Rebane's Ruminations

Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 21jun22 (updated 25jun22)

George Rebane

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

Download VersFundTransforms

Download BeliefInventory_220614

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

The Many Ways to Regulate Militias (updated 21jun22)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picking on Piketty

George Rebane

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

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

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

Scattershots – 6may22 (updated 14may22)

George Rebane

The 2016 election integrity and voter fraud issue is far from dead.  Besides the many tomes presenting evidence that somehow didn’t reach the courts or were summarily dismissed by dismissive judges, there is a whole trove of (video and smartphone tracking) evidence of hundreds of paid ‘mules’ stuffing multiple ballots into ballot drop boxes in selected voting precincts across the nation (more here).  The whole thing is documented in a new film ‘2,000 Mules’ by documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.  It is now showing at a big screen near you, and you can also watch its online 7may22 premier for pay here on Youtube.  The lamestream has been hyper-silent about this movie, and you can bet the ranch that neither Bumblebrain, Ms Pelosi, nor SFB Schumer will watch it.

[13may22 update]  In ‘Imagine the Unimaginable’ Victor Davis Hanson succinctly lays out the dire straits in which our beloved republic finds itself.  As he makes clear and most RR readers know, all of our maladies are self-inflicted.  VDH ends his warning of the radical Left in America’s fundamental transformation – “When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous — as we shall see over the next few months.”

[14may22 update] ‘Abortion-Rights Marches Planned Across U.S. to Protest Possible Overturning of Roe v. Wade’  Here’s a photo of certifiable young idiots created by the evil party Democrats who continue to broadcast their latest Big Lie that federalizing abortion rights will outlaw abortions and end up “killing women”.  Even Scientific American (here) and the prestigious British medical journal Lancet (here) have decided to expand into American law and politics to proscribe the anticipated “blood on their hands” SCOTUS ruling that would allow the several states to make their own abortion laws.  This is more corroborating evidence that idiocy is independent of intellect.

Central Bank Digital Currencies a'comin'?

George Rebane

The powers that be have quietly initiated the process to change all fiat monies into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).  Plenary sessions among the G7 have demonstrated that most countries are ready to change their money into ‘programmable crypto currencies’.  The US and UK are leaders of this movement as the means to enlarge the power of governments and control the inevitable destruction of their circulating fiat monies.

To understand how CBDCs work, consider that when implemented, we will all have personal accounts with our country’s central bank (e.g. our Fed) which will then enable control of the amounts, dispensing, and programming the use of the new nationalized crypto currency.  This essentially follows what Red China is doing now (‘the Chinese model’).  The totalitarian gorilla in the room is the programmability of CBDCs.

Depending on TBD laws, regulations, and power-motivated propensities, your particular CBDCs can be programmed to enable and/or deny you, on a day-to-day basis, the freedom to use the money as you will.  Say, that the government doesn’t want you to consume a certain product (e.g. fatty foods) because you are overweight.  It can then make your CBDCs unable to pay for such prohibited products and services.  The same can be said for travel restrictions – the government, or even the permitted airline, can make it so that you cannot purchase tickets that take you to a destination proscribed for you personally.

In essence, CBDCs will then no longer be money in the sense that today’s money is fungible as a store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange.  Your particular CBDCs will then become the equivalent of government-controlled vouchers purposed dynamically for what your employer or a state agency grants you privileges.  Are you beginning to get the picture?  (more here, here, here, and here)

PS. The astute reader will realize that programmable CBDCs can totally collapse the ‘property side’ of the Bastiat Triangle, thereby also collapsing the ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ sides. Can everyone imagine work-around black markets and barter economies? 

The Jewish Question

George Rebane

In his ‘Passover and the Constitution’,  Professor William Galston writes “The Jewish festival teaches that liberty is only possible with tradition and order.”  These are not the mainstay criteria nor governance objectives of today’s American progressives.  Galston is a political science academic who now resides as a senior fellow at the very liberal Brookings Institution in its Governance Studies program.  His linked article appeared in the 13apr22 WSJ.

In the rabbinical tradition of studying the Talmud and the Torah, Dr Galston does not always present the most understandable prescriptions – there’s always ‘on the other hand’.  Here the point that seeks exposure is that sustainable freedom can only be achieved and exercised in an environment of mutually accepted order.  And mutual acceptance is passed on as an inherited tradition, a social legacy from previous generations.  Jews formalize this tradition in the course of the traditional Seder (order) that is central to the celebration of Passover (freedom).

“This raises a classic issue—the relationship between order and freedom. Some schools of thought view them as antitheses—the more order, the less freedom, and vice versa. Libertarians want to minimize government constraints to maximize liberty. Anarchists carry this thesis to its inevitable, and self-refuting, conclusion. … In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, order makes freedom possible. In the absence of a framework—a law, a text, a tradition—we cannot act freely. Not only are we plunged into debilitating doubt, but our decisions also collide with those of others. The actions of others rarely coordinate harmoniously with our own. And when they don’t, all are prevented from acting as they choose. Without a framework of social order, every individual can seek freedom, but none can achieve it.”  If this sounds like a bit of ‘you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black’, then so be it.

However, a little meditation on the freedom/order dichotomy reveals again that in an enduring communal setting no member can act with total freedom; several times a day our fist inevitably comes to within an inch of others’ noses.  So, all of our communal freedoms are in fact circumscribed.  And respecting where the fences are, by what authority they were so placed, and who abides by them, defines the area in which we and our neighbors can practice our ordered freedoms.

The Evil Party continues self-validation (updated 6apr22)

George Rebane

A reader posted the link to conservative writer David Horowitz’s essay ‘Understanding the Progressive Mind’.  Here he points out that “too many conservatives fail to appreciate the radical evil that lies at the heart of progressivism by, e.g., giving progressives credit for good intentions and assuming that the disasters caused by their policies are inadvertent.”  We have made the case for years that these disasters have been anything but inadvertent.

