Rebane's Ruminations

Corporatist Censorship in Full Bloom

"The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."  Vladimir Ilich Lenin

George Rebane

There is no longer any reason to deny the death throes of the First Amendment.  The country’s Left, working hand-in-glove with its media, public education, and corporatist lackies, has won the Newspeak and censorship wars.  This morning we heard from FN and Politico that President Trump’s Twitter account has been “suspended”. (here)  Why?  Well, our chief executive dared to point out the burgeoning Hunter Biden email scandal that the New York Post uncovered and dared to publish.  (more here)  Of course, the NYP had its social accounts quickly taken down as the lamestream media pitched in to try and kill the story.

These are just the latest in a rapidly growing trend of social media companies censoring any and all content that goes counter to the Left’s narrative of the country’s ills which require its prescribed fundamental transformation of America.  The alarums, now being raised here and there by opposing voices, point to this avalanche of avaricious one-sided virtue signalers.  However, these voices are getting little or no traction in the public square.  The careful media consumer already has seen FN, that formerly stalwart bulwark of 'fair, balanced, and unafraid' news, begin its quiet ‘go along to get along’ with the loud voices of the Left.

Nevertheless, some worthies are not giving up without a fight.  Evidence that FN is not yet fully committed to the devil’s den, it has posted ‘Ex-Facebook honcho Tim Kendall says Big Tech is a “threat to democracy”, calls for social media reform’. (H/T to reader)  Therein Kendall makes the point that big tech is engaged in a “global assault on democracy”.  He has produced ‘The Social Dilemma’, a film streaming on Netflix, in which he and other epiphanied high tech execs give their versions of the deluge of fake news, misinformation, and behavior modifying stimuli that pour out of the web pages of today’s social media giants.

“There are studies that show false information or fake news spreads six times faster online than accurate information. The attention-based business model of social media companies perpetuates outlandish, extreme, and controversial content that tends to receive more clicks and views. Content laced with misleading information that undermines faith in elections and other institutions vital to democracy is particularly dangerous for our society. In the near term, everyone should tune out the noise online and vote with confidence, whether by mail or in-person, and participate in this crucial democratic process.”

Before the metastasis of this communications cancer, we already witnessed corporatists willingly sell socialists the rope with which America's capitalists will be hanged.  Today this enterprise has expanded to corporatists vying with each other to hand that rope gratis to our country’s comrades.  

Empaneling 2016/2020 SCOTUS Justices Explained

George Rebane

Democrats are going through a nationwide hissy-fit about President Trump’s announced nomination today of the replacement for the late Justice Ginsberg.  Their anguished screams ring hollow as they attempt to ascend Mount Morality to denounce the Republicans’ election-year nomination and confirmation of a new justice to fill the ranks of SCOTUS, and thereby avoid an irresolute court that must inevitably adjudicate the results of the most momentous election of our lifetime.

The charge against Republicans is hypocrisy – In 2016 Majority Leader McConnell denied an election year hearing for President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, yet now in 2020 he is proceeding apace to rush through President Trump’s (presumed) nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett.  But giving the matter a smidgen of thought (not a widely shared ability) quickly reveals the practical and coherent reasoning behind these seemingly disparate actions.

First and foremost, let’s start with the acknowledgement that what was done in 2016 and being done now is legal and constitutional, and, thanks to former Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid, procedurally correct.   Second, the appointment of SCOTUS justices is a political act intended to bias the court’s future rulings that will promote the ideologically motivated stratagems of the party in power.  Appeals to alternative reasoning on the matter are intended for the ideologically ignorant or sclerotic.

To understand the Republicans’ reasoning then and now, we have to review the divergent governance goals of the Left and Right.  Democrats seek to fundamentally transform America into a weakened socialist state with a crippled sovereignty that is no longer a global hegemon and prepared to accede to a one-world order.  Democrats view people, not as individuals with diverse needs, wants, and aspirations, but as members of various controlled and compliant classes, the societal roles of which will be mandated and managed by a cadre of the governing elite.  In short, Democrats are now avowedly Marxists, and all of their proposals and programs are readily predictable within this ideological framework.  And continuing on this tack, the Left remains anti-science, now with their ‘woke science’ programs they again return to the practice of science (cf. eugenics and Lysenko) that must first and foremost support the party’s political predicates du jour.

The Republicans, on the other hand, reject any notion of a one-size-fits-all global government, and believe that a peaceful communion of more or less culturally coherent, independent, and sovereign nation-states, will provide for a world order that benefits all humankind in the widest sense.  In this social framework, individuals are seen as discrete agents maximally free to pursue their own dreams as they work in co-operative commercial environments to satisfy their daily needs.  Government is seen as a minimalist social enterprise that only undertakes tasks and performs functions for the common good that are ill-suited for businesses competing in minimally regulated capitalistic economies.

Returning now to 2016, we see a federal government viz SCOTUS divided along party lines with a Republican Senate and a Democratic Executive.  With the prospect of a Democrat victory likely, McConnell makes the politically astute decision to reject Obama’s nominee, with the off-chance hope that Trump will win and then have the opportunity to nominate a suitable candidate more likely to support Republicans’ goals.  It is clear to all who can reason, that should Hillary win, then she and the Democrats could subsequently exercise their option to nominate, and the people’s will would be served.  In short, there was no intrinsic harm to either party in delaying Merrick Garland’s hearing in the outgoing Congress.

Now in 2020 the federal government viz SCOTUS is structured differently with a Republican Senate and also a Republican Executive.  Moreover, a month before the election, the current odds of a Trump victory do not look good.  We add that Trump’s election was based on his promise to shift the country’s court system toward the right, and correctly interpret his retention of the political prerogative to continue implementing that shift as long as he is in office.  In sum, getting Judge Barrett empaneled may be Trump’s last hurrah, one that he and the Republican Party dare not pass up, given the country’s rush toward a socialist autocracy.  The Republicans see a conservative SCOTUS as perhaps the remaining redoubt from which to impede our anti-American Left that has promised its minions a new socialist dawn.

And to think that all this was made possible by Dirty Harry.

[Update] Heritage gives a short summary of SCOTUS FAQs here.

Democrat 2020 Platform – The Disaster Revealed

George Rebane

Well, here it is boys and girls, the ‘2020 Democratic Party Platform’.  It is a stark blueprint for ending the United States of America; it outlines much more than just the ‘fundamental transformation’ that Obama sought to bring about.  In short, realizing its provisions will be the first step in a two-step trip to our communist future.  The programs outlined will fail utterly, leaving the country devastated and bankrupt.  Into the ashes will ride a man on a white horse who will promise the Marxist utopia, to arrive right after his party will ‘crack a few eggs’ that inevitably need cracking.     Download 2020-07-31-Democratic-Party-Platform-For-Distribution

I received the following summary of the platform’s contents, which you can verify yourself as you go through this 92-page roadmap to the United Socialist States of America.  Regarding the long-awaited agenda of America’s socialists, our wait is over – the DNC has spoken.

*Universal healthcare and Medicaid for all Americans and illegal aliens. (Pg 61)
*$15 minimum wage
*Immediate citizenship for illegals (Pg 63)
*Free college (Pg 65)
*Forgiveness of student loans (Pg 71)
*Eliminate border walls and Immigration Enforcement (Pg 62, 64 & 65)
*Make Washington D.C. the 51st State.
*Abortion for “all women & girls.” (Pg 83)
*$70 trillion Green New Deal, where the USA would be “net-zero greenhouse gas by 2050.” But CLOSE all coal & natural gas power plants by 2035. By 2030 all new construction in the USA must be net-zero greenhouses.
*Create a U.S. Agency for Global Media “to ensure that only accurate information is reported in the news or on the internet.”
*Rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement
*Create a new federal agency of 100,000 people to trace every American.
*Immediately restore voting rights for convicted felons.
*Provide funding to facilitate vote-from-home and mail-in-voting.
*Create a new Federal Credit Bureau (to replace Equafax, et al), and require banks to use this new credit reporting service that will be set up to assist low-income people in buying houses and cars.
*Make gun manufacturers responsible and liable for how their guns are used. (Destroy gun manufacturing)
*Declare and treat drug use as a mental illness instead of an illegal activity.
*Declare the support for the Rights of BLM, Multi-gender, and preferential treatment for gays wanting to immigrate to America. (Pg 63)

[Addendum]  Compare the 2020 Democratic platform with Yoram Hazony's essay on Marxism and today's neo-Marxism - 'The Challenge of Marxism' - a must read for anyone wanting to talk intelligently about what is happening today in America.

Democrats’ Great Divide or Revolution?

George Rebane

According to Democrat luminaries like Hillary Clinton and Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, a peaceful transition of power in January 2021 will occur only if Biden wins in a popular and Electoral College landslide.  Every other election outcome will result in blood in the streets, a deep nation shattering constitutional crisis, and even the Pacific seaboard states seceding from the Union.  The lamestream media is locked and loaded to call out the rioters, and President Trump will call out the military. 

That’s all according to some serious thought put into “wargaming” various election outcome scenarios as reported in the Washington Post (here and here).  We recall the Democrats' predictions about Trump not accepting the results of the 2016 election, that instead turned into a four-year rejection of that election’s results by Democrats, the party that has since mobilized every political, news media, entertainment, and radical leftwing group into a coordinated program to permanently render the country.

