Rebane's Ruminations

Critical race theory lurks in schools (addended)

[Terry McLaughlin is a regular columnist for The Union.  This column, posted here by permission, appears in the 17jun21 Union and its online edition (here).  This piece is the first of a three part series.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Parents are becoming aware of the use of critical race theory in their children’s instruction, particularly as distance learning has given them a window into their classrooms.

Since the California Department of Education in March adopted an ethnic studies curriculum based upon critical race theory, (the fourth version, after more than 100,000 earlier objections), we have seen parents sending open letters to schools and passionately speaking up in protest at school board meetings across California and the nation.

The curriculum presents the view that our legal, economic and social institutions are inherently racist. Critical race theory advocates for, among other things, “liberating” students from capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the second version of the curriculum, much to the dismay of critical race advisers, some of whom resigned.

The 100,000 objections resulted in some of the most egregious material being removed from successive versions of the curriculum, such as convicted murderers of police being portrayed as positive role models and a benign narrative presented about Pol Pot, whose regime murdered as many as 30 percent of Cambodians.

Documents from the Santa Clara County Office of Education, obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo, indicate a series of teacher-training sessions were held on deploying ethnic studies in the classroom. The leaders encouraged teachers to hide materials from parents. One panelist said, “We have to be extra careful about what is being said, since we can’t just say something controversial now that we’re in people’s homes {with remote learning}.”

In Missouri, a teacher encouraged other teachers to remove from school websites accessible to parents any classroom materials that promote ideas such as “white privilege.”

Attendees at a training session in Wake County, North Carolina, received a handout that read, “You can’t let parents deter you from the work.”

Media and supporters have given us the impression that critical race theory is a harmless idea which, as described by a CNN columnist, “seeks to understand and address inequality and racism.” But if these ideas are harmless, why are some teachers and school officials attempting to hide the content from parents? What kind of education program suggests materials be hidden from parents?

In California, apparently even mathematics “upholds capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.” This statement is from “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction,” a set of six instruction books for California math teachers.

The workbooks offer “critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms.” Examples given of white supremacy in math include when “students are tracked,” when “the focus is on getting the right answer,” when “students are required to show their work,” or when “control of classrooms is valued over students’ agency over their learning.”

There are some ideas of value within the 82 pages of workbook No.1, such as addressing errors by students not as failure but as an opportunity to expand upon their understanding of the math concept. But these methods would be of value to all students, regardless of race, economic status, or ability.

Yet the workbook’s focus is clearly and repetitively on how “white supremacy culture shows up in the math classroom.”

Are these workbooks being used to train your child’s teacher? Check it out at https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

Disguising her voice for fear of retaliation, a California public school teacher recently called a radio program to lament about how she was required by school administrators to attend a critical race theory seminar, and was told that “facts, data, and the scientific method are white concepts.”

“So,” she said, “if you use facts and data to disprove an argument against an oppressed person, you are proving you are racist because facts and data are the result of whiteness.”

As part of her training, this teacher was given a 20-page handout published by Epoch Education, a training center in Oakland. The first page instructed her to “Express skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy”.

The document included articles about white privilege and how racism will never end. The Epoch Education website displays a video narrated by program specialist Nicole Kukral from the San Juan Unified School District, east of Sacramento, in which she explains how she created an “equity audit rubric” for use by California districts to evaluate social studies curriculum being considered for adoption.

Kukral instructs teachers to evaluate history textbooks in a positive light only if the narrators were “people of color and other diverse communities.” There seems to be no concern regarding whether the history is accurate, only that history told by western white men should be considered suspect.

The fourth version of critical race theory curriculum is riddled with inaccuracies and omits facts that are at variance with its narrative of oppression, imperialism, white supremacy, and exploitation.

Nonetheless, the California Department of Education approved this version, one which The Wall Street Journal calls “radical indoctrination.” Has this curriculum been implemented in your child’s school district?

Gov. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign into law Assembly Bill 331, which would make it a requirement of graduation for every public high school student in California.