A more compelling argument as to the evil that imbues the basis of the Democrats’ objectives, means, and methods is on display today with our policy to do everything politically possible, within the context of NATO, to diminish and delay military support to Ukraine.  This perfidy is accomplished with the lamestream propagandizing Biden’s lauded fear/desire not to prompt Putin into pushing the WW3 button.  Few people understand more thoroughly than Garry Kasparov the impact this prevarication has on Russia’s foreign policy and future expansionist aggressions under Putin.  Kasparov’s op-ed, ‘Biden Told the Truth, Putin Has to Go’, in the (paywalled) 4apr22 WSJ is an important analysis of the West’s response to date.  He makes the case that “Ukraine’s sacrifice will be in vain if the West’s moral confusion gives Russia a chance to regroup.”  I’ve decided to make it available to RR readers here - Download Kasparov 4apr22 op-ed

[6apr22 update] Insulin price controls - butt stupid socialist economics on parade.  Don’t know exactly where the needle lands on their stupid-to-evil scale, but the Democrats’ Affordable Insulin Now Act will have exactly the wrong impact on every part of the R&D-to-pharmacist counter cycle.  In the longer term everyone, especially the diabetics, will be hurt as the monies will be mal-distributed between patient, government, big pharma, insurance companies, and, yes, ultimately the taxpayer.  This is yet another Democrat vote buying program directed at the desperate, destitute, deluded, and dumb.  (more here)

The Great Reset

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984

George Rebane

Given that the world will always have at least one hegemon, it is therefore imperative that America should always remain a hegemon - Rebane Doctrine.

A prime objective of RR over its now considerable lifespan has been the discovery, discussion, and dissemination of the resurgence of global collectivism under its various guises.  This enterprise has been promoted under various names and transnational programs, possibly the earliest organized launch occurred thirty years ago during a UN conference in Brazil.  There we heard about Agenda 21 (A21) and read its manifesto for a brave new world populated by a much smaller and tightly controlled population of humans.  It was a plan for a ‘sustainable world’ under an overarching collectivist government run by elite technocrats.

The road to A21 was admittedly long and had to be carefully planned and implemented so as not to awaken any early ire to the admitted loss of freedoms, wealth, and quality of life in general in order to redistribute resources to a radically reducing population.  The provisions and policies for A21 were to be installed bit by piece at all levels of government, first and foremost at the local level.  The cadres to do this would be the local electeds, bureaucrats, and civil servants trained by a global network of A21 offshoots called International Councils for Local Environmental Initiatives (which is now known as ‘ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability’).  These government cadres would quietly attend and study the ideological and operational principles of bringing what eventually came to be called neo-Marxist thought to shape and control local societies and economics.

Locally in Nevada County, almost all county staff at the managerial level have attended our regional ICLEI.  This is replicated state and nationwide.  California leads America in the number of ICLEIs, and America leads the world.  Managed from over 20 offices around the globe, more than 1,750 cities, towns, counties, and their associations in 126 countries are a part of the ICLEI network.  These many trails and tributaries to socialism are purposely ignored and unreported by leftwing media, and surprisingly also ignored by right-leaning outlets.

Today the US is being reconfigured (“fundamentally transformed”) socio-politically to prepare for its place in the new global order under a central power structure run by a cadre of elites immune from the policies they will mandate for the population at large.

A large literature has come in place to promote, analyze, and oppose what was introduced as the ‘Great Reset’ at the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos.  The Great Reset is now the latest refinement of what began as the UN’s Agenda 21 lately renamed Agenda 2030.  As long documented here, on the surface these ‘agendas’ are lists of “Sustainable Development Goals” re-adopted in 2015 to reduce world population to a more controllable level that can be corralled into high-density population centers connected by a limited number of transportation corridors.

SEC gets into the climate change business

George Rebane

There is a serious proposal (here) for Congress to get the SEC into creating additional friction in the conduct of the nation’s businesses, especially in an area where it has no established expertise and needs to set up additional bureaus/departments to monitor and adjudicate newly mandated company reports, all for the putative reason of reducing investor risk, is a bad idea (Ramirez says it all). To begin, there is no consensus science that we are suffering from preventable man-made global warming (PMGW), which is the climate controllers’ fundamental thesis – science does not speak with a single voice.  Most certainly, the series of IPCC reports, including the most recent one, make no such claim.  While most knowledgeable people admit that human activities can contribute to global warming, the quantitative sources and scopes of such activities impacting the earth’s temperature record (itself a very fuzzy concept) is totally unknown.

An important concept not reported on the heavily propagandized interpretations of the IPCC report is that the GCMs (general circulation models) have not gotten more reliable in either describing or predicting temperatures (among their other output parameters).  This science has made little or no progress and the output variance measures of the tens of competing GCMs currently in vogue/use have not declined over the last thirty years.  One reason is that the earth’s complete carbon cycle is not known – there are huge gaps in the cycle that today are still filled with various brown numbers. The transfer function for the earth’s atmosphere is unknown; the GCMs are based on heuristics – cobbled together submodels with constants adjusted to fit dubious temperature etc records from various epochs.  As we know from estimation theory, such fittings to past data give no guarantee of the predictive power of (heuristic) models based on limited science.

A litmus test of a maturing science/technology is that the models which embody and express the underlying theory continue to improve as witnessed by their diminishing output covariance matrices developed from experiment and field data.  The GCMs, on which both climate hysteria and public policies are based, have not satisfied this requirement, and about which the media, politicians, and the grant-consuming academics have been silent.  Perhaps a more dismal outlook for confirming the existence of PMGW is that the factors affecting climate are not sufficiently known, and that they also compose an amalgam of chaotic processes, the predictive modeling of which is something humans don’t know how to do, and which may well be that part of our universe that will not succumb to our level of intelligence and mathematics (there are a number of other such processes known to science where human knowledge appears to have hit an impenetrable boundary).

