Rebane's Ruminations

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farewell Unity (updated 3apr21)

[This commentary appears as an op-ed column in the 3apr21 Union (here).  Unfortunately, a typo survived in the submitted version.  The sentence "Today, our country is divided into two distinct ideological camps that each total at least half of Americans."  The word 'each' does not belong.  For some reason The Union will not allow me to inform readers of this in their online edition.  I have also appended an abstract that summarizes the extended prose which some have found to be too challenging. gjr]

George Rebane

The calls for unity over the last years have fallen on deaf ears, most likely because they sound neither sincere nor feasible.  There is no need to recount the history of our country’s polarization, now widened to a chasm.  Those who care and have kept track know it, and the rest of our neighbors don’t appear to concern themselves much about the shared animosity that is firmly entrenched in our public square.  Yet we continue to hear virtuous sounding appeals, almost all from the Left, to adopt the plaintive ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ uttered by the once-famous philosopher Rodney King.

Most of us know that there is more to getting along than having the desire.  People who have a long history of distrust and distaste for the other need first to share some objective or purpose for breaching the chasm before anyone will start looking for workable paths through that common ground.  Today, our country is divided into two distinct ideological camps that total at least half of Americans.  The remainder are those indifferent, ignorant, or claiming to be ‘above politics’.  As the late Charles Krauthammer reminded us, no one in a liberal free society should be above politics, for it is only in that arena that we discover and practice the means to stay together.  In short, all communal life is bonded with the glue of politics, often understood as “the art of the possible”.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York, made famous the shibboleth that you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.  After two generations of leftward bound public education, the reality of that wisdom has long passed by the board.  In our divided land people now hold not only their own opinions, but also their own facts, history, logic, causality, sense of justice, fairness, equity, equality, racism, …, all which define their worlds and worldviews.  Moreover, their windows on the world are distinct in the sense that they are chosen to confirm and vindicate their worldviews.

All serious, as opposed to specious, calls for unity should begin with a clear definition of the kind of world we want to achieve in common.  As a conservetarian, the world order I want for my children is made up of liberal and sovereign nation-states living and trading in peace, working together on big projects such as reaching for the stars, while learning best practices of governance from each other.  I also want America to remain the shining city on the hill with an inviting culture that honors our best traditions, rewards meritocracy, promotes the individual, prudently regulated capitalism, and opportunity for all its citizens under a constitutionally minimalist government.  Today the general contours of such a future are shared by at least half of Americans, those who gather on our country’s Right.

However, our neighbors of the Left work feverishly for a diametrically opposite world order, one in which humanity is joined under a strong and over-arching global government run by elites, and which has collected the former nation-states into well-ordered and compliant ‘socialist republics’.  In these, individualism is curbed in favor of cooperative class membership.  Peace among the classes is maintained through tightly regulated principles of equity used to enforce equal outcomes for all classes regardless of their contributions to the common weal.  In such a world, Marxist collectivism is the guiding principle for correct thought and public policy – ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’

Our Left sees a sovereign capitalist America as the main obstacle to such a world order.  Therefore, the political business at hand for them is to fundamentally transform America into a compliant peerage on the world’s geo-strategic stage.  And that must be achieved in a post-constitutional America through domestic policies designed to demonstrate collectivist leadership by visibly abolishing what the Left has identified as our country’s systemic racism and a culture of white supremacy.  The monitored metrics for this achievement will be class equity and correct thought in all aspects of public life.

Given these radically opposite futures that today divide us, any serious call for reunification as a nation, in my humble opinion, must first and foremost recognize and address the need to define a single America acceptable to the great majority of us.  All else is smoke and subterfuge to distract us on our current road to autocracy.  Without that we bid farewell to unity, and then what?

[Abstract]  To achieve national unity requires a three step process that we don’t recognize today.  To begin, finding ‘common ground’ (Step2) is sought for the purpose of defining and launching a mutually cooperative effort (Step3) to achieve a mutually agreed objective (Step1) – in the present case, the reestablishment of a preferably unified America.  Without the parties’ embrace of such a shared future, seeking common ground, let alone participating in a cooperative effort, is utterly futile.  The above commentary argues that since we literally have no hope of agreeing on a shared future (Step1), then prematurely issuing calls for unification through attempts to find common ground (Step2) is a useless exercise that serves only more cynical agendas such as virtue signaling.  

Working the Unity Myth (updated 25mar21)

George Rebane

Today’s Left seeks to suppress and supplant the legacy, history, and practice of Western culture as an evil instantiation of racism and white supremacy.

One of Jo Ann’s recent Union articles (here) addressed the futile attempts in the Left’s ongoing calls for unity, supposedly addressed to people like her – conservative, Christian women who pay very close attention to national affairs and are active in their communities. (more here)  The piece garnered a record reader response in print, online, and snail-mailed letters.  One heartfelt, well-written and long letter from a liberal woman gave Jo Ann kudos and concluded with a strong appeal for all of us to come together.  It is the ongoing flood of appeals like that, appeals that imply coming together is something as simple as throwing an attitudinal switch, that motivates the present reflection.

