Rebane's Ruminations

Border Security, Barriers, and Porosity (updated)

George Rebane

No nation-state can long maintain its culture and sovereignty without the ability and will to control its borders.

“Sounds like a lack of technology rather than the porosity of a wall”, replied a commenter who had just finished celebrating the capture of illegals who had tunneled under an old, shallow, and unmanned remote section of our southern border.  He and others like him gleefully pointed that out as evidence supporting the Left’s new narrative that border barriers (walls, fences, …) are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  And then he posted the above statement which confused (i.e. “rather than”) barrier system design with a metric of its performance.  Such mistakes from the Left abound today in the media and these pages.  We can leave the question of how much these erroneous statements are forged through simple ignorance vs promoting the ‘hate Trump’ agenda.  There is little we can do to heal their TDS, however there is an outside chance that their ignorance can be alleviated (given that there is no stupidity – i.e. processing deficit – at play).

Motivated by the above general principle, border control is defined as the ability to determine the ingress and egress of people and goods across geographical boundaries which delineate the jurisdictional limits of a sovereign nation-state.  Border controls are implemented by many means, depending on the border geography, implemented border security systems, and the cost burden the nation is willing to bear to implement its border security policies which should include one or more publicly known border control performance metrics that are part of the nation’s overall border control (multi-attribute) utility function.  The most meaningful attribute is the border’s overall porosity metric.

Border porosity is a bidirectional measure of the rate of illegal crossings in either the egress or ingress directions across the national boundary.  Today we are overwhelmingly concerned with only the ingress of illegal aliens.  In practice, porosity will vary over a range of values along a long, complex border having varying physical and political attributes that come into play.  Here we have to be careful in how we apply the above definition of porosity.  Specifically, the ingress porosity metric does NOT include the accretion of illegal aliens through non-border means such as overstaying their visa permissions.  Aliens who entered legally under various immigration, tourist, and guest-worker policies, and then ‘went illegal’ are a concern for our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

So when we want to have a meaningful discussion of border security, we must start with at least the statement of an acceptable ‘mean porosity’ level that, if exceeded, alerts us to discover and fix the cause of having violated the policy threshold.  As RR readers may be aware, my own considered border porosity threshold is a quite generous annual entry of 15,000 illegal aliens who are not intercepted/captured at the border, and successfully meld into our population.  These illegals then become fugitives from our laws, and are to be brought back into our legal system by our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

Now regarding physical border barriers (in military jargon known as ‘fixed field fortifications’) – I will not waste readers’ time countering the ignorant and inane critics who suddenly maintain that such barriers are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  (And to address the question of their ‘morality’ is for me beyond accessible levels of idiocy.)  The main purpose of such physical barriers has always been to reduce the boundary or border manning requirements wherever they are constructed.  As we are taught in the military, all unmanned fixed field fortifications can be penetrated by a determined enemy, and that goes for desperate migrants breaching unguarded segments of our southern border.  The question on what to build where depends strictly on how we must share the ‘hardware’ (walls, fences, surveillance/tracking/penetration detection systems, etc) costs with the costs of staffing our boots-on-the-ground Border Patrol, ICE, and other border interdiction units in order to maintain the acceptable porosity levels along the border.

The Left’s current narrative about whether we need walls, or slats, or fences, or whatever, and that Trump lied if he doesn’t really intend to build some ridiculously high concrete wall from the Pacific to the Gulf, is just unmitigated bullshit that diverts the national attention from border security.  This narrative panders to the nation’s Latinos, and seeks to increase the inflow of future Democrat voters who will join the ranks of those who already are working to bring America to its knees as one more compliant complement that genuflects to the brave new world of one global government.

(Now let’s see what President Trump has to say about this in his imminent speech at noon (PST) from the Oval Office.)

[update] President Trump’s short speech was full of compromises that traded multiple tranches of benefits to resident illegal aliens, including extending the DACA stays to three years, in return for the next $5.7B for border security which includes barrier systems.  He also invited the Dems to an accelerated bipartisan program to hammer out a new comprehensive immigration policy and implementing laws. (more here)  The Republican majority Senate will now draft and pass a bill that incorporates the President’s compromise proposal to terminated the partial shutdown and proceed on the road to immigration reform putatively desired by both sides.  It will be up to the Pelosi House to pass and work out with the Senate a compromise bill that the President will sign.  If Team Pelosi continues to tell the President to stuff it where the sun don’t shine, then that should remove the last shreds of doubt as to who has been stonewalling the shutdown from the gitgo.