Left to their own devices, children are naturally color blind. We are desecrating the legacy of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King with curriculum that teaches our kids to judge themselves and each other based upon the color of their skin — the very definition of racism.

Ms McLaughlin lives in Grass Valley.

[Addendum]  "A question needs to be put to the left in America. If your adversaries in politics are indeed fascists, racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and bigots, as you describe them, why would, or should, such people accept and embrace your rule over them—simply because you managed to rack up a plurality of ballots in an election? Free elections to decide who governs are, it is said, the central sacrament of democracy. But why should people who are described with every synonym for "deplorable" not reject the politics of compromise and instead work constantly to overthrow the rule of people who so detest them?"    Patrick J. Buchanan (more here)

A more comprehensive critique of CRT can be found here.  (H/T to reader)

Systemic Racism in America

George Rebane

Systemic racism is alive and well in America, and it has been in a fine fettle for most of the last fifty years.  We have our progressive and Marxist neighbors to thank for bringing it to our attention, only not in the way that they have massaged the national message.  All of our divers ethnic groups are aware of what the euphemistically labeled ‘Section 8’ promotions, admissions, awards, distributions, recognitions, … have been all about.  (I believe the origin of this label generalized from 'Section 8 set asides' in a HUD regulation that would assure minorities and low income applicants would get their share in certain kinds of contracting and allocations.)  Black intellectuals like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and the late Walter Williams deplored Section 8 advancements, not only for their racism, but for the explicit message that our African-Americans are somehow intellectually inferior and need special favorable dispensations to enable them to approach par with the other racial groups that participate in our public forums.

In our land over the years Section 8 advancements have been brought to bear to a fare-thee-well.  We all have seen it, and now witness its application in steroids.  (Un/fortunately, my professional experiences also abound in this realm.  And these have obviously shaped my socio-political beliefs.) Today even the simplest of statistical tests will confirm that the public face of our society is racially composed and biased.  The histrionics of the current ‘woke culture’ daily exposes a bevy of new insane interpretations of our language, America’s traditional culture, along with lunatic efforts to amplify systemic racism to bring about ‘equity’, the new scourge of progressive social engineering.

The resulting intellectual rot our Left is rapidly inducing into all of our institutions has, of course, already swept through academe, wreaked havoc in transforming capitalism into corporatism, seeped into the very fiber of our military, and today is finally broaching the formerly secure intellectual ramparts of our technical disciplines.  As we now see, equity is Section 8’s bastard issue.

A specific example that clearly illustrates the above is found in today’s academe – specifically, in math education.  Powerline presents the evidence in ‘Math is hard – hardest of all for the Left’.  From there we learn “that certain Virginia public school districts (and others elsewhere in the country) will discontinue advanced math classes, because (of) ‘equity’, and the University of California will permanently discontinue using the SAT for admission purposes.”  The graphic below explains the Left’s concern.  (Click on image for a larger presentation.)

The article by Steven Hayward goes on to explain, “If there’s one thing the left can’t abide at the moment, it is unequal racial results in achievement tests—tests that, let us recall, were largely invented by the liberal establishment decades ago as a means of making meritocracy count for more than family connections, private school pedigree, and so forth. It is not surprising that the left is turning on meritocracy right now.”

To further emphasize the extent of African-American and Hispanic academic deficits, which must be hidden/ignored, take a look at the graphic below that contains a SAT performance data matrix from the DoJ’s recent investigation of Yale’s admission practices.  Note the obvious bias in the admission of blacks and Latinos.  Only 20.18% of whites in the 10th decile (the top 10% of students’ SAT scores) were admitted, whereas 60% of similarly scoring blacks were admitted.  The admission rate for blacks did not sink to the level of the top admission rate for whites until the black students’ scores were in the 5^th decile (in the lower half of test scores) where their admission rate was still 20.85%, higher than that of the highest scoring whites.