Dark Days Diary – 13mar21

George Rebane

In less than 100 days of Biden’s administration, we have already gotten used to witnessing the next tragi-comic policy coming out in quick succession before the dust has settled from the previous one.  Bumblebrain is totally in the tank for the radical socialist/communist wing of the Democratic Party, and the Left’s fascist mobs are again loose on the streets burning businesses and government buildings while what’s left of the party’s leadership piously informs Americans daily that the nation’s greatest danger is from an insurrection mounted by right wing terrorists.  Evidence for this fear is a very visible fenced and razor-wired Festung Pelosi in which today sits our nation’s Capitol Building surrounded by thousands of armed soldiers.

The latest legislative atrocity to emerge from a one-party Congress and the pen of a barely-there president is the $1.9T ‘stimulus’ act.  Given how much of the last stimulus is yet to be spent (over $1T), this latest is historically the most blatant vote buying scam yet to come out of Washington.  It is another gargantuan fiscal folly launched this weekend that comes at the wrong time, for the wrong amount, and purposed primarily for pork.  As Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced yesterday, a detailed reading of the bill reveals that only about 9% of the monies will go for Covid relief, and even that amount will be spread out beyond 2021.

We are still looking for a single thing that Biden has done to benefit the country, and his promises for the future comprise are nothing short of a continuous pouring of sand into the gears of the nation’s economy and ongoing unconstitutional limits to our liberties.  The worst of these is keeping the nation’s union-ruled public schools closed.  Private schools have been open throughout the pandemic providing a deluge of data to corroborate the science that tells us open classrooms are not a danger to the students or the teachers.

And now the American Enterprise Institute reports (here) of the latest science demonstrating that keeping the schools closed has caused, and continues to cause, more damage to kids and families than if they were opened to operate normally.  The politicians who have backed school closures need to line up behind Gov Cuomo as the government’s executioners accounting for thousands of unnecessary deaths of both the old and the young.  The latter suffering horrendously from high rates of suicide, drug abuse, social crippling, and, of course, irredeemable dumbth.

Finally, I’ll end this entry by drawing your attention to Biden’s intention to get the government into the semiconductor manufacturing business, this, ostensibly, to alleviate the chip shortage that has come about because industry couldn’t follow the zigs and zags of the feds’ C19 response policies.  But instead of letting the markets straighten out the manufacturing and distribution problems, Bumblebrain thinks that injecting a bunch of socialist central planners into the mix will solve the problem.  No one on the Left has learned over the last century that government is the worst allocator of resources to solve ANY problem – shades of the USSR, post-war UK, Venezuela, Cuba, all of Africa, … .

Another Homemade Crisis

Taking cues from Orwell’s 1984, Big Tech has quashed discussion of 2020 election integrity.  However alarming this foray against our free speech rights, their larger aim is still more profound and threatening to our continued enjoyment and exercise of constitutional rights. … Indeed, the Left seeks no less than to assert total dominion over all conservative opinion with the goal to quell any and all challenges to their authority.  Charlemagne Institute

George Rebane

‘If you come, you can stay.’ is the message President Biden blurted before his administration had made any preparations for the hundreds of thousands that took the invitation literally to surge across our southern border, totally abrogating the existing border security policy and overwhelming the apparatus that had reduced illegal entrants to a trickle under the Trump administration.  Today the Biden Bunch is at wits end (for them a very short trek) to try and deal with the human crisis they have launched out of total ignorance and incompetence – they didn’t have a clue what any room temp IQ could have predicted about what’s happening now, and what is on its way north.

In bygone days farmers with movable outhouses had a working homily for dealing with such situations – ‘don’t shit in the old well until the new one’s dug.’  That piece of obvious advice went by the board with the current crop of double dummies in the White House who have opened the spigot for an uncountable number of illegal entrants.  We have now retied the hands of our border security people.  They can no longer return those they capture, but must find them humane and comfortable lodgings, or simply turn them loose into our nation’s interior.

Meanwhile, as they play word games with ‘challenge’ and ‘crisis’, Biden’s handlers have dispatched a WH team to the border area to find out what’s really going on.  During this delay, press prevaricator Jen Psaki tells us that the border crisis was “inherited” and is being kept from the president who will be duly briefed on it when the look-see contingent returns.  In the interval, she assures the assembled reporters, that there is no use of anyone asking him about the tsunami of illegal aliens since he really hasn’t been told yet.  That is another reason they are keeping Bumblebrain away from the mics and cameras while setting a record for the delay until the president’s first press conference.  It will be pure entertainment for all to see how they finally decide to pull that one off.

Scattershots – 2mar21 (updated 5mar21)

George Rebane

Those who judge the past in terms of the here and now are doing a great disservice through their ignorance of the then and there.

The Left’s promotion of America’s new cancel culture is in full swing.  We now have full scale censoring of politically incorrect content on our mass media – broadcast, internet, print, entertainment, … .  This incorporates the modern version of book burning.  The latest volumes to be ‘digitally burned’ and no longer available from major outlets include Justice Clarence Thomas’s ‘Created Equal’ video and , and now Dr Seuss.  Dr Seuss has been an icon of Americana and children’s literature for a couple of generations now.  Even an annual children’s reading day (2 March) was ensconced to recognize the birthday of Theodor Seuss ‘Ted’ Geisel (1904-1991).  But today our commissars of correct culture have deemed many of his works to racist and contain “crude and offensive stereotypes in several drawings of blacks and Asian-Americans.”  But those well-read in the country’s leftward lurch will recognize that such book burnings are nothing more than pages out of Stalin’s and Hitler’s playbooks to erase the old culture in order to make room for instilling their brave new world.  It was ever thus. (more here)