With all the pieces in place for November, Democrats have prepared to reject any outcome save a Biden tsunami.  And they make no bones in threatening the American electorate at every opportunity about what they will do if the people again don’t vote correctly – short version, there will be an historical hell to pay that may easily turn into America’s first civil war.  (The last one was for southern independence.)  November will seal a Marxist future or bring coast-to-coast madness.

The Democrat/Left ideology is now firmly in place, approved by its radical controlling wing of their organized and funded militant BLM and Antifa factions.  The intellectual basis for their anti-Americanism is all wrapped up and focused on the thesis of critical race theory (CRT).  The Democrats don’t front this ideology, but have allowed it to grow uncontested in the country’s educational and corporatist institutions.  David Harsanyi of the National Review makes the case and expands on it.  (more here)

If you want to go to a documented source, then familiarize yourself with “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”, which says African Americans aren’t only subjugated through hate and terror, but also kept down through supposedly white cultural mechanisms of individualism, objectivity, neutrality, meritocracy, and color blindness.

“Critical race theory’s foundational precept is the centrality and permanence in society of racism against blacks, rejecting the idea of significant racial progress.”  This is an important precept which keeps the looting and burning going in our cities.  Nothing of note has happened since the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

A central Big Lie of their revisionist history, now taught in our unionized K-12 schools is that “In critical race theory, racism is not a local variant of the ancient practices of caste or slavery, but something new in the world that was born with European imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and rationalism.”

Hence all modes of western civilization must be rejected on their face, since it is all just various forms of white privilege in action to promote racial injustice against the blacks.  And in its most insidious and racially unjust expression we have the principle of meritocracy, which is nothing but a camouflaged practice of subjugating people of color.  Determining the achievement and further promise of merit through testing is proof of systemic racial prejudice in practice.  “It’s a pseudo-science,” Stovall (black law professor, CRT intellectual) said. “Standardized testing is an extension of eugenics.”

Finally, and this is important in order to grasp what is really the goal of their brave new world.  “The key to understanding critical race theory is grasping the difference between equity, the social justice goal of developing policy to produce equal outcomes, as opposed to equality, the scorned liberal ideal of equal rules and procedures.”  (emphasis mine)

Labor Day 2020 Laments

George Rebane

This Labor Day we again awakened to all lamestream media channels awash in various forms of anti-Trump vituperation and propaganda.  There is no talk or discussion of what the president has accomplished or of his second term plans, only endless repetition of the latest resurrected faux pas he uttered years ago.  Neither are the public apprised of Biden’s plans, for he has none of his own, and his handlers are at the horns of a dilemma – how not to reveal their devastating political desiderata that would surely lose them the election.  So the default is to spew diversions and lies more frequently and louder than ever.  And with Democrats’ total control of the Fourth Estate (even Fox News is timidly easing itself leftward), the Republicans flounder helplessly.

If our electorate has any understanding of the growing Marxist revolution, they are keeping it to themselves, perhaps to reveal their wisdom in November.  In the meanwhile, the observables don’t look good.

Here in California we are neck and neck with the other socialist dominated states in the race to the bottom.  One of RR’s astute longtime readers, ‘scenes’ (formerly ‘Scenes from the Apocalypse’ when he arrived on these pages), provided an excellent summation in a recent comment stream which is worth rereading –

… the Blue State Boogie continues.  "Far-left protesters march to the @PortlandPolice north precinct, start a street fire & begin dancing. They’re playing their new “F— Ted Wheeler” rap song."  At least the power is still on for a bit. I always assumed that California would morph into Latin America given unchecked immigration, but we seem to have managed it on our own. A China virus no one knows what to do with, problematic electricity, overpopulation and poor forest management keeping insufficient fire suppression busy, home insurance slowly but surely going away, Communist Anarchists (a thing I've never wrapped my head around) marching in the streets as part of an election, grumblings from the patriots, drug money running a great deal of the local economy. Welcome to South America.

Prominent conservative scholar, commentator, and film-maker, Dinesh D’Souza, is among the latest politically-savvy intellectuals who see the rising likelihood of a Great Divide.  He also joins those of us who have seen this future coming for some years now.  In an interview D’Souza tells FN’s Laura Ingraham that “recent riots and political unrest could lead to a rise of citizen militias around the country” while stating that “I’m not advocating this, I’m predicting it.  It is a natural and inevitable response to the militarization of one side.”  He goes on to point out that the rioting street thugs learned their hatred of America from today’s universities, which actually are no longer universities in the sense that they have eliminated the free discussion of ideas which has been the fundamental raison d’etre of universities upon which everything else that they may offer is built. (more here)  D’Souza’s latest documentary film ‘Trump Card’ is set for digital release on 9 October 2020.

D’Souza agrees with the longstanding Rebane Doctrine assessment, "I think that the Democratic plan is [to swap out] Biden after the election. They don't want Biden to keel over before the election.  The reason they picked him is they think they needed a white male to camouflage the racial radicalness of their party. It's not like some chaotic process produced these horrible candidates. They chose him."

And regarding the Great Divide, D’Souza maintains that the real reason the Democratic Party relies on force is that, “ultimately, they can only win if they can force us to live their way. Now, I don't think we're going to. We are no more going to submit to them and change our ways than perhaps they are going to submit to us. This raises the deeper question of how do we find a way going forward... We don't want the America they want and they don't want the America we want. The real question is, how do we coexist with each other. That's the real question of the future." (Emphasis mine)

What today’s rioting BLM and Antifa thugs have no clue about is that, come the real revolution, their undisciplined lifestyles and supporting values will be instantly abolished and replaced with organized, mandated, and disciplined somber marches under approved banners interspersed with enforced cheering.  There will be no more burning and looting; most of their visible leaders will be summarily shot.  An Orwellian peace will descend upon the land in which all public expressions will be pre-authorized, and private expressions duly noted for later adjudication.

From my perch, were there no Great Divide in our future, the road to tyranny then may well proceed according to the events of 1917 Russia.  History students recall that Russia’s Menshevik (‘minority’) socialists, under Kerensky, overthrew the czar in March to establish what turned out to be a weak and naïve anti-capitalist, pro-labor socialist regime that still played lip-service to a form of democracy.  Lenin’s Bolsheviks (‘majority’) never trusted the people and advocated a strong ‘dictatorship of the masses’ under an unabashed and ruthless central control.  In October the Bolsheviks ousted the Mensheviks and established communism as the state’s secular religion and template for organizing society.  This regime became the USSR and lasted for 80 years, until collapsing internally from massive corruption, inbred thuggery, and widespread incompetence.  For all those years, the people’s modus operandi was ‘They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.’  And this has been replicated under all subsequent communist regimes.  Such a merit-free/optional economic order is today proposed by the Democratic Party and its violent street cadres.

Happy Labor Day.

Scattershots – 4sep20 (updated 9sep20)

The most important goal of the leftist project is to use the twin 2020 tragedies to alter the very storyline of America. – Mike Gonzales

George Rebane

The Great Divide draws nigh.  One of our astute readers highlighted ‘The Revolution is Upon Us’ by Mike Gonzales in the comment stream of the last Sandbox.  It is in an important essay that correctly highlights much of what is going on in America today as we approach the most contentious and possibly disastrous presidential election in our country’s history.  Read it.

Bumblebrain’s Big Lies continue with his latest claim in Kenosha that it has been President Trump who has divided the country.  In the meantime, more clear-minded commentators from both the Left and Right recognize that it has been America's Left, dragging the Democrat Party with it, that started the quick march to Marxism.  If anything, this leftward lurch has also attracted some spineless Republicans to lean to port in the attempt to keep their elected jobs.  The Republican Party's platform has remained unchanged over the last years, which cannot be said for Team Pelosi et al.

Trump on voting twice.  The president’s words and meaning have been mangled beyond recognition by the lamestream and our desperate Democrats.  (more here and here)

Here are the president’s exact words to Jon Evans of North Carolina’s WECT:  “Well they'll go out and they'll vote, and they're going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way, because if it tabulates, then they won't be able to do that. So, let them send it in and let them go vote, and if the system is as good as they say it is, obviously they won't be able to vote. If it isn't tabulated, they'll be able to vote so that's the way it is. And that's what they should do.”  He repeated a similar message last night in Pennsylvania.

School shutdowns are butt stupid.  Using persuasive, cogent, and technically correct arguments more suitable for polite company, Drs J. Battacharya and M. Kulldorff of Stanford and Harvard Universities respectively,  inform us in ‘The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy’ that – “There is little purpose in using tests to check asymptomatic children to see if it is safe for them to come to school. When children are infected, most are asymptomatic, and the mortality risk is lower than for the flu. While adult-to-adult and adult-to-child transmission is common, child-to-adult transmission isn’t. Children thus pose minimal risk to their teachers. If a child has a cough, a runny nose or other respiratory symptoms, he should stay home. You don’t need a test for that. … Sweden was the only major Western country that kept schools open for kids 15 and younger throughout the pandemic, with no masks or mass testing. How did it turn out? Zero Covid-19 deaths among 1.8 million children attending day care or school. Teachers didn’t have an excess infection risk compared with the average of other professions.”  I want to emphasize that I’m using ‘butt stupid’ as opposed to ‘ignorant’ to describe public policies keeping kids from attending school – ignorance can be corrected by supplying the ignorant with relevant data and information; stupidity refers to the cognitive inability to process, which is a deficit much more resistant to remediation.  Unfortunately, it is the latter that afflicts government bureaucracies far and wide.