In the final analysis, even if we postulate that some day soon we’ll overcome all these unknowns about climate dynamics, we will most likely discover that global warming may not be feasibly preventable, even if mankind does contribute to it.  We are capable of putting in place draconian public policies that can pauper the world, but there is not a whit of science that says any of it will impact global temperatures, let alone allow us to control them to desired levels.  And here is where the politics and corporatist enterprises come to bear.  Corporatists, by their definition, partner with government to foster laws and regulations designed to limit competition by raising the cost of doing business to such prohibitive entry levels that smaller companies are stifled and venture capital takes a pass in investing in new enterprises wanting to take on the established Goliaths.  This is why you will see corporatists endorsing this new extension of SEC power to become yet one more arm of government’s expanding control.

(Corporatism is the desirable natural endpoint to a corporate growth cycle vs bankruptcy, acquisition, … .  Corporations that grow beyond an efficient organizational size cannot compete with smaller, more nimble, companies in minimally regulated markets.  They need to team up with the government gun to gain the level of regulatory security required by large inefficient organizations to stay in business.  And membership in the corporatist club is relatively easy, all it requires is money to buy politicians and unionists.)

Coda.  From my perch as a schooled technologist, sophisticated investor of some means, and a successful professional in assessing and quantifying risk, I have no idea how to evaluate the information in the SEC’s contemplated ‘climate-risk’ reports.  I doubt that the SEC will make available their ‘methodology’ that supports the new regulations companies will have to follow.  And retail investors, institutional investment advisors, and corporate CFOs will have no clue about the then reported climate risks.  All of them will learn to operate on the basis of a handful of slogans and shibboleths handed down from on high through an enthusiastically cooperating media.

Liberal Hypocrisy Fuels American Inequality

George Rebane

What do Dems actually do when they have all the power?  The short answer is that they have created the worst states in the Union with regard to housing, education, taxation, homelessness, … .   And first and foremost, they turn on their political and media lying machines to deny what horrible messes in governance they create when voters unwittingly hand them all the levers of power in a state.  This has gotten so bad that even the NYT now runs op-eds decrying the Democrats’ hypocracies, illustrating in chapter and verse the 180 differences between the nation’s progressive talk and walk.

Today Democrats control the legislative and the executive branches, or else have veto-proof majorities in the legislatures of 18 states – Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii.  And these are the worst governed states in which progressives promote and maintain the greatest inequalities between their rich and their poor.  In these states there is no possibility for any Republicans to stand in the way of Democrat public policies – the Left owns these states lock, stock, and barrel.

Noted author and NYT editorial board writer Binya Appelbaum has zeroed in on these states to discover the nature and magnitude of leftwing travesties in operation.  He teams up with video journalist Johnny Harris to report on the details in this NYT Opinion video.  Here they present the data that forms the basis for the fabric of Big Lies on which our Left has based its access to power by buying the votes of the less-read, and keeping them on urban plantations for decades during which millions of American lives have been destroyed and/or stunted.

To me the information presented here is yet another confirmation that the Democrat Party is fundamentally evil, especially in how it has bamboozled the poor, and succored its rich into believing they have the moral high ground on the nation’s conservatives.  The Great Divide cannot happen soon enough.  (H/T to reader and correspondent)

Pentagon teaches socialism

George Rebane

Promoting public benefits without including public costs is the hallmark of charlatans and evil politicians.  Accepting public benefits without inquiring about their public costs is the way of the useful idiot and the ignorant.

More evidence pours in that our military under progressive federal governments no longer considers national security as its prime and overarching mission.  The latest comes from the Pentagon which recently sponsored and hosted ‘Responding to China: The Case for Global Justice and Democratic Socialism’. (more here)

The event featured the French socialist economics professor Thomas Piketty whose widely panned ‘masterwork’, Capital in the 21^st Century (2013), is still celebrated by progressives everywhere.  Most real economists and students of economics – certainly of the Austrian and Chicago schools - consider ‘socialist economist’ to be a demonstrated oxymoron.

The Pentagon event was put on by DoD’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and featured Piketty’s ideas about how the west should reorganize its socio-economics for the remainder of the century, and specifically to successfully “meet the challenge of China”.  Piketty also wrote Time for Socialism (2021) in which he argues “that the right answer in addressing China's growth lies in ending Western arrogance and promoting a new emancipatory and egalitarian horizon on a global scale, a new form of democratic and participatory, ecological and post-colonial socialism," … "If they stick to their usual lecturing posture and a dated hyper-capitalist model, Western countries may find it extremely difficult to meet the Chinese challenge."

The obvious thrust of what our Pentagon mavens now promote is that to counter communist China and its new approach to state-capitalism, the west must become a socialist society and also develop a form of state-capitalism on its road to a Marxist world. (here)  Most free-market economists and business leaders not yet in the embrace of corporatism see such nostrums as advising us to destroy our economy in order to save it.  (There’s more to be said about that as we consider what is happening under the aegis of the Great Reset.)

In today’s military we take valuable hours from the training day to devote to ideologically indoctrinating our soldiers, sailors, and airmen to correct modes of collectivist groupthink. Since the Obama administration, we have increasingly started doing this instead of increasing and honing our troops’ warfighting skills with the ever newer and more complex technologies that already dominate today’s battlefields, and which demand a more highly trained warrior cohort to meet the enemy with modern weapon systems instead of ideological indoctrination.

The new emphasis from such programs is not the continued maintenance of a secure and powerful America as a sovereign nation-state and world hegemon.

Lockdown Lunacy vs Fringe Ideas

George Rebane

Litmus test for autocracy – ALL autocracies actively proscribe ideas that are fringe to what the state prescribes as mainstream thinking.  Rebane Doctrine

The recent study from Johns Hopkins University unequivocally shows that lockdowns don’t work in reducing Covid-19 death rates. (here, here, and here) The mortality rate data for this also comes from around the world.  In the developed world state-imposed lockdowns have devastated economies, families, and individuals of all ages.  This pandemic will be studied for generations by historians, political scientists, and autocrats.

The impact of lockdowns has so many dimensions in the realms of their implementation and causal effects.  Most independent (i.e. not on the government tit) epidemiologists, economists, and other science-savvy analysts decried the lockdown policies from the start.  Only the central planning/control elites and ignorantly compliant local jurisdictions promoted the months of insane mandates handed down from on high that began in the spring of 2020.

