between income and critical thinking, the Democrats see perpetuating such inequality as a virtuous cycle that ensures their hardening grip on power as the dumbbell demographic accentuates.  California is now home of the coastal well-to-do who can still afford the taxes and increased costs, and those legions of the poor who rely on government transfer payments to make ends meet.

Finally, that the fewer rich, who are sufficient to operate the California companies commanding margins which make the state’s GDP one of the highest in the world, should be no surprise to those who mastered Econ 101.  However, all that will also end when even the rich must eventually sell Sacramento the rope with which they will be hanged.

It’s ALL in the label (updated)

"A rose/skunk by any other name would smell as sweet/foul", Wm Shakespeare expanded.

George Rebane

Watching the recent California gubernatorial candidates’ debate, it again became clear that the labels we both carefully, and sometimes carelessly, attach to important issues determine the direction and nature of the subsequent debate on and the final resolution of an issue.  For those who pay attention to public affairs, this was most apparent when the topic of ‘immigration’ came up.

The clear line of division between the Right and Left involves the existential factors –

1. The Left’s overarching public policies are ALL directed toward demonstrably achieving the world envisioned in the UN’s Agenda21 objectives.
2. The Left cannot achieve this as long as the US remains a sovereign nation-state and a (the?) world hegemon that recognizes and still celebrates its origin as a western civilization.
3. A cohesive national culture and secure borders are anathema to the A21 future. A fragmented and mutually wary (suspicious?) cultural tapestry is the required starting point to any “fundamental transformation of America”.
4. Continually promoting the victimization narrative (through public education and the media) about America’s blacks and Hispanics forms the attained beach head for maintaining and expanding divisions of the aggrieved in our land.
5. Most productive and conducive to achieving A21 goals is the simmering sentiment in Hispanic communities that embraces Reconquista (q.v.) – the reacquisition of lands lost by Mexico through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and their reformation under a new sovereign Hispanic government.
6. Porous borders that invite the ingress of Hispanic illegal aliens is the ongoing near-term objective – ‘I don’t believe in borders.’, ‘I don’t believe in walls, I believe in bridges.’, … is today’s cry of Democrat politicians and activists.
7. Border porosity is most strongly promoted in the Hispanic communities where purposely aggrieved people naturally practice tribalism, and invite/condone the growth of their cohorts with people who are ethnically and culturally similar. Reconquista’s oft-stated guiding principle is its ‘peaceful achievement’ through overwhelming numbers at the ballot box and in government bureaucracies – ‘We will outbreed you!’
8. Porous borders are abetted under the imprimatur that the illegal entrants are today’s continuation of America’s historical open-door policies of legal immigration. Hence, it’s of paramount importance to rename the illegal aliens among us as the innocent cohort of ‘undocumented immigrants’, which has finally morphed into simply ‘immigrants’.
9. To America’s growing population of the marginally educated, the Left’s use of ‘immigrants’ is purposely designed to confound the historically beneficial ingress of legal immigrants and the not-so-beneficial ingress of illegal entrants which subsequently meld into the unassimilated population of illegal aliens already established in the US.
10. The Left’s public position is that how you got into the country doesn’t matter, especially if your native country was authoritarian, poor, and without human rights and economic prospects for its citizens (aka a “shithole country”).
11. The Left fosters the illusion that our illegal aliens are equivalent to our legal immigrants in how they draw on public services, participate in our justice system, and contribute to our economy. To them immigration is NOT a two-party process that involves a mutual and formal agreement between the immigrant petitioning entry and the government welcoming such entry.  To them immigration is just whatever means are available to aliens to enter our country.  Illegal aliens and legal immigrants are all just ‘immigrants’ and so represented to the rest of Americans.  They all deserve equally to become franchised citizens, and until then they should have all the rights of franchised citizens, thereby making the latter distinction existentially moot.

One can make the case for the importance of correct/accurate labels that cover other issues such as ‘climate change’ nee ‘global warming’, which functionally the Left argues and treats as preventable manmade global warming.  One can make a long list of such propagandized mislabeling of issues, proposed legislation, and laws on the books that is the stock in trade of those dedicated to deception.

[update] We live "in the rotting carcass of an once great state" - the case for this is summarized succinctly in this YouTube video brought to our attention by a regular reader and commenter.