Here then we see one of the actual faces of existential systemic racism that has been resurrected in America.  This is the decades-long fruit of Democrat public policies, especially those promoted by their virulent Marxist anti-American wing under the new cynical rubric of ‘equity’.  To continue in power and our country on the road to autocratic socialist mediocrity, the Democrats cannot afford to have America’s blacks and Hispanics understand what has been done to them since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  With the Left’s control of our educational institutions and the media, there is little chance for them to enjoy any ethnic and/or racial epiphanies anytime soon.  Thus, America’s systemic racism is not only sustained, but also assured growth.

Critical Race Theory and the March of Marxism

[CRT is the most putrid piece of anti-American pedagogy to infect our institutions in at least the last 100 years.  Thanks to the Democratic Party, it is now rampant as it metastasizes the minds of our lightly read neighbors, products of schools that for years have focused their students on America’s sins.  Today CRT is being rapidly incorporated into California’s public schools, government agencies, and politically compliant corporatist enterprises.  Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo recently gave a speech at Hillsdale College on ‘Critical Race Theory: What it Is and How to Fight It’ which was published in the March 2021 Imprimis.  It is the most cogent, clear, and concise description of CRT and its current spread across our land.  It is reprinted here by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  gjr]

Christopher F. Rufo

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

California Catastrophe Chronicles – 17feb21 (updated 19feb21)

George Rebane

It’s time to start a new feature on RR now that the country’s market-mangling socialists-in-denial are in charge, both in super-majority California, and now in Washington DC.  Add to that the other Democrat-dominated states that look to California to ‘lead the way’ with the march to Marxism, and you’re looking at a perfect coast-to-coast public policy pandemic.  Hard to figure how things could get worse.  I’d like to differentiate what these Chronicles will cover from the postings and comments under our Dark Days Diary, which will draw topics from the rest of the country, and possibly the world (e.g. Biden’s geo-strategic, trade, immigration, and environmental policies).  But here let’s stick to California’s self-inflicted auto da fe.

For openers, the smart/productive ones are either gone or still going.  Our progressives have been denying this easily verifiable fact for the last few years.  They’ll have a more difficult time hanging on to their myths when the new census numbers reduce California’s House districts by at least one.

Sacramento demonstrates its incompetency by the hour.  We still can’t get the C19 vaccines distributed in a timely manner to the venues that need them.  Our leftwing bureaucrats (they’re all leftwing) have pissed away a confirmed $30B of federal pandemic relief dollars to criminals, fraudsters, and convicts residing in our jails, and even across the country.  By some estimates, that amount may reach $100B before the monies are accounted. (more here)

And then there are the majority of Californians who can’t quite put it all together.  When presented with Republican and Democrat public policies, the Republican policies win hands down.  This is subsequently demonstrated when such policies are put to a vote by our electorate instead of quietly run through Sacramento’s sausage mill.  But when the same voters look at politicians on the stump, they have a hard time saying no to the scumbags who promise everything and deliver none of it.

This phenomenon is expressed in other mainly large urban areas.  It is most likely due to the growth of national dumbth (topic of an upcoming post) as recognized by a growing group of academics, psychologists, and commentators.  Yes Virginia, national dumbth is real, ubiquitous, and not just an isolated tenet of Rebane Doctrine.

[19feb21 update]  The recall roars onward.  California Assemblyman Kevin Kiley emailed – “The latest signature count is 1,689,000, and "alarmed party leaders" are panicking, making all hands on deck calls to try to head off this extraordinary citizens’ movement.”  The linked Politico article makes for interesting reading about the political dynamics now in a frenzy over the Newsom recall initiative.  The odds of replacing our idiot governor are now a solid smidgen above the chance of a snowball in hell.