Half the country is populated by those reliably labeled sheeple.  To the ruling elite these are the recipients of received wisdom known as ‘mainstream thought’, which is comprised of an ever-changing roll of diktats a la Orwell.  These people have been taught since grade school to unquestioningly accept and put to practice whatever and whenever Big Brother mandates.  No critical thought needed nor tolerated – such thought, being constituted of ‘fringe ideas’, is to be rejected as anti-social and dangerous, polluting the purity of state mandated groupthink.  To witness them, one need only go to the local shopping mall or read The Union.

The trained progressive has had excised from his education any notion that all benefits to mankind over the millennia have always been introduced as fringe ideas.  Mainstream thought has always been the home of thought-free compliant stasis and stagnation.  At no time in the last hundred years have we witnessed in the developed world a more complete practice of such mainstream thought than over the last two years – and the beat goes on.

So now we have the latest from Johns Hopkins that once more confirms what the greatly denigrated Barrington Declaration already told us back in the fall of 2020 (here).  That piece of work was endorsed by thousands of accredited scientists and medicos, and ruthlessly put down by our federal government and their lamestream lackies.  Hundreds of thousands more died needlessly and/or went bankrupt.

No recognition of, let alone apologies for the Big Lies were forthcoming, and no one today is holding their breath.  The dead and financially destitute are a price the leftwing elites were willing to pay for their great experiment in the fundamental transformation of America into a satrapy under a global government.  And you can bet that there’s more to come from the same team, still fully in control and totally insulated from any legal or public repercussions by a corrupt DoJ and judiciary.  According to those propagandists and their local true believers, Joe Biden has had a banner year since he was inaugurated.  And the Democrat devotees across the land still revere and believe in the gospel according to Saint Anthony of Fauci, the Beatified - “The fact that we shut down when we did, and the rest of the world did, has saved hundreds of millions of infections and millions of lives.”  (17 June 2020)

The tactic of ‘accuse them of what you do’ is a tried-and-true formula for shutting down any real opposition from the recumbent Republicans.  (Does anyone know on what are they spending their political capital?)  No better example of that can be had than the established fact that Russian appeasement has been a leftwing monopoly as once again illustrated by Victor Davis Hanson (here).  To this day lamestream outlets trumpet that Trump was the Great Colluder.

Ruminations – 17jan22 (updated 18jan22)

George Rebane

A zealot is one who identifies intimately with his message, and opposes all efforts to reasonably falsify the message because doing so would also falsify him.

A brief compendium of current observations for the record.

Conservatives are (fascists, racists, white supremacists, … pick one or more) and work constantly to have government limit individual freedoms, diminish America’s liberties, and promote an autocratic government – so goes the progressive/Democrat/lamestream narrative.  This is witnessed daily and well documented in progressive activist literature like ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ by George Lakoff.  The latter is actually a best-selling leftist communication handbook into which is marbled the Marxist/socialist manifesto.  What the leftwing elites count on is the ignorance of their audience who cannot connect the dots between an autocratic state and big government based on central planning and control.  This deficiency prevents them from seeing that all conservative efforts in governance and public policy are directed in exactly the opposite direction – a minimally funded smaller government with fewer laws and regulations based on federalized maximum local control.  Such governments cannot generate and maintain collectivist public policies which need a massive government to enforce and implement.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

America’s Left and their Democrat Party public face are desperately attempting to pass federal voting legislation (HR1, ‘The Voting Rights Act’) that will foster and facilitate the entrenchment of a political monopoly based on Marxist/socialist ideology.  The selling point, hysterically touted by Team Biden, is that America’s current election laws limit voting rights, especially those of protected classes.  The evidence to oppose this attack on constitutional federalism is abundant and readily available, but totally buried by the lamestream media.  Only conservative outlets inform their audiences of how the states’ voting laws compare, and about public attitudes that favor policies which restrict the voting franchise to American citizens, and minimize opportunities for election irregularities and fraud. (more here)  Our Left tells Americans that such voter integrity policies are racist/fascist/etc designed to limit voting access to minorities, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine have fallen victim to Mammon and politics of the most reprehensible, insidious, and deadly kind.  Both medicines have been widely used worldwide as a prophylaxis and treatment for a number of maladies, including Covid – extensively reported in these pages – but proscribed by our federal government and big pharma.  The former to establish precedents and new avenues of government control, the latter to keep effective off-patent medicines out of reach so that high margin patented medicines remain the only alternatives to combatting the pandemic.  The effectiveness of IVT and HCQ have been demonstrated in countless studies and clinical cases.  It’s now so bad that Covid patients on death’s door cannot be administered either medicine by court order (more here).

The death rate of Covid ‘vaccines’ is another scandalous cover-up by our federal government.  In the program to maximize vaccinations, the data on vaccine-related deaths is withheld by the CDC and the FDA.  No vaccine is entirely safe, and every one has its own mortality rate due to various complex – mostly anaphylaxis – reactions to the prophylactic.  According to government data, the death rate within 14 days of being vaccinated for standard flu is about 120 per 100,000, and for shingles it is about 21 per 100,000.  It turns out that for Covid, the equivalent death rate within 14 days of getting jabbed is 190 per 100,000.  When this rate is applied to the millions of people vaccinated, then the Covid vaccines have killed over 388,000 Americans alone.  And with the incidence of breakthrough infections, the efficacy of the vaccines is yet to be determined.  One thing is certain, no government agency wants to talk about this, and all continue to stonewall legitimate queries submitted to them.  (more here and here)

The destruction of the FBI by the Left is almost complete – they are now being repurposed as the nation’s new Stasi.  As evidence, consider that today the FBI finally acknowledged that last week’s attack on the Texas synagogue was an act of Islamist terrorism.  They were the last to know what was immediately obvious to the man on the street across America when informed that one Malik Faisal Akram was the attacker who demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, another convicted and jailed Islamist killer.  AG Garland did the best he could to bamboozle the American public as long as he could before national ridicule made him tell his FBI lackeys to announce that the attack was “a terrorist-related matter”.  No kidding Kemosabe.