California’s Common Core Catastrophe

George Rebane

In these pages we have long lamented California’s adoption of the Common Core curriculum standards, especially in the teaching of math in K-12.  H/T to longtime RR reader and discussant Greg Goodknight, who points us to an important just-published essay on Common Core performance in California since the standards were adopted in 2010 and fully implemented in 2014-15.  The piece – ‘California’s Common Core Mistake’ – written by W. Evers and Z. Wurman of the Hoover Institution contains a crisp summary of the educational catastrophe that CC has bestowed on California and the nation in preparing our young people to enter STEM careers so demanded by the AI-driven shift in required workforce skills.

The whole mess started with California having the widely acknowledged highest math teaching standards in the nation throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  The keystone of it all was preparing the maximum number of the state’s public school students to take Algebra1 in the 8^th grade.  Evers and Wurman present copious charts and graphs of the data showing the progress of California students before CC, and then the disaster that befell when the curriculum was dumbed down after CC mandated postponing Algebra1 until the 9^th grade.  And who was hit the hardest by this curricular retreat? – the poor and minorities, of course.

A cynical but totally rational explanation for this Left-promoted, government induced travesty is that the CC curriculum will surreptitiously yet reliably stifle the growth of a more numerate and critically thinking electorate, which then will be more compatible, susceptible, and compliant to the socialist nostrums that now and eternally will gush out of our one-party Sacramento in a steady stream.

The 21st Century Progressive Dating Game (updated 9may18)

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.  Mark Twain

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 May 2018.]

For millennia females in all cultures were shielded by their families.  Marriages were arranged for commercial or political benefit, love was optional and came later if at all.  Extra marital trysts and affairs were di rigeur at all levels of society.  Females were treated as chattel, to be kept on the shelf in a perfect condition for display until a desirable customer came along.

In the west, the female perquisites of love and, therefore, choice began to emerge during the Renaissance in the 1400s, and blossomed during the French Enlightenment (ca 1740).  Although almost all proper marriages were still arranged, or at a minimum still required the blessing of the prospective bride’s closest senior male relative or appointed male guardian.  As the years passed, requiring the male imprimatur became totally optional in the most developed nations during the 20^th century in the aftermath of the Great War.  This signaled the liberation of both partners, giving each gender the freedom to go through a semi-formal game of ‘pick and choose’, during which a number of prospective partners were given the ‘try before you buy’ treatment.  The dating game was on between boys and girls of all ages.

Our Constitution – capricious or a constant?

George Rebane

America’s Constitution is one of its prime founding documents.  Founding documents of any social order – nation-state, kingdom, tribe, … - are written and disseminated to define the durable component of that order to its members.  Even monarchs and dictators who rule by force and at their whim have issued decrees that define a new scheme intended to last sufficiently so as to allow their subservients to order and organize their lives.  Such documents serve no function if it is known that tomorrow they may again change.

Founding documents are therefore drafted with great debate and contention to hammer out a work product that all parties see as a durable social contract upon which long-term plans may be made and based, and which will define the structure of governance and a stable foundation for generations.  Founding documents represent the sum total of a society’s wisdom, forged through the politics of their time, that its elected or endowed leaders are able to bring to bear.

From time immemorial the wise of a society have known that the sentiment of the public square is capricious, often with destructive and deadly after effects.  This is a baked-in human attribute that even the people themselves comprehend and have come to dread.  With this understanding they have therefore been willing to trade some of their liberties and wealth for a stable and secure social order.  In response, wise rulers and leaders have made such founding documents hard to change.  As with our Constitution, changes to it are possible, but these must follow known and deliberative procedures that can only proceed at a very dignified pace.  This has served us well for almost two and a half centuries.

No one argues that during its life our Constitution has had to endure numerous assaults.  Heretofore these assaults have been few and focused always on some or other particular provision. Today we have added changing the permanence of the Constitution, many calling it "an 18th century relic".  The Constitution's constancy is under targeted assault by a contingent of collectivist elites who are bent on fundamentally transforming the United States of America by leading a substantial contingent of our lightly read and/or neurologically challenged who have been subjected to almost three generations of being taught that America is the globe’s malignant tumor.  

The primary tack for this transformation is to be achieved through the wholesale purchase of more votes through 1) the modern embodiment of the state providing unending bread and circuses, and 2) the de facto importation (through porous borders and lax immigration policies) and subsequent enfranchisement of illegal alien hordes who then become securely bonded to prominently positioned progressives to whom they owe their welcome and weal.

As part and parcel of this assault, today we debate whether and how Americans should count ourselves, and those who live in our midst illegally, so as to establish the basis for our federal benefits and representation in Congress.  Our Constitution has some very specific guidance for such countings.  Section 2 of the 14^th Amendment clearly states that only citizens can vote, and only the number of citizens determine representation in Congress.  The 15^th Amendment underlines that it is “the right of the citizens of the United States to vote”; nowhere in our carefully amended Constitution is that right provided for anyone else.