The mangling of managed minds

George Rebane

People who are informed primarily through media soundbites have been shown to have very volatile opinions.  When a new and contrary tranche of soundbites comes along, such people more often than not change their minds and follow the new direction of the most recent compelling soundbite.  This is because soundbite driven opinions are reactionary and not reasoned.  That is simply because the individual takes no time or effort to develop any depth of understanding in what he currently believes.  Finicky and fleeting feelings drive decisions for such people.  Bryan Caplan, in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, was one of the first to publish the research confirming how voters make decisions about issues and candidates.

The bottom line acceptance of Caplan’s findings is corroborated by how politicians and our news media (specifically the lamestream) construct their messages for soundbite thinkers.  This morning’s analyses of President Trump’s Oval Office speech last night is chuck full of such messaging.

One frequently used ruse is to dismiss stated levels by surreptitiously sliding the argument over to rates, and also dismiss inconvenient rates by citing the more fortuitous change in the offending rate.  [For the technically versed, this well-known process is known as ‘climbing the derivative ladder’ until you find the one that serves your narrative.]  An example here is the President’s citing the high number of illegals currently coming over the border.  This the lamestream journalist brushes off by telling listeners that the rate of illegals entering was higher in the past.  For innumerates and soundbite thinkers, this is an effective way to dismiss concern over the continuing rate of illegal entrants.  Presented in this context, it never occurs to them that what’s happening now is still a huge and preventable problem that overwhelms our border security personnel.

Scattershots – 27dec18 (updated 30dec18)

George Rebane

LIBERAL BILLIONAIRE APOLOGIZES FOR FUNDING RUSSIAN BOT ‘FALSE FLAG’  Those fun-loving Democrats just can’t leave well enough alone when the go to work getting out the vote.  In the 2016 national election Crooked Hillary and her DNC had to do some numbers ginning up dirt on the opposition, and even putting down the hammer on one of their own kind who didn’t get the hint that it wasn’t his turn (ever).  But most recently it was “billionaire Reid Hoffman (who) apologized Wednesday for funding an effort to dupe Alabama voters into believing Russian bots were fueling Republican Roy Moore’s failed senatorial bid.”  Yep, you really don’t want to get yourself into the cross-hairs of that bunch.

Truthout.org, the ultra-left (well, actually communist) opinion shaper and progressives’ moral voice, is now calling for acts of sabotage to bring down the Trump administration.  This week the summons went out to Democrat constituencies across the country (‘We Can’t Wait on a Savior to Remove Trump. We Must Resist En Masse’), followed by a specific call directed at government employees for “federal disobedience” and “noncooperation” (‘Federal Disobedience: Why We Must Support Federal Worker Noncooperation’).  It is literally impossible to make this up.  Today’s Left is no different from the Bosheviks of old; when the established (constitutional) order cannot be brought down by their ideas in the public forum, then it must be attacked by all other trans-rational means available.

Most longtime RR readers know that people of the Left get a very one-sided view of the world that is dispensed by their favorite ideological wordsmiths and talking heads.  They stick to their own kind when it comes to forming their picture of the world.  And because of this, our local leftwing contingent continually creates comic relief in these comment streams when they unknowingly show up with their blinders on and claim that RR has a solo hold on ideas that counter their carefully cultivated credos.  When other readers provide links and point out contrary references in my commentaries, that information is simply ignored by our lefties as if it didn’t exist – they just continue their critiques cased in the comfort that not only do these ideas have local provenance, but that they also have limited purview.  Hence, if they can be stamped out here in their cradle, the outside world will not be infected.  BTW, here’s a laundry list of fake news that our progressives swallowed hook, line, and sinker during the past year from their faithful fountains of facts.

That old-time religion in America is on the skids.  We have been pointing out for years how the media and our educational systems have been composing recessionals to Christianity as part of their assault on western culture and civilization.  Every time new stats are collected and composed, the story becomes bleaker for our Judeo-Christian heritage.  The evidence for that is most visible during the year-end holiday season when secular humanity makes its strongest assault on the faith of our fathers.  I was directed to a current compendium on this cultural transformation by Joel Kotkin (‘As the Old Faiths Collapse, the Greens, Social Justice Warriors, and Techno-Futurists Aim to Fill the Void’) by a reader and correspondent.  After giving us the dreary numbers of how our traditional religions are being forsaken by the young moderns, despite heroic efforts by churches and temples to inject socio-political ideology into their liturgies, Kotkin documents the parallel social phenomenon of the Left desperately cobbling together new faiths to serve new gods, so that they will not miss out on that ineffable something that they see gracing the lives of the remaining Christian and Jewish holdouts.  (Here is Truthout's report this.) The real interesting news here is about the outliers of secular humanists’ fabricated faiths.  These involve the new trans-humanist faith(s?), and those churches of god without god.  Kotkin concludes his essay with –