Common culture counts.  That has been a fundamental tenet of RR, and is now being adopted by many other national voices to counter the Left’s all-out assault on America’s traditional culture.  Six former US education secretaries co-authored ‘America Needs History and Civics Education to Promote Unity’ (2mar21 WSJ).  In there they cogently argue for a national education plan “to help teachers instill an understanding that is complete and honest but not cynical.”  The 6jan21 frustration that was expressed by Americans on the Mall and in the Capitol is a harbinger that the country’s political leaders, those who truly want to promote unity, should take careful note of and respond with appropriate legislation and regulatory relief for our public schools.  It’s a tall order the chances of success for which are not high given the entrenched collectivists in politics and the teachers unions.  Nevertheless, the authors cite the ‘Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy’, the culmination of a 19-month project by 300+ “scholars, educators, practitioners, and students from diverse backgrounds.” (more here) In sum, a minimally common culture for a constitutional democracy “requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively, as well as the knowledge and skills to act for the common good.”  The Roadmap provides the guidance for the several states to develop curricula that can provide such an understanding.

Joe Biden puts all his credibility chips on a Big Lie, and takes a page of bombast from Trump’s playbook.  He and Team Biden, echoed in the lamestream, now trumpet the claim that he is the nation’s savior from Covid-19.  Specifically, “he is staking his legacy on the lie that the pandemic was out of control until the day of his inauguration.”  And a more comprehensive segue to the old days of ‘journalism’ was made possible by the former president’s CPAC speech.  The hiatus is over, we can now stop having to explain (or avoid) Biden, and shift back to coverage of Trump topics that fit like an old shoe.  Gerard Baker says it best (here) –

The return to the limelight of a certain former president has triggered an unfortunate but probably inevitable relapse for the Trump addicts of our news-gathering class.  They’d gone cold turkey for a whole month and there were tentative, encouraging signs that the cure might be taking. Deprived of their favorite drug, some were gingerly discovering other, more wholesome pursuits: tackling the mountain of evidence that Andrew Cuomo might be a mendacious, incompetent, bullying sex pest; investigating the slight but tantalizing possibility that not all of America’s social and economic woes can be attributed to white supremacy; slowly weaning themselves off the urge to ask penetrating questions of the White House about Joe Biden’s rescue dog.

What must ol’ Bumblebrain do now to get back into an adult-level news cycle?  After all, he’s still the president.  Isn’t he?

[4mar21 update]  A CPAC puzzle?  A straw poll was taken at the recent CPAC conference at which many Republican luminaries – including former President Trump – spoke.  The poll indicated that 68% wanted to see Trump run for president in 2024, and only 55% wanted to see him nominated for the office.  This conservetarian doesn’t understand how the excess of the 68% would have him become a Republican candidate in 2024 without first being nominated – especially after he made clear that he would not support or start a third party.  From my perch it looks like a collective brain fart.  Other solutions most welcome.

The Capitol Fortress.  Thousands of troops remain guarding our razor wire wrapped Capitol.  Why?  The Dems insist on fake intelligence reports of another imminent attempt at a rightwing ‘insurrection’ (when there never was one in the first place).  The disorganized and frustrated mob that charged the Capitol on 6 January had no idea what they were doing or were supposed to do.  They got in only because the on-duty Capitol police were incompetent in every aspect of operational planning and execution, or ordered to allow a politically useful penetration of the building.  And the mob had nothing to do with the deaths that day, that was another fabrication by the Dems and their lamestream media.  So, the whole thing today was a set-up for the Dems kabuki security theater to defend against a supposed repeat today of 6jan21.  This attack was supposed to occur according to some unknown advisory from an unknown agency in our intelligence community – perhaps the FBI.  In spite of today’s nothing burger, the military will continue to occupy DD for another two months – to defend against some unknown threat - at which time another fake intelligence advisory will launch the next phase of political histrionics to keep the public apprised of their assigned place under the heel of the state.

[5mar21 update]  ‘A Compromise on Creationism’ – in this little 5mar21 WSJ essay (here) physician/scientist Dr Joshua Swamidass calls for reaccreditation of colleges that teach creationism as long as they also permit discussion of and courses in evolution, along with some other provisions about the transfer of creationism course credits.  (He misses the reciprocal call for accredited secular colleges to also welcome speakers who counter theistically progressive narratives.) What again astounded me was the citing of a 2019 Gallup poll that “showed that 40% of American adults ‘ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.’” (more here)  Interesting to note is that 40% with college degrees believe that the evolution of Man was guided by God, which indicates a belief in Intelligent Design (here, here, and here) that for obvious reasons is purposely confused with and perfidiously equated to Creationism by our secular humanists.  My own concern is that these ‘strictly creationists’ reject most of what science teaches about how we and universe function, knowledge that is also the basis for the politics of public policies.  How do these religionists vote?

Progressives Big Lie #7519 – Texas Power Debacle

George Rebane

The 24feb21 Union ran this cartoon on its op-ed pages.