Those among us who are bent on America’s fundamental transformation are also bent on an interpretation of the Constitution as a bendable document that should respond to whatever the selectively assembled are prompted to shout from the public square.  Their argument demands being responsive to the malleable demands of the multitude – ‘after all we are a democracy, and the people should get what they want when they want it.’  The trouble is that we are not a democracy, and the last thing thinking people want is to live under a founding document that flaps capriciously in the winds of the moment before becoming a shredded remnant.

Scattershots – 1apr2018 (updated 4apr18)

George Rebane

Democrats admit to using illegal aliens to boost their receipt of fed funds and stacking Congress with their representatives.  Today on Fox News Sunday we saw videos of both CA AG Xavier Becerra and Rep Brad Sherman (D-CA) admit and argue for illegal aliens being counted in the upcoming census so that CA would not lose congressional seats and federal monies that are doled out on the basis of the number of presumed citizens and legal residents of our country.  They were completely unabashed in stating their positions as if that was an understood constitutional mandate – whoever can successfully crawl under our border fence, according to these two progressive worthies, is due the full benefits of American citizens.

The recent revelations from Dems on their contempt for the United States of America and its Constitution is both alarming and refreshing.  First, it was former SCOTUS justice Stevens admitting that the ‘sane, common sense gun controls’ with which the Left has been bamboozling us for years is just a bald-faced sham.  They really want the Second Amendment gone so that gun confiscation can proceed apace, and they won't then have to dick around anymore with the ongoing bit by piece removal through a constant drizzle of ratcheting regulations that constructively destroy that amendment.  And now they admit that retaining US sovereignty through control of its borders and access to citizenship has never been something they have promoted, and that their oaths of office to preserve and defend America were just a scam that such lying sacks of s#!t have to swear in order to obtain the powers of elective office.  A21 on steroids.

[2apr18 update]  States are broke – liabilities total more than available cash or reasonable foreseeable revenue streams.  Politicians of all stripes have always been willing to sell the future welfare of their voters down the drain if they can be re-elected just one more time.  And the voters in their turn have been stupid enough to vote for pandering politicians’ promises that have no chance of being delivered.  Mainly, because they too don’t know that there’s no free lunch.  As we have pointed out here for more than a decade, vote buying public employee pensions, along with more entitlements than one can count, are the culprits of our failing fisc.  And the beat goes on.  (more here)

[4apr18 update] From today’s WSJ website – “Police Scrutinize YouTube Shooter’s Social Media for Motive: The woman accused of shooting three people inside YouTube’s headquarters before killing herself left a social-media footprint that included rhetoric against YouTube for allegedly censoring her video content.”  (emphasis mine)  The woman did no such thing; her rhetoric unequivocally stated that YouTube censored her – she did not allege the censoring, she accused YouTube of doing it.  The media have become so timid of being sued or something, that their reporting has become silly with the obvious and existential being described as ‘alleged’, as if there were still some other conclusion waiting in the wings.  Don’t you chortle a bit when you hear, “After killing (umpteen) people, the alleged shooter then turned the gun on himself.”? And after hearing eyewitness testimonies and counting bodies, including that of the shooter, the reporter still puts the killer into the 'alleged' category??  The silliness is always corroborated by the absence of any subsequent investigation by the authorities to find an alternative perpetrator.  (I’m reminded that this is even true when justice screws up badly, as occurred in finding OJ innocent.  No one launched an investigation of who actually killed his wife and the unlucky guy returning her sunglasses.  Mrs Simpson’s murder is not an unsolved crime, we know the alleged murderer killed her.  We can't say it, but did sue the bejeezus out of him in the double-jeopardy civil suit.)

“Biased Algorithms” – Advent of Politically Correct AI

George Rebane

[9apr18 - An edited version of this commentary appeared (here) in the 9apr18 edition of The Union.]

Do you want to see the latest on how the progressives plan to take down our lead in one of the few remaining areas of technology in which we are still the world’s gold standard?  Tolerated by formerly science-driven institutions like MIT, the ACLU with activist allies like the ‘AI Now Initiative’ are starting to hold conferences at which they lament that “opaque and potentially(sic) biased mathematical models are remaking our lives—and neither the companies responsible for developing them nor the government is interested in addressing the problem.”