Scattershots – 16feb21 (updated 18feb21)

George Rebane

Recalling Gov Gavin Nuisance.  The 'Recall Newsom 2020', and similar movements, reported last week that they had exceeded the 1.5M signatures needed to put the recall proposition on the ballot of a special election that would be scheduled for sometime this fall.  Many thinking Californians and millions across the country agree that Gavin has been a disaster for the state – for openers, bungling the C19 response and exacerbating policies that have accelerated our Great Exodus.  Almost everything he touches turns to crap.  These signature counts have been reported by NBC (here), FN (here), and Newsweek (here).  But that news don’t make no never mind to leftwing columnists like our Union’s George Boardman who confidently reports (here) that only 600K signatures have been collected.  Who still says that you can’t have your very own facts to support your own opinions?

[update]  A correspondent writes me that, “After two months of elected officials across the country saying that there is no need to verify signatures from the 2020 election, one politician is clinging to this very process to salvage his career. Governor Gavin Newsom of California is now seeking to ensure that all of the signatures collected in the effort to oust him be verified thoroughly. What changed? Is the integrity of one public vote more important than another?”

[17feb21 update]  Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk show host, dead at 70.  RIP.

Recall Newsom numbers.  From the comments below, George Boardman’s quietly outdated number claims are deemed correct by none other than the indominatable Steven Frisch himself.  Frisch asserts that Boardman’s couching of “…backers have submitted less (sic) than 600,000 of the 1.5 million valid signatures they need…” makes it clear to readers that to date the signature gatherers are woefully short of the number needed by St Patrick’s Day.  What he seems to ignore is that Boardman’s hopeful report was based on cited data collected and validated by 6 January 2021.  At that time the statewide cumulative summary consisted of 723,886 signatures received by the SecState, of those 485,650 signatures were put through a validation process, and of those 410,087 signatures or 84.44% were accepted as valid.  Over a week ago the various ‘Recall Newsom’ organizations reported that over 1.5M signatures had been collected.  If that validation rate holds, then last week’s expected number of valid signatures numbered about 1,266,600.

All this means that a total of at least 1,776,410 signatures need to be collected to meet the 1.5M valid signatures requirement.  And I'd bet the ranch that today there are at a minimum several hundred false flag leftwing activists out there filling petitions with invalid signatures.

[18feb21 update]  To put a ribbon on my take of Mr Boardman’s column, IMHO he wrote the usual gleeful leftwinger's report of another insipient and pending failure of California’s GOP.  To get the desired message across, he cited a grossly dated summary of gathered and validated ‘recall Newsom’ signatures - a very dynamic process, especially in its closing months - that appeared to intend a miscommunication.  Believing Boardman’s prognosis, the lightly-read reader of his column would walk away thinking that no way in hell could the Repubs get enough signatures to put the governor’s recall on the ballot.  At a minimum, such commentary cum reporting was not valid in any sense of the word.

BTW, the most recent report from the 'recall Newsom' organizations cite collected signatures well above 1.5M, with the intention to bring that total to 2M so as to insure that more than the required 1.4M+change signatures are available for validation by CA's SOS.  We shall see.

Ruminations – 13feb21 (updated 17feb21)

A happy finish gilds everything, however unfitting the means may have been.  Which explains why at times it should be the rule to offend the rules, when it is not possible by other methods to attain a happy ending.  Gracian #66

George Rebane

‘My way or the highway!’ were the responses to the 13feb21 column by my favorite conservative Union columnist (here) wondering how Biden’s calls to unify would work as the country's Left continues to vilify the tens of millions on the Right who voted for Trump.  The strong answer from our locals echo their national response, and confirms that there is no middle ground.

‘On second thought, no witnesses needed.’  After they sobered up, that was the Dems’ second cut this morning at wanting to call witnesses.  The Repubs’ first witness would have been Mrs  Pelosi answering questions of what/when she knew about the Capitol riot and a whole lot of other stuff.  Her testimony would have resulted in either Perjury City (and an orange jumpsuit) or blowing the Dems case, not only for this impeachment, but also for every little lie and dirty trick that went down over the last four years.  No, no, no, can’t let that bird sing.