A more standard law enforcement fare for today’s FBI is launching domestic terrorism investigations of parents who go on public record to oppose local school boards about the content of the curricula – e.g. the tenets of CRT - taught to their kids.  On such matters the FBI is right on the spot ferreting out those subversive parents who don’t toe the line laid down by leftwing dominated teachers unions.  Gotta get those parents out of the way of our educators who are concerned first about their students right after they have their pension negotiations in the bag.  Actually, there may be an issue or two, like paid days off for Covid safety, that may still consume their attention before they get to the kids.

[18jan22 update]  Open and free critique of government is a fundamental principle upon which America was founded.  And the continuance of that right has been the mainstay of our republic since its birth in revolution, which itself is the ultimate critique of government by its citizens.  All roads to tyranny start with the state proscribing the critique of government.  We in the United States have a long history of criticizing our government, its policies, and actions both domestic and foreign.  Everyone has exercised that right, built into our founding documents, without second thought of suffering retribution from any institution of government.  This is not to say that it hasn’t happened (e.g. the IRS going after conservative 501c3 organizations).  But when such illegal retributions have been discovered – usually uncovered by an alert media - they have been roundly rejected by all Americans, resulting in public censure, ending of careers, and even legal actions against the perpetrating scoundrels.  Those days are gone.  Today, firmly on the doorstep of autocracy, we have the Democrats in power openly deploying federal intelligence and law enforcement organs to punish critics of its rogue and radical politicians and policies, and even those opposing state and local leftwing authorities illegally mandating laws and regulations about schools, the pandemic, academe, border porosity, elections, and corporatist enterprises that seek government favor. (more here)  What portends even worse for the republic is that a large share of Americans now favor such government reprisals that formerly were the hallmarks only of communist and fascist governments, and tinpot dictators of backward (e.g. shithole) countries.

Democrats’ Newspeak – 13jan22 (updated 31jan22)

George Rebane

[A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the 29jan22 op-ed pages of The Union, titled ‘Democrats’ ‘Newspeak' a radical ideological agenda’.  As you can see from the comment stream under article, once again none of the leftwingers understand the message and simply play their strong suit in attacking the messenger – ‘twas ever thus.  All are profoundly ignorant of not only the civil, but also the legal, pre-Newspeak meaning of ‘alien’ which was in common usage across the land to describe the non-citizen class of people in America.]

George Orwell and Mao Zedong both knew that a person can only think thoughts supported by his language, a cogito-linguistic principle first introduced as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Orwell introduced it to broad audiences in the form of Newspeak in his 1984 classic.  Newspeak was a continuously revised and government mandated English that systematically removed/revised words that supported thinking about rebellion or anything antigovernmental.  It worked very effectively in the novel, and motivated Mao's attempt to replicate a Newspeak version of Chinese to a large illiterate population after communists took power in 1949.  Mao began by reducing published Chinese to 2,000 carefully chosen ideographs (out of more than 800,000), the recognition of these would make a citizen compliantly literate and able to read government issued dicta and ‘news’.

Democrats and other would-be autocrats worldwide have been envious of this method of thought control effected by the bureaucratic elites of collectivist governments.  And in the last few years we have seen America’s progressives begin implementing the 21^st century version of Newspeak.  A more sophisticated and harder to detect aspect of Newspeak is to reduce the information carrying capacity of the language.  This is achieved by contracting authorized word usage and making the meaning of surviving words more ambiguous.  (Languages expand their information carrying capacity by introducing new words to identify new things and capture more nuanced meanings so as to efficiently communicate them – think of ‘the cat caught a mouse’ vs ‘the domesticated furry, four-legged predator with claws caught a mouse’.)

A recent ratcheting of Newspeak is found in Gov Newsom’s new spate of laws for California, as described in Terry McLaughlin’s column in the 13jan22 Union (here).  Starting this year, the word ‘alien’ will be struck from government materials (as already picked up by the lamestream media), to be replaced by ‘non-citizen’ and ‘immigrant’ to describe people in America who are not citizens.  With these newly restricted usages, the reader cannot distinguish between, say, a legal tourist or business-person, and anyone illegally in the country; or a recently arrived person under a legal two-party agreement, and anyone who came here in violation of our laws.

Again, the Democrats’ motivation here is clear – not only make it hard to distinguish but also to think about illegal aliens flooding through porous borders to weaken America’s traditional culture, its sovereign nation-statehood, and to ensconce a growing electorate that will ultimately guarantee a one-party monopoly in the United States.  And Newspeak, promoted widely through our government and academic institutions, co-operating corporatists, and unionized public schools, makes it all possible.  As an exit exercise, consider also the new meanings of ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘insurrection’, ‘the rich’, ‘nazi’, ‘socialist’, ‘violence’, … . To confirm the success of this insidious program, just have a conversation with anyone under 30 years old.

As former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker observed in ‘The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’, “We are facing nothing less than a concerted, sustained and comprehensive effort to re-educate Americans in service of a radical ideological agenda.”

[31jan22 update]  The comment stream under The Union’s online post of the above article is populated by almost all leftwingers with a totally predictable illustration of polarization beyond futility.  They have focused on my inclusion of ‘illegal alien’ as one of today’s proscribed words that makes very difficult or impossible understanding and discussing immigration policy or our border situation.  And, of course, that is the whole purpose of the Democrats' radical progressive wing to reduce the information carrying capacity of everyday language.  However, most noteworthy in today’s America is that there now is a huge cohort of our electorate that demands to be ignorant of the issues, and unable to communicate anything about them beyond the approved slogans in abbreviated semantics.  In response to that comment stream, I posted the following.