From this the newspaper’s uninformed and progressive readers have the clear takeaway that the Texas electric grid is in disarray and dysfunctional, as the recent blizzard demonstrated, because the electricity market is too ‘free’ and unregulated.  The disaster that hit Texans, and from which they still suffer, was caused by too much capitalism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The actual cause of the grid’s failure and its normal high cost to consumers is purely and solely a government manufactured travesty, brought to you by the scumbag politicians in Washington and Austin.  (Remember, if society has a problem, government is almost always the cause.)  To get a handle on this rather complex kerfuffle, we first have to understand that across the country there have come to be two kinds of energy suppliers – more or less deregulated ‘retail generators’ and the usual regulated public utilities.  The corporatist ‘free marketeers’ led by outfits like Enron, successfully lobbied for new fed and state laws that allowed the set up of the two-tier supply structure – the deregulated retail suppliers were supposed to compete and thereby lower consumer prices below those charged by the regulated utilities.

The corporatists anticipated their windfall by promising to set up a green power generating infrastructure that minimized reliance on coal and nuclear.  It was going to be all wind and solar with gas back-up.  The green power part was going to be heavily subsidized by the feds, and natural gas was a just-in-time fuel that could not be efficiently stored by the remaining back-up power stations.  And to transport the gas through pipelines required the operation of electrically powered compressors.  As dollar signs danced in their heads, and since the deregulation didn’t require it, the last thing in the minds of these new corporatist retail utilities was spending money to maintain and harden the electricity distribution infrastructure.   Are you beginning to get the picture? (more here)

Now step back about 30 years when people started analyzing the vulnerability of green electric grids not backed up by reliable coal and nuclear.  They started issuing warnings which were ignored by the politicians in charge of legislation and prudent regulation.  In fact, the eco and corporatist factions caused most of these longer term studies to be shut down lest their pesky findings would get too much publicity. To add insult to injury, many jurisdictions such as in Texas, consumers were not allowed to pipe gas into their homes for heating, and codes were put in place to prohibit the building of such houses – ‘clean electricity’ was going to be the solution to all energy consumption needs.

This insanity continued with governors (e.g. Cuomo) prohibiting the building/expansion of pipelines to bring back-up fossil fuels into their states and appropriately distribute it in the regions where subsidized green power was expanding.  The point here is, that contrary to the Big Lie cartoons like the one above, there has never been anything free about the energy markets when corporatists conspire with econuts and scumbag politicians to force consumers to choose between regulated utilities and ‘unregulated’ retail electricity generators who wind up with a captured clientele that can be charged sky-high market prices when primary (wind and solar) generators inevitably fail and back-up power turns out to be inadequate. (more here) 

So today politicians such as Cuomo and Warren inhibit the building of needed infrastructure ranging from pipelines to gas compressor facilities, and go on to ignore and shut down studies that produce results which don’t support their Agenda21 green narratives.

But more fundamentally, as taught by Rebane Doctrine, unfettered capitalism in any market will become rapacious as it inevitably coagulates into socially egregious, corporatist oligopolies on the road to monopoly.  (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, …)  Capitalism, as an economic order to generate and distribute wealth, is an 800 lbs gorilla that always needs some minimal regulation by the collective in a stable and liberal society.  Capitalism is God’s paramount gift to mankind’s pursuit of happiness, but it does not come free.  We recall that the good part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system, and the bad part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system.  And there’s the rub for enlightened governance.

Consummating Corporatist Conspiracies

“Conspiracy - an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.”

George Rebane

Over the last year or two corporatist conspiracies have come into full bloom with the various progressive factions of the government and media as counter-parties.  Today the dominant vehicle for promoting the fruits of such conspiracies is the ‘green new deal’ in all its facets.  What makes the ‘surreptitious’ part of the plan work is that most Americans think that the GND was promoted as a temporary far-left hot flash to attract the socialist cum communist factions of the Democratic Party to support Teams Biden and Pelosi.  Walter Russel Mead goes into some detail in the 23feb21 WSJ (here) to remind us that  -

Those who dismiss ideas like the “green new deal” as mere left-wing fantasies miss the enormous appeal of these programs for corporations looking for new business opportunities. It isn’t only renewable energy companies looking for government mandates and funding. It’s major auto manufacturers dreaming of replacing every gasoline-powered car and truck on the planet with an electric vehicle—and reaping the public-relations reward of looking virtuous. It’s construction companies looking to replace the existing energy infrastructure.

To these corporatists we add our technology oligopolies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.  A blatant example of corporatist trade of corporations’ support for suppression of competition is made in Amazon’s full page ad (see nearby photo) propagandizing of the $15/hr federal minimum wage in the 22feb21 WSJ and other lamestream outlets.  In this unashamed appeal for the government gun, Amazon wants its retail competition quashed through mandatory increases in labor costs for those small enterprises that still offer entry level job opportunities as opposed to integrating expensive new technologies or simply folding their tents.  As justification, the copy in its ad reads –

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.  For millions of workers, that’s 12 years without a wage increase – despite significant cost-of-living increases and the economic toll of the Covid-19 crisis.  That’s why we support the Raise the Wage Act that’s currently being proposed in Congress.  This legislation will increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour four years from now, giving 32 million US workers the raise they deserve while helping accelerate the recovery from the pandemic. … At Amazon, we saw the need to do more.  That’s why in 2018 we decided to provide all our US employees a starting wage of at least $15 an hour.  Since then, applications have doubled, our employees have had an easier time providing for their families, and local economies have seen a boost. …  We’re calling on Congress to pass the Raise the Wage Act.  It’s the right thing to do.