Our Supes have been pretty spineless during Newsom’s insane lockdown diktats.  There has been no science or logic to back up statewide and local policies to, say, prevent indoor eating at restaurants.  Other neighboring counties – e.g. Yuba and Placer – already have indoor eating as brave restaurateurs allow their customers to decide on their aversion to C19 risk.  In Nevada County our eateries cower compliantly under the leadership of county officials who dare not raise a peep against almighty Sacramento.  Well, today we read Board Chair Dan Miller will put on the next agenda an item “to further discuss state restrictions.”  I guess we’ll now inch forward one vertebrae at a time.

California mistakenly gave convicts over $30B federal C19 relief dollars.  That according to Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-6^th district) who stated today that further evidence has emerged indicating that a lot of that money wound up in the hands of LA and Bay area gangs which they have used to buy guns.  Any past increase in criminal gun violence has always been used to launch the next leftwing assault on the 2^nd Amendment to roll back gun rights for law abiding citizens.  That is beyond progressive logic, but simply a continuing scam to eliminate civilian arms.  Great Divide.

[14feb21 update]  More Covid fraud exposed.  For most of the past year RR has examined the C19 pandemic in detail with analytical models and numerous cited sources.  As reported, my own findings have always indicated that there has been something funny going on in the feds’ C19 reporting and recommended response policies – things didn’t tie, and most certainly did not follow cited science.  The scope of and responses to the whole pandemic seemed to be politically motivated and manipulated.  Early on I also examined the 'excess deaths' aspect of C19 and found them to be minimal as did others (here).  Recently more detailed analyses of CDC releases expose how the institution has played fast and loose with its reporting of C19 cases and deaths.  A summary of the findings are here, and a detailed report of how the data was manipulated can be downloaded here. (H/T to reader)

[15feb21 update]  Equity on parade.  So, the guy who made $8/hr will now get $15.  The guy making $11 gets $15, and the guy who made $15 gets $15.  And as a result, that hard worker is on the bottom again.  (And don’t even start me on the well-known principle that a rising minimum wage floats all prices.)

Covid deaths as you like them.  A regular reader sent the following graphic that he dug up on the CDC website (here).  He makes a cogent argument that IF these reported numbers of simple body counts are true, then there are indeed ‘excess deaths’ (from the projected norm) that can be plausibly attributed to C19.  At this point of (C19 and other) stats flying this way and that, it is hard to determine what to believe, since both journalism and govt agencies have now succumbed to publishing injections of political propaganda.  But for completeness, you are invited to make up your own mind.

Billionaire Bill “has a master plan for battling climate change” and ending our dependency on carbon and other bad stuff.  He will reveal it all in his How to Avoid Climate Disaster that will be published this month.  Using a lot of “analysis”, Mr Gates has been able to reduce the whole thing to “a simple plan” that most of us should be able to understand.  He has started a couple of green venture funds with other very rich people, and, of course, he has a funded a sophisticated lobbying organization that can buy politicians by the dozens.  The latter to make sure that appropriate laws and regs get passed so that the venture funds make a lot of money investing in green start-ups protected from open markets by the government gun.  (more here)

The leftwing commenters to Jo Ann’s 13feb21 Union column have a hard time understanding her point about Biden’s call for national unity.  It was Biden who issued the call, not Jo Ann.  All she’s doing is asking how one can respond to such a call if the Left continues to call people like her bad names and accusing her of doing bad stuff in being a Republican who supported Trump.  Understanding that seems to be a bridge too far.

[17feb21 update]  NAACP sues Trump and Giuliani under guise of violating the 1871 KKK Act as reported in the 17feb21 WSJ.  That is another blatant exercise by the transformed leftwing civil rights group to enlarge the country’s division, keep reminding blacks that they continue as victims, and that they should remain on the plantation cared for by their elitist black political leaders who have learned to play the game.  (more here)

Texans are freezing their symbolic balls off.  The energy richest state of the Union has its energy generation and distribution grid and its energy market in general so badly mangled by its (Republican) state government kowtowing to federal mandates, that there is not enough functioning power generating capacity available as inclement weather knocks out their fair weather wind turbines.  Playing ball with the global warming Left invariably gets the bat shoved up your butt sideways as California already has demonstrated.  Global cooling – it’s a comin’.