[6sep20 update]  We are no longer sufficient unto ourselves.  Foreign worker visas have been hampered by C19 strictures and other prohibitions intended to give a helping hand to the non-existent American worker.  Worker shortages have cropped up everywhere, led by the lack of qualified and willing talent in sectors such as technology, hospitality, recreation, and agriculture. (more here and here)  Equally troubling is the prohibition on academic visas for grad school students studying and researching STEM fields.  Since these resident workers earn and spend the bucks here in this consumer dominated economy, it is not clear where the additional consumer spending will come from to make up for the dear departed or never arrived.  More and more of our fellow Americans continue to get college degrees that require skill sets for which no one is willing to spend their own money to hire – of course, government spending OPM is the ever-present employer of last resort for those know-nothings, for which then the country suffers.  This reliance on legal and illegal foreigners cannot end well for us.

‘America Hit by Roughly 550 Violent Demonstrations in Three Months’  A bit of news totally alien to consumers of lamestream media.  National Propaganda Radio wakes up the country every morning with reports of “protests” against “racial injustice” in our cities, never mentioning the real openly declared aims of the BLM and Antifa rioters, amply funded, supplied, and transported as required to keep the heat on in the cities with incompetent, compliant, and abetting Democratic administrations.  And then, led by Team Pelosi and their lamestream lackeys, the word goes out again that the whole thing is fomented by our divisive President Trump.  And for millions of light readers across this land, this kind of reportage sustains their ground truth about what’s really going on.

China is weaponizing water.  China is the source of major Asian rivers that flow into over ten other Asian countries.  On its rivers China has built over 87,000 dams, and continues to build ever more of these critical infrastructures that create huge reservoirs for in-country irrigation, transportation, and exerting strategic influence on its neighbors.  China can and has created droughts and floods that cause major impacts on the lives and economies of downstream countries.  If you don’t play ball according to China’s rules, your lands may be flooded or crackling dry. (more here) Now China also has dam problems, witness the structural cracks developing in its Three Gorges Dam and others (more here).  Also, dams are very vulnerable to attack during wartime, and many experts predict that in this century the major cause of wars will be over access to fresh water.

[9sep20 update]  Left always wants to silence the Right, but not vice versa.  Why?  This litmus test for a leftwinger is reliable because the Left never ever has any new ideas, but can only offer slogans for old collectivist policies that have never worked here or elsewhere.  So in the battle of ideas their best tactic is to take a pass and call off the contest.  Instead of ideas, they substitute the Big Lie and a stream Alinsky Alternatives.  Locally this tactic was again evident in calls to silence both RR and Jo Ann who sits on The Union's editorial board.  And the Big Lie gambit is constantly available in its various forms in our local left-listing newspaper, today having a particularly vicious cornucopia of anti-Trump copy.

The Democrats continue to work a brilliant tactic to promote Biden, they keep Trump talking about Trump.  Biden is a singularly unaccomplished, corrupt, and feckless politician with a 50-year record of absolutely no accomplishments that he can be allowed to burnish in public.  And he doesn’t even dare read off the list of policies his Marxist handlers have planned for us.  So to divert and suppress the Republicans’ strong suit of accomplishments and planned policies, the Dems have made the campaign about personalities, and ego-brimming Trump is more than happy to comply.  Our president still doesn’t understand that not many people like him personally, and that his only hope is informing voters of his record of accomplishments and plans for a prosperous and sovereign America.  Were he to make the campaign about what he’s done and plans to do, ol’ Bumblebrain would show up at that gunfight with an empty holster.

RL Crabb misses by a mile

"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

George Rebane

Our county’s celebrated and beloved political cartoonist and prominent leftwing thought leader, RL ‘Bob’ Crabb, got a twofer in the 15aug20 Union (on the editorial board of which he sits along with the wife of my life).  In addition to his regular weekend cartoon (here), he wrote a major piece titled ‘Whose town is it anyway?’  Bob is a longtime resident of Nevada County and his words go a long way to shaping our community’s understanding of the county’s rich and historic past.  Do not dismiss them lightly.

In today’s column Bob takes on the task of comparing the happenings and attitudes of half a century ago with what is going on in the county today, and what went down on the streets of Nevada City a few days ago.  We then witnessed a protest march of BLM supporters – locals and from sources unknown - sporting a variety of signs emblazoned with what have become common leftwing anti-American sentiments seen for weeks in the country’s cities that host violent riots and demonstrations by contingents of Antifa and BLM cadre and supporters.  In our town, these marching protesters were met by a handful of counter-demonstrators who did not take kindly to having their community being designated as the next target of the Left’s declared foment of revolution.

The counter-demonstrators did not act wisely with their emotional response, during which they tore up some protester signs and pushed back individual protesters.  All in all, the ‘violence’ we saw on Broad Street compared favorably with what is the everyday norm for commuters on the workday subway platforms of New York and Tokyo.  And it didn’t even qualify for comparison with what has been happening nightly in the downtowns of Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, … .  But Nevada City is now a hard-left town, and their own were being manhandled in the streets.  This clearly called for a good dose of social justice administered under the prominent flutter of virtue signalling flags.

So the town’s police launched what is undoubtedly their first “complete investigation”, and from the perusal of numerous videos of the dust-up, perpetrating suspects were identified, with the first already arrested and booked into the county jail – more arrests are promised.  The county’s Left continues in the lather of righteous outrage, as witnessed by the number of contributed editorials that surround Bob’s contribution on the newspaper’s op-ed page.  And it is with this background that we dive into Mr Crabb’s literary contribution.

Bob opens with a fine memory lane jaunt recounting the days of yesteryear when the aftermath of the social unrest and riots of 1968 gave rise from the cities to an exodus of hippies, free-thinkers, counter-culturalists, and other various misfits.  They lifted their eyes toward the hills from whence cometh their salvation, dotted with communities which promised the freedom to let them do their own thing, unmolested by those pesky norms of established tradition and nosey cops.  A goodly cohort arrived in Nevada County, and Bob details their somewhat rough reception by the locals while crediting their arrival with all kinds of good things that befell our community in the subsequent years after the dust had settled.

So far so good.  But then our pencil-pushing philosopher attempts to cross one historical bridge too far with his vivid recounting and unfolding attempt to dovetail the ‘then’ with the ‘now’.  He claims that the decades-separated episodes are really birds of a feather, and a reprise of what our community had once before successfully handled, digested, and integrated.  Then he concludes his considerable comparison and counsel with the lament, “So it is disappointing to see history repeat itself on these same streets.”

Not even close – there is nothing here that represents history repeating itself.  Fifty years ago the hippy migrations were strictly a resocialization of urban misfits into kinder climes.  There was neither a national movement underlying it, nor did it include a concerted and much-advertised goal of fomenting a revolution to fundamentally transform America, a revolution which has now successfully co-opted the nation’s established leftwing political party and jerked its leaders into compliant mouthpieces for the movements’ socio-political ideology.

Today’s proto-communist protestors have no desire to quietly integrate into our communities as profit-seeking merchants, service providers, and professionals; or even as workers for capitalist companies competing in minimally regulated open markets.  Today’s rioters and protesters are neo-Marxists, whose limited and jaundiced view of history sees America as a terminally evil country in a world in which socialism has suffered many faulty starts, corrupt capitalist conspiracies, and mistakes by the various leaders of leftwing movements.  All of these are seen as correctible, and will be corrected this time around as we once more unite and march to the strains of the Internationale.  

Shifting from the Fourth to the Fifth

George Rebane

Let me get this straight, led by Rep Schiff, the Dems are taking the DHS to task for doing its job in developing and providing intelligence on today’s anti-American rioters, their enablers, and their propagandists.  WaPo, the arch-leftwing lamestream outlet, presents one of its totally misleading reports on what’s happening in the land, and how the DHS relieved Brian Murphy, the head of its Office of Intelligence & Analysis, for compiling intelligence on the country’s coordinating rioters and journalists who published reports on confidential DHS documents to subvert and interfere with its security operations.

All this is part and parcel of efforts by the leading lamestream outlets to support continuing civil strife by undermining and managing public opinion against federal officials working to restore order in cities where local authorities promote looting, burning, and general mayhem by taking their police off the streets under the guise of protecting the civil rights of “peaceful protesters”.  (Today’s crime stats speak for themselves.)  WaPo, instead, tells its readers that “DHS has been under mounting scrutiny from lawmakers and civil liberties groups over its use of federal law enforcement officers to quell protests in Portland and in light of President Trump’s threat to deploy federal personnel to other cities that he asserts are being overrun by violent criminals.” (more here)

What the demonic Dems and their propagandist media count on is the short memory or just plain ignorance of the general public in consuming these breathless reports of the DHS doing its mandated job.  For over four years the Democratic leadership fabricated bought-and-paid-for ‘evidence’ against President Trump, his staff, and election campaign in an administration wide effort that we now know was launched and coordinated from the Oval Office.  Readers of these pages know the litany of charges that were sequentially brought by Democrat controlled and colluding Justice Department officials (the AG and FBI Director) and House committees that launched an unending series of investigations, including one requiring a special prosecutor, and finally ending with a disgraceful trumped-up partisan impeachment.

All of these came to naught, failing to find a shred of evidence of criminality or wrongdoing.  And ALL these enterprises involved government acting in its most cynical manner, employing extra-constitutional methods to destroy an administration and reverse the 2016 election’s outcome.  And how did our mainstream media comport itself during these subterfuges and kabuki performances?  Over the years they behaved as obedient lackeys of the Democratic National Committee, publishing article after article that bent the truth ranging from partisan innuendo to blatant Big Lies (latest examples here).