Illegal Alien: Federal law employs the term alien, which it defines as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States”.  US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses the term in its program descriptions.  As a legal term of art, illegal alien has been a part of US Code, our body of laws, for generations.  From BallotPedia, “Those in favor of using the term illegal alien argue that it is a legally accurate term used in federal law and other formal documentation. They also argue that its alternatives, such as undocumented immigrant, are euphamisms used to distract others from considering whether someone has violated U.S. immigration law. … Those opposed to using the term illegal alien argue the use of the word illegal dehumanizes people and does not fully consider the exceptional cases of refugees.”  More specifically, according to H.A. Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, “ 'Undocumented immigrant' is a politically correct, made-up term adopted by pro-illegal alien advocacy groups and liberal media outlets to obscure the fact that such aliens have violated U.S. immigration law and are in the country illegally...If we are going to discuss and debate the issue of immigration and what our public policy should be, we should at least use accurate, precise terms, and talk about, for example, legal aliens vs. illegal aliens.”

The comments herein do an excellent job of illustrating the point/thesis of my column.  To further underline my thesis, The Washington Post reports, “The Biden administration has ordered U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to stop using terms such as ‘alien’, ‘illegal alien’, and ‘assimilation’ when referring to immigrants in the United States, a rebuke of terms widely used under the Trump administration.”  Obfuscation über alles.

Ignorance that passeth all understanding

George Rebane

The Biden administration in attempts to climb out of its shithole of bad policies has the latest excuse for the inflation surge – it’s the fault of American businesses, big and small.  You see, they all got together and decided to start raising prices at the same time.  Another capitalist conspiracy if there ever was one according to our socialists cum communists (that has been their message for over a century now).  It is incomprehensible how the simple economic principle of supply/demand and its effect on prices (and economic behaviors) continues to elude them.

This aspect of their profound ignorance ranks right up there with the Left’s eternal shibboleth that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior.  Where are their intellectual luminaries like Cass Sunstein, of Nudge (2008) and Noise (2021) fame, when Bumblebrain and his redheaded shill put out such garbage for national consumption?  It has never taken much between the ears to understand why socialism and widespread misery correlate so well - more socialism, more misery.  Assemble just a handful of their tortured tenets on human behavior, and you can not only write the economic histories of their disasters, but also predict the nature of the next disaster given their latest policy WIP.  Their BBB (Bring Back Blight) legislation, now in limbo, is a perfect redux of the Titanic’s last night at full speed in iceberg infested waters.

As part of the carefully intended and hidden blights in the BBB, consider that one of its many disastrous provisions calls for the feds to subsidize the nation’s journalists’ salaries.  The wraps would finally come off these lamestream lackies of the Democratic Party – they would finally be put on the payroll to write the ‘news’ as dictated by the DNC - so much for the sham of a free and impartial press. (more here) The American electorate is judged to be in such dire straits that the Left no longer needs to hide or deny such fundamental transformations of America.

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

In the last Dark Days Diary (here) I highlighted a short dissertation on the spread of communism by a former KGB agent.  As we have frequently pointed out, 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 insidious collectivist propaganda – e.g. Critical Race Theory.  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.

Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson makes the extensive case (here and here) that this 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 a 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 then 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 student, 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 believe in 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 making school choice possible and letting parents decide where their children will be schooled.

Dinner table topics (updated 16dec21)

George Rebane

At our house the conversation turns to politics after the usual householder topics are covered and resolved.  Both Jo Ann and I are political animals.  Readers know my beliefs and propensities, there is here a long record of both, one that is regularly ignored by those of the Left.  Not so many here know about the wife of my life.  She is a longtime hardworking volunteer in various philanthropic organizations and in charge of our family’s giving.  She is also a member of the NC Republican Central Committee, the Union’s editorial board, and the Nevada County Republican Women Federated.  The latter is the local chapter of the largest organization of grassroots Republicans, and next week she will become the new president of the NCRWF.  Did I mention that she’s also the family matriarch with our two daughters, six adult grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren?  Me?  I now try to devote as much time as possible to master the lifestyle of a classic flâneur of the Taleb school – you see, I have been blessed as a kept man by a very capable woman.  Enough.

Recently we dissected the abortion issue (again).  It’s a topic much discussed in these pages, but not so recently.  The so-called ‘pro-life’ anti abortionists continue to miss the dominant argument to abet their cause.  The ‘pro-choice’ promoters base their entire case on the mantra ‘A woman has a right to do with her body as she will.’ – my body, my choice.

The entire basis of the abortionists is that there is only one body and one life involved.  That’s not true in any sense of the word, most certainly not clinically, and in many places, not legally.  What the pro-lifers should continually point out is the singular ‘body’ in the pro-choicers’ mantra, and ask ‘how many bodies (lives) does your choice affect?’  Getting them to admit to the correct answer will change the nature of the debate on a pregnant woman’s rights, subsidizing abortions, who should be involved in the decision, especially in the pregnancy of a minor, and so on.

All ideologues, no matter their coloration, agree on the importance of controlling language as part and parcel of controlling thought (Sapir-Whorf and all that).  The ongoing onslaught of the Left to cancel western culture requires strict adherence to language control, especially as it is taught in schools, used on the lamestream, and pontificated by progressive politicians.  The tsunami of illegal entrants across our open southern border is a case in point.  These arrivals are no longer illegal aliens, or even illegal immigrants.  Today they are simply migrants.  Everyone knows that people have innocently migrated here and there for ages, that’s how the world got populated.  And the migrants from the south are simply people who decided to move to the United States, so what’s wrong with that?  Read the poem on the Statue of Liberty.

In the same vein the press has banned Christmas tree.  The thing we light and decorate in our living rooms during Christmas is now relabeled as the “holiday tree”.  None of that European western culture need be acknowledged in lands both ancient and colonized.  Today a new global world of equity is dawning.  But a little attention reveals that the culture cancelling is very precisely directed.  No one yet dreams of calling the menorah of Hanukkah a ‘holiday candelabra’.

And then there are pejoratives like ‘white supremacist’ and ‘racist’ which must only be used for their implied meanings but never ever defined.  For to offer definitions, no matter how imprecise or ludicrous, would quickly torpedo their entire narrative in pursuit of social justice and equity.  Substance in support of socialists’ apologetics is definitely not their strong suit.