This piece of drivel has more holes in it than a sieve.  Nowhere have there been millions of deserving workers increasing their skill sets for over a decade without getting raises and promotions.  There exists no permanent cohort of American workers condemned to only $7.25/hr for years.  And Amazon’s applications have doubled because misguided government lockdowns have destroyed thousands of retailers among other businesses.  During this time Amazon’s online retailing business has boomed from people ordering their necessaries from home, thereby increasing Amazon’s happy requirement to build more distribution warehouses that need thousands more workers off the unemployment rolls.  (Amazon can afford to train and pay the $15 to carefully selected and appropriately capable new employees.)  The longer the lockdowns stay in place, the more money Amazon makes.  And in return Amazon and the oligarchs promote Democrat vote-buying policies with added benefit of virtue signaling to the nation’s light readers.

And fuhgeddabout “local economies have seen a boost”.  The promise of a $15 minimum wage has had nothing to do with any growth of local economies, growth which is only fostered by businesses that are allowed to operate at current labor costs to provide needed goods and services to people hunkered down in their homes.  Were that not so, then even more growth would come about if the minimum wage were to be $20 or $30 or even higher. As Raise the Wage Act becomes law and labor costs start rising, there will be a net fewer jobs available across the country (1.4M fewer according to the CBO), especially for the uneducated and unskilled who are also promised government checks if they vote correctly.

Walter Russel Mead concludes his adroit commentary with –

Business lobbies around the world are experts in regulatory capture and in diverting subsidies and mandates to serve corporate interests. It won’t be the greenest possible grid that wins the political contest; it will be the system that provides the most-entrenched interests with the highest rents that the best PR firms can present as sufficiently green. As lobbyists and green entrepreneurs rush to cash in on one of history’s greatest bonanzas, pigs will be adorned in green lipstick and white elephants dipped in green dye.

Yes indeed, you scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours.

Right Wing Watchers

George Rebane

For some time now a hard-left commenter signing himself as ‘Nevada County Right Wing Watch’ has been visiting these pages and leaving a trail of his intelligence, understanding, and thoughts.  He claims to be part of an extensive organization, apparently one of several reported in the news that are doing their best to intimidate and shut down all wrong thought in the country.  It’s hard to tell how authentic all this is.  But it’s very easy to tell from both the news and as corroborated on this blog, that the communication between the polarized sides is extremely asymmetrical.  The Left wants to silence the Right.  The Right wants an open forum debate on ideas, happenings, history, economics, etc.

A microcosm of this activity has been recorded in RR’s comment streams for the last 14 years, and in recent years the exchange has become more intense.  During this time the leftwingers come here to repeatedly tell us that our views are grossly in error, evil, and that no one cares what we think – and yet they come.  All of them appear to think that the conservetarian ideas promoted by me and others are unique, constrained to a tiny group in these foothills, and only represent fringe far-right thought.  They have no idea of the existence of the tens of millions of every-day Americans with whom we are ideological soulmates.  From the content of their comments, it’s clear they think that if only they could silence RR, then such wrong thinking would be eliminated from the land.

In the following I present a couple of extracted comment threads from recent posts to give readers a clearer picture of the virulence experienced here and, no doubt, elsewhere.  We start with the contribution of our ever-vigilant Right Wing Watcher in a comment thread under ‘$15/hr Dumbth on the March’.

$15/hr Dumbth on the March

You always get less of what you tax more.  Eternal Truth #461

George Rebane

For some years now RR has chronicled and mourned America’s decline in intellectual resources and critical thinking skills.  This national dash to dumbth continues (nay, accelerates) as a purposeful process by progressives who have carefully husbanded public education at ALL levels for the last half century to achieve today’s new lows in pedagogy.  Various writers and academics have observed this process for some decades now – Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) are some earlier works that come to mind.

Most recently we have a comprehensive essay – ‘The Decline of Intelligence in the West’ - by educational theorist and literary critic David Solway that cites the work of many psychologists and cognitive scientists who have documented our “plummet in cognitive abilities” over the course of these years.  These assessments come from a broad range of socio-political ideologues – e.g. Gruber’s on-target assertions on “the stupidity of the American voter” that would help pass Obamacare as his next step toward socialism.

Consideration of this descent is not an idle undertaking for those who want to sustain America’s achievements and support its continuing ascent in the 21^st century as the world’s ‘shining city on a hill’.  Denying the data, as Solway points out, hastens our decline, and serves the aims of globalists yearning for a post-national America.  Science historian Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture (2000) observes that “a society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.”  This truth is embraced by autocratic elites everywhere, and our cynical central planners daily devise and implement stratagems to keep America maximally dysfunctional, knowing how that concentrates power in government.  Our Founders’ realization of this was summarized in Jefferson’s immortal ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

Today we see an example of such a stratagem about to be run by the American voter one more time – the next rise in federally mandated wage controls in the imposition of the $15/hr minimum wage.  Without going through the catalog of damages this will do to the poorest already in and those seeking to enter our workforce, I want to point out that almost no one in the country knows how and when America came to accept a minimum wage.  That is one of the many parts of our history that has been wiped from our schools’ curricula in their dispensation of dumbth.

Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recounts (here) the “racially discriminatory roots” of America’s minimum wage laws born in the 1930s, and of today’s Pelosi-led progressive prevarications designed to bamboozle the ignorant and free into supporting the Dems’ $15 vote buying scheme.  For openers, the minimum wage does NOT provide the breadth of economic benefit to the claimed target populations of women and the poor.  But it will kill more jobs (1.4M according to the CBO) and remove another tranche of entry-level rungs of the economic ladder from those who need it the most.