Today the beat goes on unabated.  The barefaced propagandists continue their daily manufacture of ‘news’ that widens the ideological chasm in America, having already brought it to a state in which neighbors, who formerly understood and tolerated each other’s political leanings, can no longer stomach their proximity.  Our ability to meet at non-partisan social occasions is fast disappearing, as everyone, first and foremost, frames the other as a compatriot or someone working to undermine our country’s future.  And as has happened many times during the upheavals of the last century, the afflicted country’s Fourth Estate has always been complicit as it morphed into its Fifth Column.

Letters from the Revolution – 24jul20 (updated 26jul20)

George Rebane

No one’s interests, objectives, values, … will exactly match yours.  The best you can ever do is support those with whom you share the most in common.

Kudos to our local restaurants Old Town Café, Sergio’s, and Friar Tucks for remaining open and in business despite Gov Newsom’s unconstitutional diktats and the compliantly cringing Nevada County Environmental Health Department’s threats to close and fine them.  The poster on their doors says it all.

[update] ‘News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’ observes Gerard Baker in the 20jul20 WSJ.  He cites Orwell’s “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”, and writes, Part of George Orwell’s genius lay in his insight that manipulation of language was essential to the revolutionary project. If you can command popular compliance with a lexicon that reorders—or even inverts—the widely understood meaning of political terms, you can remake society as much as you can with any law, mandate or act of force. Thought is constrained by the limits of language, and so language becomes a vital tool for placing limits on thought.”  Baker apparently is not aware of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of which Orwell undoubtedly was.  S-W makes the strong claim that one can only think thoughts that can be expressed in the language(s) one knows.  The Left quickly became the leading practitioner of this facet of human cognition, and has applied it worldwide where it has come to control the institutions of education, news media, and entertainment.

[26jul20 update]  Democrat Big Lies just continue washing over the country.  The latest is from Dem big city mayors who tell their know-nothings that the president’s sending federal forces into their cities to enforce federal laws, which the mayors refuse to do, is unconstitutional.  As former AG Michael Mulkasey patiently made clear on FN, the truth is exactly the opposite.  The Constitution requires the president to send in federal LE forces wherever they are needed in the country in order to enforce federal laws – e.g. secure and defend federal property.  Another longstanding Dem whopper is the ongoing charge that Trump has mishandled the federal C19 response, which ‘mishandling’ no one seems to be able to define.  So, when Bumblebrain was asked on MSNBC what the correct response should be when he is president, he stuttered through his ‘six point plan’ containing items each one of which had already been initiated by President Trump and is already in operation.  The liberal interviewer was either too ignorant to call Biden on his purloined ‘plan’, or didn’t want to tell her audience that Bumblebrain had blown another one.

 

The communists try again … (updated 17jul20)

George Rebane

From The Patriarch, David Nasaw’s mega-biography of the life and times of Joseph P. Kennedy, we read –

The Depression, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted in the first volume of his The Age of Roosevelt, offered “radicalism its long awaited chance.”  The unemployed, underemployed, dispossessed, and hungry were not sitting idly by waiting for prosperity to return.  Many were too numbed, too crushed, to protest, but a small and vocal minority were not.  The Socialist and Communist parties more than doubled their tiny memberships and exploded in visibility.  Communist Party organizers were actively operating in city neighborhoods from Harlem to Detroit, in the coal fields of Pennsylvania an Kentucky, and the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, among tenants and sharecroppers in the South and migrant workers in California, and outside and inside closed and closing mills and factories in the Northeast.  Their argument was simple: capitalism had failed and needed to be replaced.

In the 1930s FDR’s big government nostrums kept the country in a depression so deep and enduring that it took the greatest war in history to bring us out of it (aided through Truman’s fortuitous rejection of the post-war return to FDR’s alphabet soup agencies) and reject communism.  What is it going to take this time in today's Democrat-promoted recession as their socialists/communists again marshal their forces in the streets and in the ballot boxes?

[17jul20 update]

Western academe’s sunset years

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 July 2020.]

The current insanity sweeping the western world that started with the George Floyd killing is now way past that outrage and moved on to much bigger objectives.  The event served as a trigger to launch the ready and waiting socialist and anti-capitalist factions to start their push toward a global collectivist world by first weakening or doing away with sovereign nation-states that have cultures built up over the centuries which today are the glue that unify their populations.  The socialist elites and their fielded militants in the streets have identified several critical weak points in the ties that bind nations.  One of them involves the flawed histories that each developed western nation has, which includes their role in colonizing the third world and fighting religious wars among themselves.

All of these pursuits are ample demonstrations that violate today’s standards of political correctness, social mores and values, treating all peoples and races equally and with appropriate respect for their indigenous cultures.  Western nations did little of that when they conquered and colonized the more backward civilizations of Africa, the Americas, and southern Asia.  All of that history is used by the global Left to indict today’s mostly white and European-derived countries of everything ranging from ‘cultural appropriation’ to genocide.

The west’s public educational systems have long been co-opted by progressive cadres injecting leftist principles at all levels of curriculum.  The generations of the so-educated are now primed as they doubt their own worth to humanity, and are ready to adopt a more virtuous course forward that demands fundamental changes in each nation’s basic and foundational institutions.  The ‘evidence’ for this ongoing stratagem overwhelms us daily every time we tune into mainstream media outlets.

Cultural cohesion, it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

The country is well along its increasingly insane path to the long sought and much promised fundamental transformation.  As our recent commentaries and many excellent reader contributions in the related comment streams attest, the well-funded madness is growing by the day.  The latest expansions involve initiatives to completely erase and remake America’s history, moving from tearing down our national totems to closing museums which house the artifacts and tell the soon to be forbidden stories of our ‘evil past’.  Our public K-12 schools and academe have long prepared for these events, and produced the millions of mindless moilers now making mayhem in our cities and towns.

What I want to point out here is that in their expanding rage they are co-opting a Rebane Doctrine tenet, namely, society is best organized when people exercise their natural right to live among others who share their values, mores, customs, traditions, language, worldview, …, in short, abide with those who share a common culture.  Expressing the desire to do so is not evil per se, as the Left has been telling us all along.

On this road to revolution the Left is visibly reversing itself, and now not only approves of society living within a cohesive culture, but will define such a command culture for all to accept, with no exceptions.  The specifics of such command cultures have been most evident under communist regimes which force their morally imperative diktats onto the masses under the banners of ‘common good’.  In our major governmental and private institutions, including our post-capitalist corporations, these cultural strictures are already solidly ensconced and perfidiously policed to identify, shun and/or oust the non-conformists and historically tainted.

Today a wrong word or an ideological imperfection discovered in your record, no matter its vintage, is more than enough to get you fired, career ruined, or even qualify to be investigated for some bespoke civil or criminal infraction.  In the early days of the revolution, no provision for appealing the verdicts of the righteous mob is made.  Only later, as the revolution matures into the instruments of power will our new masters establish the traditional institutions to isolate and redeem those wearing the indelible mark of the identified deplorables.  We have seen that happen with the Soviet Gulag, the Cambodian and Vietnamese re-education camps, and the wholesale forced labor incarcerations of hundreds of millions carried out by the Chinese communists during their cultural revolutions, and who currently house their culturally incorrigible Uighurs in massive prison complexes. (more here)

My point is that finally the Left has also accepted and declared its mandate for a culturally cohesive society that will be conformed for the common good.  America’s Right has always promoted the existence of divers culturally cohesive communities living in harmony – e.g. the Quakers, Amish, Mormons, … .  The methods we have historically used to separate such communities have not always been civil, and some have had definite racist motivations – e.g. against African-Americans and the Irish.  Nevertheless, the criterion has been maintenance of cultural conformity and not the genocide of the expelled culture.  In the last century we also learned that anyone of any genetic make-up can and has been accepted into any given culture.  In sum, ‘race’, however it’s defined, is no longer a relevant factor for cultural membership.

(In my native land, Estonians were for centuries considered genetically inferior and culturally corrupt in turn by their German, Swedish, and Russian conquerors.  We were treated as slaves and then serfs by our masters who even imposed ‘first night’s rights’ on newly married brides in order to ‘improve the breed’.  It was not until the mid-19^th century that Estonian culture came to be recognized, and was then able to work its way into peerage among established European cultures.)

So where are we on the adoption of culturally coherent communities?  Well, both sides have now declared their in-principle preference for them.  The big difference is that the Right wants Americans to have the ability to establish such communities according to their own desires and in places where similarly minded people can move to join together in various locales/regions across this land.  The Left wants to impose its new one-size-fits-all politically correct culture on everybody in America.  It wants to organize our transformed society on the historically failed models of its collectivist forebears, with the claim that this time we’ll do it right, embodying all the inclusiveness, social justice, and equality that were the watchwords used to sell the great unwashed on previous versions of socialism cum communism cum tyranny.  So once again it has started with ‘we’ll take from the greedy and racist rich and give to those who can’t or won’t’, all that’s required is unquestioning conformity.

And it has already started with Job One – the utter destruction of America as we have known it – now going on in a neighborhood near you.

Letters from the Revolution – 27jun20 (updated)

'Can the country confront its current problems with its traditional can-do spirit?  We have barely four months to figure out how.'  A.H.A.