The loss here would not only be for the faithful but the entire society. Religious institutions rooted in the past also serve as ideal transmitters of traditional culture and identity; the new ones see themselves largely as warriors of the future, based on perceived social and scientific truths. Trans-humanists, for their part, seek to reduce reality to data, rejecting much of what makes us different not only from other animals, but machines. … Ultimately, the new religions, seeking to fill the void left behind by traditional faiths, offer little to families in search of moral instruction or guidance for how different kinds of people can get along. They have no answers for addressing the reality that almost all of us alive today, despite the scheming of the trans-humanists, eventually will die. A world without the old faiths may still be spiritually engaged, even hysterically so, but we may lose the lessons of community, sacrifice, discipline and faith that the old religions taught to bind our societies together.

[28dec18 update]  “Climate change has always been the cover story, not the real issue which (is) Agenda 21 Sustainability.” writes a reader and correspondent in this morning’s email.  This year’s IPCC special report SR-15 details the real agenda that was pursued at this year’s international climate change conference in Katowice, Poland. (more here)  The global warming bamboozle continues in full force, but the real objectives for arguably the greatest wholesale fraud ever attempted on the entire world’s population are now leaking out, and there to see for everyone who cares to pay attention.  Unfortunately, humans in the aggregate are not that bright.

‘China Reins In Its Tech Giants’ reports the 28dec18 WSJ.  “The closer scrutiny of tech companies comes as Mr. Xi seeks to restore the Communist Party's pre-eminence as a force in people’s lives and to establish that the Party—and not the private sector—is charting the course for China’s future.”  Communism, like our progressive sector, has always claimed to be society’s most reliable moral compass.  Therefore, kowtowing to the Party, China’s industries like ride-sharing Didi are now hiring thousands of “Communist Party members as role models for customer service.”  For our global competitive position, this is the best news coming out of the Middle Kingdom in years.  (Here our Dems will do their best to emulate China starting 3 January 2019.)

Nokidhungry.org maintains that childhood hunger is prevalent in over ten million American households.  And this goes on under governments that have uncountable programs for helping and feeding even mildly or totally unneedy families and individuals.  Congress just passed an $867B (dreadfully misnamed) ‘farm bill’, of which 85% or $737B goes for food stamps for the poor.  For the hungry households, this computes to over $73K for each household’s annual food budget.  Cut that in half and half again, and you’d still come up with over $18K per year for groceries.  What do each of these messages convey about the extent of children going hungry – ‘In America 1 in 6 kids is starving’, ‘- does not have enough to eat’, ‘- faces hunger’.?  (nokidhungry uses the last one in its ads).  But the real question is, what’s wrong with this picture?  (Extra credit:  What’s the political persuasion of the overwhelming share of bureaucrats who have been running the food stamps program for years?)

[30dec18 update]  I was graced by Union columnist George Boardman to appear in his tomorrow's (31dec18) offering.  He quoted from the addendum to my 3jan18 KVMR commentary - "I believe the present state of affairs in the world order are the result of the spontaneously coordinated efforts of fundamental Islam and western socialism’s striving to meet Agenda21 objectives."  I invite readers to reread the complete addendum.

Globalists and Nationalists, oh my!

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 December 2018.]

Have you considered where you stand on the many issues that not only divide us Americans, but also people everywhere, that is everywhere they can freely speak their minds?  Have you really thought it through well enough to sit down and make a list of the issues that concern you, and also your reasoned or even unreasoned, attitude about each such issue?  Most people will have to answer a truthful NO, and admit that they primarily respond to such questions, as they come up, with an unexamined yet readily available emotion.

Today we are becoming more polarized as each day goes by without anyone being able to identify a meaningful patch of common ground on which we can meet and talk.  The old adage of ‘don’t talk politics or religion’, when hoping to remain civil in polite company, has now become a social mandate in the carefully groomed public round.  When at church or at some other club or association meeting, everyone carefully minds their mouths, and holds on patiently until they can leave and get back to more reliably like-minded folks.

While there are many things we all can disagree on – today immigration, climate change, abortion, culture, assimilation, terrorism, … remain high on the list – how we come down on each of them can usually be traced to our overall picture of the kind of world we want our kids and grandkids to inherit.  And for those fortunate enough to be well-read, that almost inevitably brings us to one of two kinds of worlds, which ultimately identify each of us as being in the nationalist or globalist camps.  Moreover, the roads to such diametrically opposite worlds contain all the just-mentioned hurdles about which we, again, are of opposite minds.