But the most politically damaging part of the governments’ minimum wages is the history of their introduction and implementation.  As Riley recounts, minimum wages were introduced to the country’s North in the attempt to stem the migration of blacks from the economically bleak agricultural South.  The North’s black-excluding unions lobbied Congress where compliant “lawmakers complained openly about the ‘superabundance’ and ‘large aggregation of Negro labor’, and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.”  They knew that “low-income minorities stand to lose the most from lifting the wage floor because they are overrepresented among less-skilled and less-experienced workers.”  And Team Pelosi, with Bumblebrain in the wheelhouse now, have not forgotten the benefits of that policy tool.

Perhaps most damning of today’s progressive narrative would be to recall JFK’s attempt in the Senate to protect New England industry by promoting minimum wages that would price blacks out of the low end of the labor markets.  There in 1957 the young senator and soon our future president lectured a NAACP official, stating, “Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete, … and when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”

We conclude with an apropos picture of America’s dumbth on the march.  This is the Democrats’ siren song to their incomprehensively loyal African-American constituencies with carefully cultured deficits in history and economics.

That Which Must Not Be Known

George Rebane

In free societies merit and its reward will always seek a commensurate level.

As we enter the Biden years, America’s Left has a once in a lifetime opportunity to permanently tip the scales and guide the country into the Marxist future they have been seeking since the Bolshevik Revolution a century ago.  Following Lenin’s dictum in educating our young, our Left, in its co-opting of the Democratic Party, has had unfettered control for the last half-century of the country’s public education.  And by all available observables and measurables (e.g. National Center for Educational Statistics) they have now produced an America that in the large reflects what the late Steve Allen referred to as “national dumbth”.  Today merit has been replaced by mediocrity (more here). The best illustration of this is the political behavior of our least well-read neighbors who have shown themselves to be robotically compliant to the state and its corporatist manufactured reality.

The eternal goal of collectivist autocracies is to evolve humankind into an amalgamated society that will respond reliably to top-down rule.  A major tool for creating such a population has been the successful decoupling of merit and reward in the American mind.  This has been achieved by appeal to the siren songs of ‘social justice’ and ‘equity’, each having malleable and/or implied meanings that are fashioned daily to promote the latest state diktat.

The demonstrable aspect of the merit/reward principle in determining human behavior has some compelling corollaries -

1. Merit always has an open market price.
2. When reward for recognized merit is withheld, the level of delivered merit declines.
3. When reward for recognized merit is lavished, it invites an increased supply of merit.

This universal principle is totally counter to collectivist ideologies in general and today’s progressivist narrative in particular.  The command-and-control elites of autocratic governments understand the merit/reward relationship, and use it cynically in shaping public policies designed to hide its teachings.

Facts, Speech, and Reach

George Rebane

We are all isolated from ‘facts’ by at least one layer of biased intermediaries.

In recent editions of our local Union we continue to read its columnists and letter writers who devoutly believe in and repeatedly cite versions of the late Senator Moynihan’s famous dictum – ‘You are free to have your own opinions, but not your own facts.’  In recent years our polarized country has demonstrated countless times that in addition to their own opinions, people now have their own histories, logics, social contracts, ethics, science, sense of justice, equality, equity, lexicons of highly charged terms, and, not least of all, their very own facts – and all of these backed by equally countless online citations.  The NYT acknowledges all this, asking “How do you unite a country in which millions of people have chosen to create their own version of reality?”  All of these realities are proudly on display in their heartfelt and intense communications that promote their own worldviews.  Who among us is the final arbiter of any of these cultural and ideological notions to pronounce that this is truth and that is not?

Dark Days Diary – 1feb21 (updated 3feb21)

George Rebane

The latest 2^nd Amendment attack is in progress.  HR127 has been introduced in the House (here).  The high hard one starts with, “The Attorney General, through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, shall establish a system for licensing the possession of firearms or ammunition in the United States, and for the registration with the Bureau of each firearm present in the United States.”  From there it gets worse, in Sec (c)(1)(A) the law would require all Americans possessing firearms to have each one registered, each type of ammunition registered, pass a criminal background check, pass a psychological evaluation, successfully complete a training course, and take out a special firearms insurance policy.  This is called constructive abrogation of the 2^nd Amendment.  From there it is one short step to subsequent prohibition and “surrendering” of select firearms since their owners and locations will be known by the feds.  Violation of any of the bill’s strictures carry long minimum prison sentences and fines that will leave the overwhelming fraction of Americans destitute.  The total disarming of law-abiding American citizens is the goal.  Criminals, illegal aliens, terrorists, … will not be affected.

How the Democrats killed thousands of Americans, and many others elsewhere, is now coming to light.  Starting in the spring of 2020, the Dems and their lamestream lackies strongly opposed Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin for use against C19. (example here)  Why?  Because President Trump spoke hopefully about the effectiveness of HCQ as demonstrated in the EU, Africa, and Asia.  The Democrat Death machine would have nothing get in the way of their narrative that the Trump administration was mismanaging the country’s C19 response – high body counts were the gold standard for their allegations.  If thousands had to die in order to keep their election-year imperative a viable issue (they had no other policies to offer) in the daily news, then so be it – it was all for the greater omelet, and more than a few eggs needed to be cracked.  Well, it turns out that these well-established medicines have proven to be huge lifesavers around the world (more here), and now that Biden is in office, even the FDA is putting HCQ on its approval list (here).  HCQ has proven very effective as a therapeutic in the early stages of C19, and Ivermectin is probably the hands down champion cheap drug for both prevention and treatment of C19.  Since the US is seen as the leader in C19 response policies, the death counts, when totaled with other countries similarly delaying the use of these drugs, may number in the millions.  Collectivist politics über alles – historically, whatever they touch is followed by death and desolation.  (There are other news references to this revisionist policy which I'll dig out later.)