George Rebane

‘America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution’, so argues Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (married to Niall Ferguson, internationally prominent socio-political historian not to be confused with the recently notorious epidemiologist of C19 fame, Neil Ferguson).  We have twice before met this brave and eloquent lady in these pages (here and here).

In her timely essay she brings together many of the ideas promoted in these pages for years, and which also adorn the corpus of my credo and form major tenets of Rebane Doctrine – all of which are anathema to our command/control collectivists now carefully coordinating their socio-political assets as they foment the coming revolution.

An alarming report in her piece is the confirmation of the absolute volatility of public opinion and its being totally unmoored from reason and critical thought. (see also here)  Recounting the rush of politicians and corporatists to join the rioting revolutionaries Ms Ali recounts –

By the middle of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public figures who had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Please reread the assessment of a thoroughly politicized scientist, who today abound in the public forum.

She goes on to view the changes in what may be termed the aggregate American mind.  We used to be a nation that prided and practiced distributed self-government at the local level, solving our own problems as they arose with our own solutions.  This seminal and differentiating characteristic of Americans was noticed as early as in the 1830s by European visitors.

This country is only 244 years old, but it may be showing signs of age. Time was, Americans were renowned for their can-do, problem-solving attitude. Europeans, as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were inclined to leave problems to central authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans traditionally solved problems locally, sitting together in town halls and voluntary associations. Some of that spirit still exists, even if we now have to meet on Zoom. But the old question—“How can we figure this out?”—is threatened with replacement by “Why can’t the government figure this out for us?”

That last appeal is the common denominator that gathers all of our leftists who then also grouse when their problems are not solved by technocrats in some distant capital.  Furthest from their minds, and now from the minds of the mostly mindless masses is the fundamental tenet that government itself is the most likely, if not certain, first cause and/or amplifier of the problem.  Today von Mises’ counsel to government – ‘First, do nothing!’ – is considered a reprehensible expression of lese majeste to big government socialists.

More sinister and on the mark is Ms Ali’s fearless finger when she asserts, “The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power.”  According to Rebane Doctrine, this forms one of the many accessible litmus tests to identify corrupt and evil politicians and their fielded demogauges.

Right now the biggest danger to our republic lies in the leftward rush of the Democrat Party, and their unquestioned embrace of socialism as the stepping stone to a more perfect world.  In this regard Ali expresses our common hope –

One way or another, the Democratic Party has to find a way of throwing out the socialists who are destroying it. … The Republicans, too, have to change their ways. They have to reconnect with young people. They have to address the concerns of Hispanics. And they have to listen to African-Americans, who most certainly do not want to see the police in their neighborhoods replaced by woke community organizers.

What no one, including Ms Ali, wants to address is how the Republicans can penetrate three generations of anti-American, anti-capitalist indoctrination of our young and younger cohort that is daily reinforced by the lamestream media.  But making headway in that quarter they must, for the fraction of young people currently attracted toward conservetarian ideals is too small to make a significant impact in the voting booth.  Meanwhile, the ranks of today’s young social-luddites swell and sway with every new serving of misguided bombast from the White House.  Nevertheless, the Great Divide, with or without a revolution, it’s a’comin’.

[update]  Appealing to the reasonable middle in America continues to be a fool’s errand still promoted by the intellectual Right (and on which I find myself).  The Left knows better.  That cohort of middle-roaders that so enamors our lightly read, good-hearted neighbors is almost non-existent.  Good estimates seeking out these people are able to calculate that they number at most about 6% of American adults.  The remainder of the permanently polarized, mostly leftwingers and their gimme constituents, significantly outnumber the rightwing true believers.  “In April, the Washington Post published an article titled ‘The Coming Republican Demographic Disaster’ (where it) discusses one of the most notable trends in American politics over the past decade: Republican candidates do consistently worse with people of color, and the proportion of non-white voters in the American electorate is increasing. This could be bad news for the Republican party. If its candidates do not improve their appeal among non-white voters, their chances of winning future elections will decline sharply in the coming decades.”  These non-whites have demonstrated for decades that they are politically beyond any reasonable reach.  I find it sad to see that nationally prominent talking heads, such as those like Dan Henninger at the WSJ, continue to spout hopeful platitudes claiming that if the Republicans can only reach the middle, then they will prevail.  Not even close.  The real question is ‘what does it take to piss off a Democrat voter?’  No one knows.  (more here)

Reflections on Racism – no time to decide (updated)

George Rebane

A barren desert is now the middle ground separating Americans from their woke and fundamentally transformed brethren.

Racism has been an enduring theme on RR for years – e.g. back in 2010, through the years, and a more recent commentary in 2019.  With readers we have dissected it 20 ways from Sunday.  Even liberals have joined in.  Unfortunately, their contributions have been limited to calling the rest of us ‘racists’ without being able to even define the word.  From Lewis Carroll we read once again –

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

I recently visited Bob Crabb’s site to pay homage to his excellent cartoon (here) and return the favor of his visits to RR.  What caught my eye was Bob’s brief but meaningful commentary posted below his cartoon –

We are reaching the tipping point, and I don’t mean just tipping old confederate statues. Our competing ideologies have retreated to the far ends of the spectrum where any kind of compromise is seen as treachery. … Can cooler heads prevail? I’d like to think so, but when the extremes are obsessed with winning it all, it seems unlikely. … As I have said here before, it’s too bad that we are bent on destroying such a nice country.

Bob now perceives the tipping point that in my Great Divide screeds I claim we passed long ago.  But what I took to task was his claim that both “extremes are obsessed with winning it all”, which on its face is not true.  I then entered into a dialogue with some liberal worthies that turned out to be predictably unproductive, save that it illustrated the barren desert of our middle ground.  As I’ve mentioned before, and with no apologies to the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sides can and do have their own distinct and widely varying opinions, facts, histories, morals, ethics, systems of logic, and desiderata for the future.

Springtime for our Great Divide

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2020.]

Where were you and what did you do in the spring of 2020?  The world has changed much during the last three months.  When we look back, we will remember this spring as the historical milestone when Americans finally realized that they are no longer one reconcilable people.  Where next we go from here is uncertain and up for grabs.  The only certainty we have going forward is the coming Great Divide.

Our country has been subjected to a perfect trifecta of national crises, all layered onto an ongoing campaign to discredit and destroy the duly elected president of our democratic republic.  Along with the rest of the world, we were blindsided by a viral pandemic which no one understood and for which no one had prepared.  America, along with most other developed countries, initiated a lockdown mandating that people not travel, stay home, and not work.  In consumer driven economies like ours, this caused economic collapse.  And while we were sequestered, hearing reports of Covid-19 deaths, and wondering how we would pay our rent and bills, we witnessed three separate killings of black persons by incompetent, inept, and poorly trained police.  And all of this during the most contentious presidential election year in living memory.

Hurricane George Floyd

“In October 1913, the Bolsheviks were a small radical Russian faction. No reasonable person would have predicted that within a mere four years they would take over the country.” Y.N. Harari, Sapiens (2014).

George Rebane

The on-camera, tragic and unjustified killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman has unleashed a social storm across America that is unprecedented and potentially ruinous to our constitutional republic.  Anti-American coalitions have united to sanctify a habitual criminal and elevate him to a unique martyrdom for the purpose of disrupting our established, albeit imperfect, yet overwhelmingly beneficial social order that is the envy of the world.  All of these cohorts – ranging from Antifa to the Democrat Party - see today’s nationwide protests and riots as an opportunity to create the chaos from which each has the possibility to bring about their own version of a fundamentally transformed United States.

President Barack Obama started stacking the dominoes with his view of an irretrievably flawed America that needed to be fundamentally transformed into a socialist democracy that would function under a revised, reinterpreted, or totally rewritten constitution.  Today we are witness to the other dominoes all waiting in a row – rotten cities, uncontrolled homelessness, “mismanaged” pandemic, crippled economy, historically high unemployment, politically-biased media, dismally uninformed and innumerate electorate, advance of disruptive technologies, dysfunctional public schools, distrust of businesses and enterprise, rejection of capitalism and markets, looming systemic unemployment, firmly ensconced victimhood of minorities, socially polarized nation, unpopular President with maladroit communication skills, corrupt and timid justice system, Democrat plurality fomenting socialism, lame Republican Party sans backbone, … .

All of these self-inflicted and manufactured flaws today stand in a row ready to be tipped by the riot-prone protests perfidiously promoted by the several political factions sharing various shades of collectivist ideologies in their agendas for a brave new global order.  And the question now is whether that serendipitous video, seen around the world, of the police murdering George Floyd was the flapping of the butterfly wings that has now set in motion a storm the final impact of which no one knows.

From my readings of history, I am reminded of what the previous year’s events gave rise to in the Russia of 1918 and the Germany of 1934.  Today WSJ columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes (here) –

Indiscriminate property damage and looting descended on some 140 cities across the U.S. in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd while in police custody. Business owners, workers and customers in minority neighborhoods were hard hit. And in the years to come they will pay the steepest price for the unchecked violence done by rampaging mobs claiming to represent them.

To be clear, the near universal outrage over the video of Floyd’s death, expressed by an overwhelmingly nonviolent majority of demonstrators, is the lawful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble. This is central to what it means to be an American and to reaching peace and reconciliation.