The growing hysteria is built around the proposition that “algorithmic bias is shaping up to be a major societal issue at a critical moment in the evolution of machine learning and AI.”  Has anyone else discovered this “major societal issue”?  The claim of the hysteria leaders is that the machine algos will somehow discriminate against the minorities and the poor, because they were either surreptitiously programmed to do such dastardly things, or they learned to do it on their own (gasp!) when given an objective utility function to maximize along with copious amounts of realworld data.

The Left’s activist elites have decided that government should somehow start regulating the kind of AIs we can use in our businesses and homes.  These limited knowledge types (aka ignorant) believe that they can dictate through regulatory means how machine intelligence should continue to develop and grow so that it’s the best for the most.  This is the shared and overwhelming hubris of collectivists.  According to their initiatives, we should prepare to soon see establishment of the Bureau of Socially Sensitive AI that will attempt to vet every machine-learning utility function, and then test/certify the performance of such AIs before they can be used by consumers or commerce.  (more here)

It is argued that such intervention will make the machine algos more transparent, sensitive to human needs, and prevent the usual litany of discriminants that promote racism, sexism, homophobia, gender bias, xenophobia, … , you know the drill.  Of course, those who are studied in the arts and technologies of smart machines know that this is madness right from the gitgo.  It also hearkens back to how Stalin sank Soviet agriculture by setting up bureaucrats under anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko to tell the collective farmers how much to plant of what and when.

Today, scientific and technical knowledge expands at an unimaginable pace, and bureaucracies (government and corporatists) react, if at all, at a snail’s pace.  Most of what they claim to know and write into gun-imposed laws and regulations is already false.  Ronald Bailey expands on this in ‘Half the Facts You Know are Probably Wrong’.

But all this is still possible with the country now firmly in the grip of dumbth (q.v.).  In the past and in the large, human ignorance was mitigated by market forces as economist Walter Williams once more points out in his ‘Human Ignorance and Market Genius'.  His "bottom line is that ignorance is omnipresent. The worst kind of ignorance is not knowing just how ignorant we are. That leads to the devastating pretense of knowledge that’s part and parcel of the vision of intellectual elites and politicians.”  And that “devastating pretense” is what overwhelmingly impacts the votes of the most desperate and deluded among us.  Just listen to their voices as they mass and march on our malls and streets.

Climate Industry’s Shameful Science

George Rebane

A correspondent alerted me to an important new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation titled ‘Global Warming – A Case Study in Groupthink’ by Christopher Booker.  This extensive report examines the now institutionalized global hysteria embracing the belief that humanity is in the grip of catastrophic yet heroically preventable manmade global warming.  In these pages we have commented and debated extensively on the groupthink aspect that has been dominant in politics and academia.  Booker’s monograph provides a comprehensive chronicle of its psychological basis which we see playing out daily in the media, and even more fervently among those most innocent in the sciences.

The foreword to the report is by Prof Richard Lindzen, recently retired Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT.  It follows in its entirety –

“The bizarre issue of climate catastrophism has been around sufficiently long that it has become possible to trace its history in detail, and, indeed, several excellent recent books do this, placing the issue in the context of a variety of environmental, economic and political trends. Darwall’s Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex and Lewin’s Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deserve special mention in this connection. Booker’s relatively brief monograph asks a rather different but profoundly important question. Namely, how do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, contradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications. Booker convincingly shows the power of ‘groupthink’ to overpower the rational faculties that we would hope could play some role. The phenomenon of groupthink helps explain why ordinary working people are less vulnerable to this defect. After all, the group that the believers want to belong to is that of the educated elite. This may have played a major role in the election of Donald Trump, which depended greatly on the frustration of the non-elites (or ‘deplorables’, as Hillary Clinton referred to them) with what they perceived to be the idiocy of their ‘betters’. Booker’s emphasis on the situation in the UK is helpful insofar as there is nowhere that the irrationality of the response to this issue has been more evident, but the problem exists throughout the developed world. The situation everywhere has been reinforced by the existence of numerous individuals and groups that have profited mightily from the hysteria (including academia, where funding predicated on supporting alarm has increased by a factor of about 15–20 in the US), but why so many others have gone along, despite the obvious disadvantages of doing so, deserves the attention that Booker provides.”

The importance of the GWP Foundation’s work receives its strongest testimonial from the constant attack it has been under since its inception by those who have the most to lose in grant funded livelihoods, ejection from groups with pre-calcified credos, reputations based on irredeemable advocacy (i.e. manmade global warming cannot be falsified), and constituencies induced with politically profitable fear.