[2feb21 update]  Re the efficacy of politically incorrect medicines like HCQ and Ivermectin for C19 prevention and treatment, we had a routine visit with our physician today and the conversation inevitably turned to the pandemic.  We talked extensively about alternative prophylactics and therapeutics to the anti-viral Remdesivir and the recently developed vaccines.  To make a long story short, our physician and colleagues have for months now been taking a daily dose of HCQ.  He confirmed that almost all we’ve heard about the pandemic and the ‘science’ behind the response policies is utter bullshit.  We will now join him in this regimen and get our first vaccination shot next week.  Our litigious justice system, abetted by the corporatists’ social media and the Democrats’ lamestream, advise against the broad dissemination of this knowledge, but it does not prohibit their practicing ‘Physician, heal thyself!’

[3feb21 update]  More on the Democrat C19 killing machine.  The 3feb21 WSJ reports (here) on corporatist YouTube’s recent censorship of critical lifesaving testimony to the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs – “(Google's YouTube) censors testimony from physicians on early treatment for Covid-19 patients.”  At that hearing two medical experts gave evidence of the efficacy of alternative medicines in the treatment of C19, one of which was Ivermectin. Dr Pierre Kory reported on the most recently published clinical study of that medicine involving 1,200 healthcare workers, 800 of whom received Ivermectin and 400 received a placebo.  Subsequently, none of the 800 contracted C19 while 58% of the 400 did.  The Democrat-led warpath against Trump has kept America’s healthcare institutions on tenterhooks to do nothing that would draw the wrath of leftwing politicos and their lamestream legions.  As a result, America early on rejected regimens using safe and established medicines that could have saved thousands of lives and mitigated the draconian lockdowns that have destroyed so much of our economy – all to support their drumbeat narrative of Trump’s mishandling the country’s response to the pandemic.

‘Speech and Sedition in 2021’

George Rebane

That is the title of the important lead editorial (here) in the 30jan21 WSJ, and very relevant to the ongoing discussions and debates on these pages.  The whole notion of speech-based sedition arose with the Federalists who essentially ran the government of the newly born United States.  The Federalists and their agencies, did not consider themselves as a political party, they simply saw themselves as THE government when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.  Therefore, any speech that opposed them or their ideas opposed the government, and was therefore by definition seditious.  The Democrats of today have overwhelmed themselves into the same government positions and the same mindset.

Today the WaPo again supplies one of the abundant confirmations of this by arguing that the Federalists’ stratagems with such legislation and its enforcements did not go far enough, and was therefore “flawed”.  This is buttressed by Democrats who “increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy.”

Our mega-fraudulent Covid response

George Rebane

It was well back in the last year during the heights of our Covid panics that it occurred to me to examine more closely the cited death tolls from the pandemic.  The CDC was beginning to prevaricate on some stats that didn’t fly in tight formation with John Hopkins, which had assigned itself to be the national Covid (C19 in the sequel) tally center.  Being locked down, I then amused myself with a lot of analytics that ranged from developing my own epidemic spread model to deriving the reliability relationships of the various C19 tests that were being administered.  What puzzled me was how these pandemic deaths comported with the mortality rates that the country experienced during ‘normal’ years.

It didn’t take much looking to discover that whatever the number of C19 deaths we were suffering, they did not cause a spike in our national mortality count that our daily ration of media hysteria reported.  I posted my thoughts and findings on the matter, and soon found that I was not alone – other investigators had come to the same politically inconvenient conclusion. (more here, here, and here)

“The Covid-19 death count is a fabrication” reports Celia Farber of uncoverdc.com in a piece titled ‘Have 400,000 Americans Died of Covid-19?’ (H/T to reader)  Citing several scientists and investigators and illustrating CDC data with screenshots, she goes on to make an extensive case for that assertion that many have already discovered for themselves.  You will not find any of this information in the nation’s trusted lamestream outlets, and even honest politicians (a hard notion to swallow) will have little courage to properly denigrate the policies that our governments by the gun have imposed on us.  The result has been a devastated economy, thousands lives and businesses ruined, uncountable collateral deaths and morbidities, a skewed election placing corrupt idiots in the White House, and a ratcheting back of our constitutional freedoms the impact of which is shaking the foundations of our republic.

The bottom line of the C19 fraud so far is that the CDC has been mangling the deaths data to a fair-thee-well, and to keep with the Democratic/Biden supporting narrative, they had to precipitously add almost 270,000 to the “all-cause deaths” at the end of the year; “evidently 269,249 people suddenly died during the last week of 2020” to reinvigorate the C19 hoax.  Apparently, even the CDC could not make the needed ‘excess deaths’ from the nation’s 2020 mortality dataset, so they just fabricated the number and added it in with the hope that no one would notice and/or understand what they had done.