Violence is another matter entirely. There is evidence that it has been instigated by organized militants trained to leap into action when opportunities present themselves. While they don’t represent the majority of protesters, they use them as shields. What is more, their brutal aggression is politically effective and only mildly condemned. One reason, I would venture, is that they are the mailed fist of a broader movement that has infected academia, the media, popular culture and politics with the notion that Western traditions are oppressive and should be destroyed. … The bad news is that the drip-drip-drip of an intellectual narrative aimed at destroying Western values and publicly shaming anyone who resists the ideological corrosion is here to stay.

I join with those who do not accept the glorification of George Floyd nor the assessments of the street wisdom and fomenting politicians about the irredeemable state of our Union.  From our media we are awash with deceitful propaganda that frames events into formats not supported by any collected data.  In other words, the numbers in the public record (discussed many times in these pages) don’t support the misappropriated emotions of the protesters, politicians, and even police who seek indemnification and redemption for professed sins with every opportunity to ‘take the knee’.  My sentiments about the happenings during the last two weeks are best expressed through the words of Candace Owens in a Facebook video (on Powerline here) now seen by tens of millions.  No one stands taller than this woman against the current tide of insanity.

Antifa Rising (updated 9jun20)

George Rebane

Motivated by the ongoing George Floyd protests cum riots, I renewed my interest in finding out more about Antifa – is it an organization or merely a movement of loosely coupled cells operating all over the country?  The discussions in our comment streams seem to divide along ideological lines – those leaning right see it as a formidable organization that rises to the occasion whenever there’s a political contention in the public forum; those leaning left characterize it as nothing more than a movement of some loosely formed groups of protesters against the country’s capitalist order.  In recent days I’ve received some informative emails from readers containing links to reports and commentaries that cover the waterfront on Antifa.  Here I’ll share a couple of them which I found more salient to my puzzling on the matter.

First some definitions:  A movement is a social cohort sharing an affinity to a set of beliefs and an overarching objective.  They usually express themselves in conjunction with other social gatherings, observances, and/or ad hoc events which may spontaneously/serendipitously arise.  A movement need not be organized around an enduring social structure.  An organization is a social order that has an enduring and labeled identity which is structured to achieve an objective summarized in a published mission statement, the accomplishment of which is through some known intermediate goals.  Organizations have a leadership hierarchy (e.g. board, executive management, operating managers, staff, …), a headquarters, established means of funding operations, membership, and a current agenda.  As they grow and gather steam, movements inevitably become organized in order to continue progress toward their overarching objective. 

The following numbered points summarize my current take on Antifa –

1. The origins of Antifa can be traced to the post-Bolshevik movements to spread the communist revolution into western Europe during the 1920s, specifically to counter the fascist (national socialist) movements that started in Italy with the rise of Mussolini after he was expelled from the Italian Communist Party.
2. Antifa members held a loosely defined and contradictory political ideology that welcomed both anarchists and Marxist/Leninist communists. The anarchists wanted to do away with all government immediately, and the communists wanted big governments to control all aspects of society.  But we recall that the Marx’s stated ultimate objective was a social order in which the perfected communist Man would live in social harmony without further need for government.  So in that sense Antifa could attract both anarchists and communists to work together toward an ultimate common goal, the timing of which they could quibble over after the established ‘fascist social orders’ were overthrown.
3. Antifa divides people into anti-fascists, fascists, and those who are ideologically innocent/naïve. Fascism is never given a precise operational definition, but is simply defined as being anything and everything that opposes the Antifa objectives and methods.
4. The acknowledged and taught MO to achieve Antifa objectives is through violence that is justified because Antifa members consider all opposition to their creed to also be expressions of violence.
5. The Antifa movement never became a stable organization in Europe or in its spread to the US. It arose here and there to oppose fascism in pre-WW2 Europe and was ruthlessly put down by the Nazis.
6. Antifa has made itself known through protest demonstrations of opportunity over the last decades by joining the ranks of non-violent protesters and then turning the protests into violent riots by instigating assaults on police, arson, looting, and generally creating opportunistic mayhem. Their intent is to project the image that the entire protesting cohort in the streets share their objectives and violent means of achieving them.
7. No overarching Antifa organization has been identified in the US. However, there are several Antifa cells that have names and aggressively operate in various cities and regions of our country.  Today they are very active during the ongoing George Floyd protests, successfully having turned most of them into destructive riots.
8. Antifa’s published leaflets and online proclamations declare its fundamental opposition to property, established legal order, capitalism, individual rights and freedom, religion, and constitutional government. The underlying objective of all their activities is the ultimate destruction of the United States of America, their greatest worldwide evil against which all means and methods are justified.
9. “Antifa activists communicate and recruit mostly through social media, using Facebook as their principal forum for organizing protests.” Antifa cells receive money for recruiting and operations through a number of listed leftwing, pro-socialist organizations funded by prominent hard-left personages (e.g. George Soros and various entertainers).
10. The main source of new Antifa members is from the constituents of the Democratic Party. The Dems and their lamestream media provide the political support for Antifa, mischaracterizing them as ‘protesters’, never calling them rioters, and minimizing reports of their violence and destruction.  And when all else fails, Antifa is portrayed as being in the streets to justifiably oppose ‘rightwing anarchists’ and ‘white nationalists’ who are the real fascists and instigators of the riots.
11. The Democratic Party sees Antifa as a cohort of useful idiots that today function to keep alive the more visible and virulent forms of anti-Trump sentiments without having to expose themselves as militantly in the streets seeking to bring about their advertised “fundamental transformation” of America. More importantly, Antifa’s message to the minorities reinforces the Democrats’ decades-long narrative that our Hispanics and African-Americans continue as perpetual victims of corporate America and racist whites.
12. There is a lot written about Antifa. From my readings, the two most informative that I found are ‘Project Veritas: Antifa Operates Like a Business’ and ‘A Communist & Anarchist Movement That Explicitly Endorses Violence’.

[8jun20 update]  The Antifa Manual.  Over the last week I’ve received several emails with what is purported to be the manual for Antifa members that outlines its ideology and the modus operandi of its street operations.  At first I hesitated to post it for several reasons that made me doubt its authenticity, primarily the variations in the writing style and a very naïve composition/structure.  It looks like it was meant to communicate the evils of Antifa to people unfamiliar with the movement.  In any event, whatever its provenance, someone went to some trouble to make the document look like the real deal.  You can download it and make up your own mind.  Download Antifa-Manual

[9jun20 update]  Noted WSJ columnist Bill McGurn joins many nationwide observers of how the peaceful protests have been co-opted by violent thugs, most of whom pledge their allegiance to the many Antifa cells that supply rioters to the various George Floyd demonstration venues.  In his ‘Mayhem is the Message’, McGurn writes – “If justice for George Floyd is the goal, many cannot fathom how it makes any sense to trash already-vulnerable neighborhoods, kill other African-American men in the process, and destroy black-owned stores that, as former President Barack Obama just pointed out, may never come back. But it makes perfect sense if the goal is to indict America as fatally compromised by racism since birth. And if the mayhem provokes authorities such as Mr. Trump into further inflaming the situation, so much the better.”

And then there’s CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the idiot brother of New York’s governor, who pours gasoline on the fire with his, “Please, show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”  The dufus totally misses that ‘polite and peaceful’ is how the lamestream, led by his employer, has been characterizing the riots.  Today’s perversity of the Left includes the observation by Scott Walker of the Capital Research Center that “Radical mobs on campuses call speech they don’t like ‘violence,’ ” while “Radical mobs in the streets call their violence ‘speech.’ Either way, instead of highlighting the difference between peaceful protesters and rioters, they want to erase it.”  The reasonable voices from the black community are always few and hard to hear over those screeching victimhood, but three intellectual giants stand out – Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Shelby Steele.  African-Americans would fare far better following their counsel, instead of divisive demogauges like Sharpton and Jackson.

Liberty’s Twilight - 13may20

George Rebane

Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her Louisville, KY home when the police erroneously broke through her front door in the middle of the night seeking a narcotics suspect who was already in police custody.  Not knowing the invaders during the break-in, Ms Taylor’s boyfriend sought to defend themselves by shooting one of the assailants in the leg.  In the following melee the other police officers returned fire, pumping eight rounds into Ms Taylor and killing her.  Her boyfriend was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of a police officer.  The family is now suing the police department (more here).

Over the years we have lost count of this kind of mistaken killings of innocents by incompetent law enforcement agencies.  But that is not the real point here.  What’s germane is that our homes are no longer our castles.  We have no right to defend ourselves within the confines of our own four walls when LE executes one of its surprise assaults into our living quarters, our most inner sanctums.  These unnecessary attacks mimic criminal home invasions which now, according to the ever-growing leviathan, put the onus on the home owner to ascertain the identity of those breaking through his front door BEFORE he is allowed to start defending himself.  The assailant now has the de jure right to take the first shots at the victim.  And only after the assailant’s identity has been confirmed by the victim, can his defense begin.  Moreover, in some states it’s not even legal to ‘stand your ground’ in your own house if it is later determined that you could have retreated out of the back door or an open window.  The law has been stood on its head, and we sheeple must comply.

In a practical sense, there is never a need for LE to ambush someone with deadly force in a known residence.  The state always has the resources to surround the habitat and then make their presence known.  LE officers breaking and entering in the middle of the night is now an established tactic of state thuggery.  According to our Constitution and Rebane Doctrine, an American has every right to initiate the use of deadly force against any unidentified assailant who forcefully enters his home.  And an innocent man being accused of attempted murder of a police officer after such an incident is the beyond-cynical elimination of the last vestiges of justice that should be brought to bear after such a tragic incident.  Our quiet acceptance of these proceedings, just because it happened in distant Louisville, is testimony to how inured we all have become to the growth of our autocratic governments in these United States.