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

[Russ Steele is a regular contributor and commenter in these pages.  He hosts Sierra Foothills Commentary, a blog that focuses on the ongoing debate about the science behind the highly politicized ‘climate change’ issue.  RR invites submitted bylines from various viewpoints on a wide spectrum of issues.  gjr]

By Russ Steele

Let’s be clear, climate change is not a hoax, the climate on this planet has demonstrated a wide range of variability over millions of years and continues to vary year to year, as the oceans warm and cool, orbits around the sun change, and the sun’s output varies.  No hoax, it is real.

So why would President Trump call global warming a hoax?  Perhaps, because there was a hoax played on the American people by a group of climate scientists as to the cause of current climate variations, claiming it was human generated CO2.

Red Pill America has the hoax story, in Episode 7, a podcast by Patrick Courrielche who has done an excellent job of telling the story in a way that all can understand. Even global warmers can follow and understand the story, and the basis for the hoax label. That is if they listen.

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

As a friend of Anthony Watts and close follower of Steve McIntyre, I was an observer to the events described in this podcast. It was Steve McIntyre who got me started learning the R programming language, as I studied his Hockey Stick analysis software. I later used some of his R code in my temperature plotting programs. I am now using Python.

Listen to the biggest science heist in history and you will understand the hoax.

Coming Apart and the Beltway Bubble (updated 4dec18)

George Rebane

SecDef Mattis was interviewed yesterday by FN’s Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum.  This is an annual get together of the country’s important people to talk about, well, national defense.  I’m a fan of Gen Mattis (even though he is a gyrene) and think he’s done a good job at the DoD.  But when the interview turned to how poorly Americans get along with each other today, and the Right/Left polarization, Mattis’ response left me slack-jawed.  I had to rewind the DVR and listen to his quote a couple more times to be sure I heard it right.

The general’s response was a version of Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we just all get along?’  He didn’t think that there lay any real barriers for the country reuniting into a functional form again because, after all, we are still all Americans, and as a country “we probably don’t have big differences about where we want to go ultimately.”  What??!!

Plastics and more from CO2

George Rebane

The latest chapter in the global climate change hysteria was published last week.  The ‘4^th National Climate Assessment, Vol2’ (NCA4V2) purported to summarize for light readers the dreadful fate that will surely befall all of us were we not to immediately put in place policies that would pauper ALL developed countries.   This is the only reason the others are not willing to commit economic suicide, and instead relegating their earth preserving wrath into versions of public outrage against the US for not willing to fly solo into that mountain of politicized climate science.

NCA4V1 was published last year, and contained the then ignored ‘science’ behind the current version of the hysteria.  Now that NCA4V2, the political summary of the 1,500+ page NCA4, has issued, scores of scientists and analysts, not on the climate change payroll, have again reviewed the purported science, and again concluded that both volumes represent a big nothing-burger at best and fake news at worst.  Specifically, the rebuttals echo the years of identical arguments presented on RR, and can be stated compactly as –

1. The NCA4V1 results are calculated from over two dozen general circulation models (GCMs), none of which agree, and some of them clearly implausible;
2. None of the GCMs “used to compute the effects of human influence on climate have successfully predicted the weather, weather cycles (such as El Niño or La Niña events), or climate.”

We are alerted by Russ Steele (here) to one of the more comprehensive analyses of NCA4 by Andy May (here).  In there May points out that even in the NCA4’s summary, the economic effects of the predicted climate change are minuscule, and most certainly contain no verifiable demonstration that human activity is the controlling cause of the GCMs’ predicted temperature change(s), not that reducing such activities would have any significant effect on the perpetual dynamics of earth’s climate.

OK, so what’s the latest that real technology and science have to say about that dastardly GHG, yes, CO2.  Well, as reported by New Atlas (here) it turns out that a team of scientists at Rutgers University have achieved an artificial photosynthesis breakthrough that promises to allow the manufacture of plastics, resins, and pharmaceuticals “on the cheap”.  The overview of the process is shown in the figure, and the complete story is published in Energy & Environmental Science (Issue 9, 2018 here).

The point to be made here is that the realworld is rapidly giving lie to the climate change hysteria mongers rushing to put us on a one-way road to global governance and its inevitable autocracy cum tyranny.  The real climate change is not what’s being sold to the world’s masses, and accelerating technology continues to produce environment sustaining solutions without government diktats, driven by (gasp), yes, capitalism.  “With patents in hand, the (Rutgers) team will now work toward commercializing the technology.”

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.