We both could not help smiling (more like snickering) when we heard the latest report on NPR about BLM leaders going on media to lament that ‘armed white people are now running amok’, thereby making their rioters and pillagers to feel unsafe during their public activism.  As odd as that may seem, we hope that more law-abiding people would carry in public, and have the strong belief that rioters assaulting innocents should not feel safe as they are promoted politically on the lamestream.

[13dec21 update]  Ivermectin's effectiveness subrogated to landing a $40M grant.  A leading virologist and researcher, Dr Andrew Hill, republished his favorable findings on the life-saving effects of Ivermectin in order to satisfy the politically correct requirements for obtaining a sizeable grant for Liverpool University.  Given the demonstrated performance of Ivermectin in saving lives during the Covid pandemic, Hill worried about changing his report that could then cost about a half-million lives since his research was one of the main inputs used by the WHO to recommend Covid therapeutics around the world.  You can read all about this tawdry and deadly saga here.  (H/T to reader)

‘Bend over and spread ‘em.’  Our State Dept admits this was the reception our diplomats got when arriving in China and succumbing to their government’s C19 tests via anal swabs.  Understandably Foggy Bottom has been very silent about this new level of contempt Xi has for Team Biden.  This latest foreign policy embarrassment was instituted in February 2021, immediately after Bumblebrain got sworn in.  The insult was first discovered by The Hill to whom State admitted that it was carried out but under protest since the State Dept “never agreed” to the Chinese ignominiously swabbing our diplomats where the sun don’t shine.  This was confirmed by Judicial Watch which filed a lawsuit after State stonewalled a FOIA request.  (more here)

[16dec21 update]  No disaster remains unattributed to climate change.  The know-nothing activists are doing their best not to let the recent Midwest tornado disaster go to waste.  They will be haranguing us with a passel of made-up tales that the whole thing is more undeniable evidence of preventable manmade global warming.  However, suppressed historical data tells a markedly different story of huge multi-state tornado systems with hundreds killed that have devasted that region since white settlers started keeping records in the early 1800s.  But such counter-narrative evidence is no match for the bullshit that now saturates lamestream outlets. (more here)

The Glasgow Climate Change Kabuki

George Rebane

President Biden heads to Glasgow with an empty quiver this weekend in a futile effort to demonstrate that his administration is still hanging on to some vestiges of global leadership here and there.  Most nations have either written off the United States as a worthy ally, or most certainly as a hegemon to be respected.  And Bumblebrain accomplished all that by himself.

Climate change is no longer on the list of important concerns for Americans, and even less so for people of other lands.  However, our leftwing lamestream media keeps up the drumbeat of global warming hysterics with lies ranging from the sublime to the ludicrous.  A major one that hits close to home is the progress of destructive wildfires, the frequency and size of which are supposed to be growing without bound due to manmade preventable global warming.  In Biden’s new spending framework there is $500B or so allocated for various green bamboozles designed to fool the foolish and enrich Democrats’ favorites.

But as Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, reiterates what these pages have reported for years – the acreage of America’s annual wildfires continues to decline, and has been declining since record keeping was initiated in 1900 (see nearby graphic).  This fact has been quietly reported by the World Wildlife Fund, and vigorously ignored by our lying politicians, environmental activists, and media.

In ‘Climate Activists Blow Smoke on Wildfire Fears’ (28oct21 WSJ) Lomborg cites data and again points out how the hysterical scenarios on climate change consistently fail to incorporate the most salient and significant factor that mitigates and ameliorates the predicted catastrophes – human adaptation.  In such loudly trumpeted forecasts, humans do nothing and quietly accept whatever nature has in store for them.  Over the millennia this never has been the case, and most certainly won’t be in a technologically and resource rich future that we can and are building for ourselves.

What our average citizen has trouble parsing is the difference between the frequencies and size of wildfires, and the property damage done by wildfires.  In a 2016 study Nature reported, “Contrary to common perception, human exposure to wildfires increases in the future mainly owing to projected population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in burned area.”

Lomborg concludes – “Helping future wildfire victims has little to do with strict and expensive climate policies, and everything to do with simpler, cheaper measures like better forest management and building codes. There’s no good reason to terrify children with stories of apocalyptic firestorms.”  All of this will be ignored during the Glasgow kabuki.

The Onslaught of the Politically Dormant

"The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living." Anonymous

George Rebane

We have been told many times that democracy works only so long as the takers can’t use the government gun to derive their livelihood from the makers.  Staged governance in a democratic republic was conceived to prevent (delay?) that from happening.  But leftwing autocrats have also known that for over a century, and have always attempted to convince the masses of the non-existent benefits of a pure democracy applied wholesale across the land – it is the fastest way to secure enduring political control by unprincipled authoritarians.

Today we witness what appears to be the beginning of the end with a ‘fundamental transformation’ of our republic.  The Deep State of autocratic elites and their central planners has become firmly ensconced in our government through 50 years of elections by an increasingly under-educated and politically dormant electorate.  California’s failure to recall Newsom is undoubtedly the nation’s posterchild of such misguided elections when we look at the condition of the state and his horrible ongoing policies.  Consider (here) that in just one region –

• SF retailers (e.g. Walgreens) closing stores because their city lets thieves clear shelves of goods and openly haul them away;
• People are moving away in numbers that leads to an enrollment drop in SF schools;
• Polls show that more than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave permanently.

Given Newsom’s overwhelming repulse of the recall, it is clear that the added level of pain to cause a sea change in people’s attitudes is yet to be determined.  And that again brings to question the ability of voters to understand the source and sustenance of their pain.

‘Tax the Rich’ – a momentous Democrat lie

“… until you run out of other people’s money.”  M. Thatcher

George Rebane

The momentous lies retold daily by the Democratic Party are now getting too numerous to count.  Among the most impactive on Americans is their assertion that the $5T+ cost of their new government growth and spending programs “will be zero”.  How’s that?  Well, they’ll just tax the crap out of “the rich” and corporations.  ‘You, Mr/Ms Main Street Snuffie won’t have to pay a penny; what’s not to like?’