Local liberals lambast loosening lockdowns (updated)

George Rebane

As we and others across the country have pointed out, phasing out the C19 lockdowns has become the latest political chasm in the Great Divide.  You know that our country is now fundamentally transformed when it can no longer come together for a unified response to a national emergency.  It’s not a reach to conclude that had we this kind of schism in our citizenry in 1940, then the US entry and participation in WW2 would have been very different with historical consequences of creating a world we would not recognize today.

Our leftwing wants the country to suffer enormously and enduringly – first, in order to defeat Trump in November, and then to remain in a devastated state during which main street mobs will rise to demand a bigger government to save them.  Today the most reliable way for the Left to achieve this state of affairs is to maintain the economy destroying lockdown for as long as possible while buying votes wholesale with government checks drawn on newly printed money.

On the local scene we see this policy promoted daily in the pages of The Union by our county’s progressives.  Most recently, columns by conservatives Terry McLaughlin (here) and the wife of my life, Jo Ann Rebane (here) have drawn extensive ire on the matter of loosening the local lockdown.  It is particularly instructive to read the comment stream under Ms McLaughlin’s column, and the same can be said for Jo Ann’s column.  A more measured response to the latter is in the 7may20 print edition of The Union from a Mr Paul Hauck.  He claims Rebane’s call to prudently loosen the Nevada County lockdown is both unreasonable and factually incorrect.

Nowhere did Rebane promote a “precipitous” abandonment of social distancing, masks, etc.  And whether through careless reading, promoting an agenda, or both, he disputes the cited university reports on the estimated levels of existing herd immunity in California, and goes on to doubt her understanding of “the causal connection” between stay-at-home and low C19 incidence (no active cases currently) in the county.  I personally can attest to the lady’s deep and detailed understanding of such factors affecting pandemics, which appears to be a cut above Mr Hauck’s own understanding of regional herd immunity variances in the country.  (My own analysis of the impact of herd immunity levels and the intensity of a ‘second wave’ was published here and in the 18apr20 Union.)  He most certainly does not know what other countries have done and are doing to effectively loosen their lockdowns.

We know the story of Sweden (more here), and are learning daily how other EU countries have fared on their return paths to normalcy.  The evidence, as I have presented before, shows little correlation of death rates between various lockdown levels implemented by countries.  The latest good news comes from Germany (here), a country that never went into a draconian destruction derby with its economy, and is now rapidly reinstating pre-C19 norms in its commercial sector.  Such reports are, of course, omitted or on page seven in the lamestream media.

The main point that is lost in such leftwing opposition to prudent paths to loosen the lockdowns is both gratuitous, and definitely politically motivated to retain public policies that will maximally stifle the healing of our economy and the return to normalcy.

[update]  Are we in the middle of a ‘Plandemic’?  Along the line of argument presented here and elsewhere in these pages, I received this video of an interview with renowned molecular biologist and medical researcher Dr Judy Mikovitz, PhD (here). She did seminal work on viruses in the development of vaccines and the eradication of HIV/AIDS.  Her PhD dissertation and subsequent discoveries put big pharma at risk, and she was successfully attacked and silenced for 5 years by court order (while uncharged with any crime) and threat of fabricated prosecution.  This interview is not only a pertinent revelation about the underside of what’s happening now in our nation’s C19 response, but also about how an entire industry controls the science and released public information about infectious diseases.  The five years are up, and she has co-authored a book (here) about the massive subterfuge that is drawing legions of physicians equally concerned (outraged?) about how our power establishment is managing the business of infectious diseases.  I personally am a bit astounded that in today’s environment of corporatist censorship, that this video is still available to us (YouTube took it down).  It’s worth your time to view it and see what you will make of it.

And make no mistake, there is plenty of opposition to Mikovitz and her assertions of conspiracy at the highest levels that include recently canonized St Anthony of Fauci.  Here and here are a couple of links to give balance to the above.

A Nation Risk Averse - Scared, Cowering, and Compliant

George Rebane

In the middle of the 20^th century we lived in a world filled with ‘unconquered’ infectious diseases that were both life threatening and life limiting.  Everything from measles to polio lurked in places unknown.  And, of course, we had the rates of mortality and morbidity to show for it.  Nevertheless, life went on in full recognition of the hidden dangers laying in wait.  None of us thought of shutting down the country and cowering in our homes until someone somewhere in authority would make the dangers go away.

The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed 50M worldwide and somewhere well above half million Americans died of the disease.  But life not only went on, it thrived in the years after WW1 with the country’s economy growing while people were still coming down with the virus and other maladies.  Little to no mention of the disease made the news nor required special government dispensations affecting the entire population.  The flu was there, it would stay for a while, and then it would go away – meanwhile try not to get sick.

The same happened later in the century when we weathered the ‘Asian flu’ in 1957 – over 110,000 deaths in the US and 1M worldwide.  And then there came the ‘Hong Kong flu’, another Asian flu in 1968 – 100,000 deaths in the US and 1.1M worldwide.  From the NIH we learn that “within the past one hundred years, four pandemics have resulted from the emergence of a novel influenza strain for which humans possessed little or no immunity: the H1N1 Spanish flu (1918), the H2N2 Asian flu (1957), the H3N2 Hong Kong flu (1968), and the H1N1 swine flu (2009).”  They summarize these pandemics in the following table.

And then there were others like the avian or ‘bird flu’ which killed 70,000 Americans; and even more - it’s all very confusing.  But the bottom line is that people didn’t lose jobs, companies didn’t go out of business, the fed and state governments didn’t go autocratic, no one panicked, life went on.

A long-languished letter

[Way back when, before C19 conquered the media, I was taken to task in its lead 13mar20 column by a Union reader about my views on the electoral college and democracy.  I submitted the following rebuttal which became a coronavirus casualty.  Its posting here is for the record, and an acknowledgement that not all my submissions get published.  So there.  gjr]

An Electoral College dialogue continued

Mr Dick Sciaroni wrote ‘Electoral College reform – it’s up to us’ in the 13mar20 Union, a measured and civil response to my 7mar20 Union column, ‘Democracy Destroys the Electoral College’, wherein he concludes with, “Is it time to reform the Electoral College system? Perhaps. It’s up to all of us, the citizens, to decide. That means dialogue, not diatribe.”  However, a more careful read of what I wrote would reveal that nowhere did I oppose a national dialogue on the continued utility of the Electoral College in the governance of our republic.  What I do oppose is the current approach to its sub-rosa and de facto elimination through the little known National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Mr Sciaroni writes, “The Founders’ decision how they should choose a president should have no overriding claim on 21st century America such that we cannot change it. After all, we are talking about our government. It’s ours. Why can’t we change it?”  In this he implies that I oppose any such change.  I don’t, but I do oppose what’s going on now.  The NPVIC is intended to surreptitiously sidestep a national dialogue, and most certainly subvert a constitutional process, through the leftwing mainstream media’s daily diatribes that call for a precipitous elimination of the Electoral College.  I highly doubt that more than one in a hundred Americans are aware of the NPVIC’s existence, its role in eliminating our EC, and current progress toward that goal – all happening without the national dialogue which Mr Sciaroni and I would welcome. 

In his piece, nowhere did Mr Sciaroni acknowledge that my arguments were directed against imposing governance by direct democracy on large diverse populations, in accord with our Framers.  Instead he did repeat the Left’s talking points that the configuration of the EC by our Framers was a devious stratagem to keep wealthy white men in power, and therefore is now a dated construct of our government that needs major overhaul, and perhaps removal altogether.

And his main point about the pervasive role of money in our elections ignores recent evidence that undermines his arguments.  In 2016 Hillary outspent Trump by far, in the current election Steyer, Bloomberg, and Bernie have all outspent our former VP Biden, and most certainly President Trump.  Yes, modern campaigns demand more funding to get out the message, but the evidence at hand is that it still continues to be the message, not the money that shapes the voters’ preferences.  In sum, such evidence should weigh heavily to counter Mr Sciaroni’s “final analysis” wherein he maintains that “the downside of the Electoral College is that it works hand-in-glove with moneyed interests to give a small number of people – not surprisingly, white males – access to the presidency of a country in which they are the decided minority.”  By all means, let us all talk about this.

George Rebane is a retired systems scientist in Nevada County who blogs on Rebane’s Ruminations.

Hunker Down Diary – 26mar20 (updated 27mar20)

George Rebane

When there’s a problem, government is guilty until proven innocent.

Today is HD19 for the Rebanes.  We started hunkering down on 8 March 2020, and finally risked it all this morning by showing up at our local Safeway at 7am, the advertised ‘old folks shopping time’.  Apparently the younger people had not gotten the word, and the store was full with a lot of couples like Jo Ann and me pushing two carts.  Most of us wore gloves, a few had on masks, and all of us social distanced as much as possible.  But what we saw was dismal; something you’d experience in a socialist second or third world country – ‘miles’ of empty shelves of the stuff that everyone really wanted to buy.  Still, we all filled our baskets with what there was and substituted a lot of PlanB items.