All of these numbers in Farber’s article are replicable from published data sources.  And the politically correct crowd can easily debunk what the cited scientists have presented.  But, of course, that will not be their way of countering these conclusions should they ever be made public by any of the ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ media.  Until then, wear your masks, socially distance, lock down your businesses, and keep your hopes up for a better world as you turn toward your local state house from whence all wisdom flows – remember, your government follows the science.

‘The Sovietization of California’

George Rebane

We have covered this dreadful progress to autocracy for years from a number of perspectives.  In my lifetime California has descended from its Olympian perch as the planet’s jeweled jurisdiction, to one that today competes with second and third world countries in governance, infrastructure maintenance, husbanding its natural resources, extracting tribute from its citizens, and daily ratcheting down more of their freedoms.

Longtime California resident and national columnist Dennis Prager in Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal gives a summation (here) of how the Left has tattered the once golden state.  Prager describes California as “a state where corruption reigns (one of the leading Democrats of the last half-century told me years ago that politicians in California are window dressing; the real power in California is wielded by unions) and where, for nine months, normal life has been shut down, schools have been closed, and small businesses.”

As a celebrated national leader in everything from technology to ideology, the state has worked hard to fundamentally transform America into its own declining state of collectivism.  As one of its leading bamboozles, California has convinced the nation’s light thinkers that the Left follows the science, when demonstrably “the left’s claim to ‘follow the science’ is a lie. The left does not follow science; it follows scientists it agrees with and dismisses all other scientists as ‘anti-science’.”  And then doubles down with the bigger lie that science speaks unambiguously with a single voice, which for some mystical reason only those of the Left are able to hear and understand.

Given our state’s lead, “there is no question that America is becoming, if it hasn’t already become, two countries: one that values liberty, from small businesses being allowed to operate to people being allowed to say what they believe, and one that has contempt for liberty, from eating in restaurants to free speech.”  And more differences between us are legion.  De facto, the Great Divide is already here, and, as observed in these pages, awaits only its de juris resolution.

Covid Related – 11dec20

George Rebane

With major ongoing national issues, I’m starting what would appear to be bespoke issue-dedicated sandboxes.  Let’s see how well/long this works out.

A reader sent me a link that supports arguments I and others here have made as to why the US has its reported Covid case and mortality numbers.  The Left has effectively screamed all summer long and into the fall that these were due to President Trump’s mishandling of the nation’s C19 response program.  Well, they were wrong on multiple accounts, but with the lamestream’s help, this continuously broadcast message convinced enough people to give us the currently reported and contested election results.

The actual reason for the difficulty in reducing our numbers to that of smaller, more culturally cohesive countries is that we are a large polyglot nation, now highly polarized, and of many cultures, ethnicities, and political persuasions.  Belgium, a much smaller nation of 11M, but otherwise similarly afflicted also demonstrates even higher C19 rates (more here and H/T to reader).  And it doesn’t look like this level of America’s ignorance will be surmounted any time soon – especially now that K-12 schools are starting to embrace ‘critical race theory’ big time.

From Fox News to …? (updated 14nov20)

George Rebane

OK boys and girls, things have gotten rotten in the Murdoch media empire.  I’ve been pissing and moaning about Fox News for months now (always did have my gimlet eye trained on them) as their news coverage and copy kept drifting, now visibly sliding, toward lamestream journalism.  Their ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ has always brought out a chuckle in me and mine, but today the ‘unafraid’ part is an out-and-out farce – they are very afraid of straying too far from the progressive narrative.  (As I’ve noted many times before, ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ has always been a fool’s errand that only convinces the naïfs.)  For lack of a better target, I blame the entire transformation on Rupert’s liberal son Lachlan now in charge of their news outlets.  The even more liberal son James has already departed Fox because it still wouldn’t follow the leftwing narrative well enough, especially the coverage and promotion of climate change (i.e. preventable manmade global warming).  So now the cat is out of the bag.  Once daddy left the business to his sons, things immediately started listing to port.

FN’s and FB’s stalwarts like Bret Baier and Neil Cavuto have already tossed in the towel and joined their liberal colleague Chris Wallace and former colleague Shepard Smith in how they select and wordsmith their news reports and interviews – today the prematurely departed Smith would feel very much at home at FN.  But the real canaries in the Murdoch media mine are conservative stalwarts like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham (and maybe even Jesse Watters).  If any of them start leaving FN, then that network’s turn to the dark side is a done deal.

It would be interesting to see where such conservative commentarians would take their established brands.  Newsmax is an obvious destination.  And there are more conservative streaming news outlets available like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly’s new homes that would get a tremendous viewership boost if they garnered any of FN’s big three.  And now we’re starting to hear rumors that a former president Donald Trump may again be in the business of starting his own news network or buying into an existing one and turning it into Trump TV (more here).

To all this I will add our country’s losing fight with the First Amendment as the forces of darkness continue to throttle free speech and religious liberties.  A significant telltale about the ‘progress’ of progressives in this arena was SCOTUS Justice Alito’s recent speech to the Federalist Society on these topics of America’s freedoms. (more here, here, here, and here)

Exciting times ahead as the nation starts its foreplay with socialism after Biden’s inauguration.  I’m hoping that our intrepid RR readers, who seem to know all that’s happening on the web, will keep the rest of us informed as to the best post-Fox destinations on cable or online.

[14nov20 update]  Bill Whittle at Instapundit.com delivers the first of a multi-part series (here) on the downfall of America’s media and the particulars of how the election was impacted by their fake news and daily streams of lies.  (H/T to reader)

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.