For our informed and educated neighbors such claims are truly head-spinning as is made clear again by economists Phil Gramm (also former senator) and Mike Solon in the 15oct21 WSJ (here).  There we are reminded again that “the wealthy already bear far more of the burden in the US than they do in other developed countries.”  The chart below compares the ‘fair shares’ paid by the top 10% earners in the US, France Germany, and Sweden.  Note the enormous imbalance in what our socialists are demanding to what we already are paying to keep the vote buying programs funded.  The tax burden in other developed nations (including the vaunted Sweden) is more equally shared by incorporation of a nominally 15-20% VAT on all purchases.  So it turns out, as Gramm and Solon show, that the US already has the most progressive tax system in the world, thereby giving lie to the claims that somehow the ‘rich’ are getting away with murder at the expense of the remaining 90% of Americans.

Their public copy aside, what the Democrats’ new tax proposals do is continue to favor the top 1% who lower their tax rates by charitable giving and investing in tax-favored securities and sectors promoted by our government.  These provisions actually favor the very rich – i.e. the top 1% of earners, not the 10% - and none of such bennies will be affected by the new ‘tax the rich’ rates designed to hit the less wealthy down the income ladder.  No lamestream outlet is allowed to tell us this.

In the meantime we are having a problem finding enough workers to support robust economic growth.  “Since the War on Poverty started in 1965, the labor-force participation rate of bottom-quintile earners, who now receive more than 90% of their $50,000 average income from government transfer payments, has fallen from almost 70% to 36%. With the Build Back Better Act proposing to explode unearned benefits and shower them on middle-income Americans, how long will it take for the current U.S. labor-force participation rate of 61.6% to fall to 55%, as it is in France, or 50%, as it is in Italy? Who then will pull the wagon and pay the taxes to fund the American welfare state?”  This is what we mean when we talk of the takers and makers.  And who do the takers vote for, and which party wants to maximize the people (citizens and illegals) who draw ever more of their succor from the government?

(And these worthies have no idea what’s in store for them regarding their contribution to labor, once the nation, any nation, falls under the tender mercies of a single party state.  History read is a great teacher; not so much history ignored.)

We are reminded again by Gramm and Solon that “corporations don’t ultimately pay taxes” – their customers and their risk-exposed owners pay the whole kit and kaboodle.  “If there is anything economists agree on—and there isn’t much—it’s that all taxes imposed on corporations fall in part on the consumers of their products and in part on their stockholders and workers. Workers pay between 50% and 70% of the corporate tax that isn’t passed on to consumers in higher prices. The record growth in real wages after the 2017 corporate tax cuts, especially among low-income, minority and disadvantaged workers, bears this out.  So when corporate tax rates are raised, it’s workers and their pensions, retirement accounts and insurance investments, which own 72% of America’s stockholder equity, who pay most of those taxes.”

Again, the indominable man-in-the-street who votes Democrat has no clue of this, or at best considers it to be another rightwing piece of fake news put out by rich capitalists and big corporations.  However, when you run the numbers, you see that “not surprisingly, with much of the 2017 tax cuts made up of corporate rate reductions, child tax credits and a doubling of the standard deduction, the Trump tax cuts made the tax code more, not less, progressive.”  When was the last time you heard that on any of the lamestream outlets?

We can put a ribbon around all this by citing the most recent big three feel-good economic accomplishments out of Bumblebrain’s teleprompter – 1) he has created 5M+ new jobs, 2) unemployment dropped below 5%, and 3) wages have gone up.  Well, not exactly.  Employment gain has been anemic due to government handouts, industry is stifled for lack of workers.  Unemployment dropped only because more people dropped out of the workforce -  i.e. they quit looking for jobs.  And the buying power of wages has declined due to not keeping pace with the big jump in inflation.  Americans’ real wages have declined for the first time since the big Obama dip in 2013.  And all of this is due to self-inflicted harm brought to you by Team Biden and his ballyhooed Build Back Better policies which have a snowball’s chance in hell of kicking in.  But to Bumblebrain, all this is "progress".

Climate Change Policies – Costly and Ineffective

George Rebane

Bjorn Lomborg (q.v.) enlightens us again about the realities of the much-ballyhooed policies to fight what is sold as preventable manmade global warming. (here)  The bottom line is that the agreed on policies of the recent Paris accords, and those to be adopted next month in Glasgow, are both enormously expensive and will not make a hill of beans difference in the future anticipated as calculated by the UN and reported in Nature.  We should also note that no one is even on track to meeting their Paris commitments signed under Obama.

If the whole country went carbon-neutral tomorrow, the standard United Nations climate model shows the difference by the end of the century would be a barely noticeable reduction in temperature of 0.3 degree Fahrenheit. This is because the U.S. will make up an ever-smaller share of emissions as the populations of China, India and Africa grow and get richer.

America’s goal, according to the Biden administration, is a 95% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, which will come in at a cost of 11.9% of GDP annually.  The Left claims that polls show Americans are all for reducing carbon emissions, and even willing to pay up to $200 annually to achieve that.  But the actual cost per person breaks down to $11,300 per person per year.  That means that the annual bill to an average American household of 2.53 people is over $28,500, and no one is willing to pay even close to that by almost an order of magnitude.

Polls are mostly worthless pieces of legerdemain because their questionnaires are ideologically wordsmithed, represent dynamic attitudes, and their results are misunderstood by their innumerate audiences.  Few would answer ‘No’ to ‘Do you favor policies to reduce future crop scorching temperatures and rising sea levels?’ or ‘Should CO2 levels be reduced to what we had in 2005 to stop global warming?’  With one-sided questions like these, no one knows either the effect or the cost of achieving the stated goals.  And yet the policy promoters in government and the media state with grave authority that ‘85% of Americans favor policies to significantly reduce future carbon levels’.  This then is supposed to be the public’s support for draconian increases in our taxes, economy stifling regulations, and added restrictions on our freedoms.  Sleazebag politics at its finest – “A nation ignorant and free …”.