What surprised me was that today the younger generation of managers have no knowledge, let alone experience, of the buying patterns during times of emergency and need.  With all signs of the coming hunker down time apparent more than a month ago, no one, starting with FEMA, advised the supply system to put the pedal to the metal on obvious staples and sanitary items.  There was no anticipative ‘push’ in the pipeline.  Everything appeared to have continued on with the JIT (just in time) scheme that works so well during happy days.  The makers and distributers are making do with the JIT schema in spite of the enormous consumer ‘pull’ of empty shelves.

The Demonic Party reveals itself (updated 25mar20)

George Rebane

The congressional Democrats have plumbed new depths of unabashed and sickening sleaze as they block the passage of the Senate bill to provide liquidity and relief to the nation’s economy on the verge of depression.  The multi-trillion dollar aid package is designed to prevent bankruptcies of countless companies that provide jobs to millions of Americans and are now attempting to rapidly retool to supply the medical needs to flatten the Wuhan virus infection curve, thereby saving untold families grief. (more here) Instead, led by Team Pelosi/Schumer, the Dems have attached a socialist wishlist of provisions to the bill that have NOTHING to do with fighting the virus and saving the economy.

Besides demogauging another one of their material Big Lies that the bill is a “slush fund” and a “bailout” of corporations, as if the corporations were the cause of the pandemic, these socialist sleazebags want to piggyback on this crisis to pass anti-capitalist provisions that they could never accomplish during normal times.  The want to revise laws that will implement many of the Green New Deal provisions on corporate board memberships (unions, activists, and workers), and that henceforth the government will have a major say in how individual businesses are run. (more here)

One of their most onerous provisions is a permanent ban on corporate stock buybacks.  It is clear that such buybacks should not be allowed during the time a company receives liquidity funding from the feds, but the Dems want to remove this important financial strategy forever.  They are either ignorant of or just plain evil in denying such an important market strategy that benefits every participant in such buybacks, including the small investors and holders of retirement accounts.  (more here)

Their aim is to finally start the real fundamental transformation of the country through a government ‘rob-and-ruin’ involvement in company operations.  Since the Dems have no positive or productive policies for generating wealth and jobs, they continue to play the only cards they hold – hate capitalism and hate Trump.  And their constituents don’t have the wherewithal to ask ‘what then?’ after their socialist future comes about.

But all of this is part and parcel of a party that has long been the creator and promoter of the nation’s miseries, highlighted by their support of slavery, then decades of Jim Crow, then the destruction of black families and promotion of urban blight launched by their not-so-Great Society, and now continuing with the dismantling and destruction of America’s educational system. (The complete list is too long to recount here.)  While the Republicans also have warts and have not always been our angels, the policies and politics of today’s Democrats have surely made them into our Demonic Party.

[25mar20 update]  Healthy companies create jobs, jobs pay people, people with money can buy things they need, companies make more such things, and the cycle repeats.  I have yet to find a single leftwinger, let alone socialist, who really understands this cycle.  The role of a thriving private sector economy is so obvious that, when told this, almost all folks of the Left will agree to the need for such a cycle that epitomizes a healthy economy.  And then they blow a tire, because invariably their follow-on remarks turn out to promote economy stifling policies, which gives lie to the claim that they understand.  All this is enormously magnified by the nation's political idiot contingency in Washington and other levels of government across the land.  They simply cannot connect the dots when it comes to wealth creation; they sincerely believe that money (wealth) is created simply by government printing the long green as much as is needed.  There is no comprehension as to what has to stand behind those printed slips of paper (or the equivalently fortuitous bit patterns on some mass memory device somewhere in the cloud).  We see that again in the demonic machinations of Team Pelomer in Congress.  Last October “the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.” (more here)  Their bottom line, don’t destroy the economy when fighting a pandemic, the resulting damage is a lot worse and longer lasting than what the pandemic can do in an economy that continues to function.  Save the economy to save the people.

Bernie’s Big Lie – Socialist Sweden

George Rebane

Sen Bernie Sanders’ lies are too many to count, but one that he keeps repeating successfully to the nation’s light thinkers involves the myth of Scandinavian socialism.  This is the kind of socialism that Bernie wants to incorporate in the United States, and he continues to use Sweden as the posterchild of how socialism can be made to work successfully.  Either he is butt stupid or evil as he spreads the lies about Swedish socialism.  Let’s be kind and put Bernie with the butt stupid crowd, that includes the Dem candidates clown car and Team AOC, as they were characterized by Will Rogers’ “It ain’t what you know that worries me, it’s what you know that ain’t so.’

Sweden was a model and wealthy capitalist democracy before 1960, having gone through two world wars as a neutral selling their wares to the highest bidders.  Along with the other Nordics, Sweden then tried socialism to redistribute its remarkable wealth and earn votes for its leftwing politicians, and that failed miserably over the next two decades.  As a result, each pulled back toward marked capitalism after enjoying the tender mercies of socialism.  Sweden led the way after having doubled public spending from 31% to 60% in the 1960-80 interval.  And then the real problems started piling on which ended with unemployment surging and budget deficits of 11% of GDP in the late 80s (that’s like almost $3T annually in the US).  The country literally went broke as the wealthy, the producers and entrepreneurs jumped ship.  The pullback to sanity started in 1991 and has been going on ever since.  And that has been the best kept secret of our progressives and their lamestream lackeys (witness its effect on our local liberal commenters).

Swedish historian and author, Johan Norberg (also senior fellow at the Cato Institute) lays out the history of this wise retrenchment to sanity in his ‘Sweden’s Lessons for America’.  Norberg reports that -

Sooner or later, American socialists always return to Sweden and other Nordic countries. There’s a good reason for that. For some reason, the countries that socialists originally tout always end up with bread lines and labor camps. But there’s always Sweden: decent, well‐​functioning, nonthreatening, and with impeccable democratic credentials. … There is just one problem: Sweden is not socialist. … If Sanders and Ocasio‐​Cortez really want to turn America into Sweden, what would that look like? For the United States, it would mean, for example, more free trade and a more deregulated product market, no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the abolition of occupational licensing and minimum wage laws. The United States would also have to abolish taxes on property, gifts, and inheritance. And even after the recent tax cut, America would still have to slightly reduce its corporate tax. Americans would need to reform Social Security from defined benefits to defined contributions and introduce private accounts. They would also need to adopt a comprehensive school voucher system where private schools get the same per‐​pupil funding as public ones.

Should Our Kids Learn to Code?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 March 2020.]

As more and more young people finish their education today with unemployable skill sets, while employers are looking for people who can think on their feet and solve problems, the question of whether and how to teach high schoolers the elements of programming comes up.  Given that our world is now almost entirely software driven, and will become even more so tomorrow, you would think that programming or learning to code should become one of an educated citizen’s basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic which reached those expectations over a hundred years ago.

But there is a curious mix of people who argue against teaching such a skill to students in our public schools.  Some see acquiring coding skills to be equivalent to vocational training, against which many have argued for decades.  It’s hard to believe that there were educators against teaching high schoolers skills with which to earn a living after graduation, especially when so few students went on to college.  Stanford professor of computer science Robert Sedgewick points out that coding “is not vocational training any more than English is vocational training for journalists or economics is vocational training for business executives.” 

In the early part of the 20^th century more than 90% of students entered the workforce without college degrees.  But our schools did teach them skills beyond literacy and arithmetic that were needed in the workplace.  Yet academics like former Stanford education professor Dr Larry Cuban continue to argue that coding is the same as teaching vocational skills such as machine shop and home economics.  Such courses for them have been a wrong-headed “imposition of those requirements (that) for years served to undermine the broader cultural goals of public schools—such as social mobility, individual development and civic engagement.”  Yet everyone today knows that all of those broader cultural goals are only possible for those who can be gainfully employed.

In response, Dr Sedgewick points out that “teaching students to code introduces them to logical thinking, as well as fostering creativity and problem-solving skills. It encourages experimentation, develops persistence and promotes collaboration. Learning to think as a coder gives one a valuable set of strategies for understanding a variety of situations that one will encounter later in life—particularly those who are working outside of tech.” (more here and here)

In my own teaching experience, I have confirmed that learning to code is also a painless introduction to critical thinking.  The experience provides a gender-free sense of empowerment, as the students make machines and data sing at the touch of their finger.  Coding and algorithmics – devising stepwise procedures for efficiently solving problems - are fields connected at the hip.  Immersive coding is a ‘flow experience’, almost like being in another universe that contains its own resources and rules for new and powerful tools.  Tools which you control and with which you can assemble wondrous machines.  For young people anticipating college or a job after high school, having mastered the elements of coding is tremendously empowering as they experience the opening of new worlds of possibilities and understanding.

But today we also have an emerging dark side of coding and computer science, one more political enterprise that is seeking a foothold in secondary education.  It is called ‘culturally responsive computing’, and is devised by the politically correct mavens of identity politics.  The proposed curriculum is primarily directed at minorities, and claims to educate students through the implementation of “computing-culture connections” that inject such arcane concepts as “African mathematics”.  The entire enterprise is a massive diversion from teaching kids substantive skills valuable for work and further studies.  Fundamentally, it is one more area of ethnic-gender education that would join the other useless but feel-good subjects which already displace substantive learning in our public schools.  Look for it at a school district near you. (more here)

In the meantime, I strongly recommend that you support the advent and expansion of STEM subjects that include computer science and coding in your local high schools.  Our young people need every bit of it that they can handle in a world where they will spend the rest of their lives.

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.