 

Scattershots – 23jan21 (updated 27jan21)

When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.” – Barton Swaim

George Rebane

California hides C19 data to insulate Newsom’s disastrous pandemic response policies from criticism.  Surprisingly, AP broke this story (more here), and the rest of the lamestream immediately clammed up about it.  As usual with the Left, this practice is well-established in all autocracies wherever they are implemented.  Don’t let the public discover that their government is wrongheaded, stupid, pernicious, or a sordid amalgam of all three.  Newsom is an established idiot with a penchant for control.  For almost the entire past year his stratagems against C19 have been totally ineffective or markedly underperformed those of almost all other states.  You have to be idiots-on-steroids like Cuomo and DeBlasio to outperform Newsom in governance.  (It takes a union-educated progressive not to know that California is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged one-party autocracy.  And California has them by the millions.)

Speaking of Newsom and the nationalization of California’s failures, here is a compendium of them by CA Assemblyman Kevin Kiley in a 21jan21 letter that he sent to President Biden.  In it he responds to Newsom’s plea to Biden to implement the Golden State’s disasters nationwide.  Have you signed the petition to recall Newsom?

Higher wages increase profits – well, at least “at times”, according to a 23jan21 piece (here) by Ray Fisman and Michael Luca in which they describe ‘efficiency-wage theory’.  This theory by some prominent leftwing economists proposes that paying workers more will increase retention and productivity.  And the cost benefits from these increases, for certain industries, primarily the 'shag and stack' kind, it may boost the bottom line for a while.  However, the special cases in which this may be true are few and far in between, and most certainly don’t recommend a national minimum wage policy.  Leftists who believe that some arbitrary amount, today $15/hr, will result in workers happy dancing in the streets are the same ones who still believe in perpetual motion, and that the moon is 1/49^th the size of earth, even though it is further away.  Henry Ford’s raising assembly workers' wages by almost double and reducing work from 9 to 8hrs/day did indeed increase productivity and retention enough to more than pay for itself.  But that was primarily due to the long lines of applicants outside the factory gates to replace those Ford would fire for not working their butts off for the firm.  This is not today's labor market.  Everything has its market price, and no matter how much governments attempt to mangle those prices, in the end reality will rule.  Biden’s Bunch knows none of this, and will do its damnest to show all how levitation by bootstraps will work.

[24jan21 update]  On vaccine distribution and administration, under its disastrous Democrats California now ranks dead last in getting the stuff out to the people who need it.  And double-dummy Newsom writes Biden to have the nation start following California's lead on public policies a bit more closely.  I guess he figgers that if the rest of the country gets as crappy as we are, then Californians won't notice the difference, and they won't have anyplace else to go, and maybe we'll even stop the recall petitions now circulating around the state.

[25jan21 update]  Bumblebrain’s latest Big Lie is one that is attributed to his victory over Trump, and also the ONLY thing the Dems could claim was his mandate from the electorate – to demonstrate how Trump was derelict in responding to C19, and to demonstrate how his administration will finally get the pandemic under control.  Well, as pointed out @914am below, he has no plan of his own that is better than what President Trump achieved with both the historically rapid development of multiple vaccines (Project Warp Speed), and the meticulously planned distribution of the vaccines to the states using military logistics.  What did the states do?  The Dem governed ones loudly declared that they didn’t trust Trump, and sat on their collective asses instead of preparing their states’ distribution plans.  Today most of their vaccines are still sitting on shelves and some are spoiling instead of saving lives.  But the bottom line for Bumblebrain is that his handlers have finally explained the matter to him, which is that he can do no better than Trump.  He admitted his Big Lie with “there's nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months”. So, on what he got elected, he can’t deliver.  Compare that to the share of promised accomplishments by his predecessor. (more here)

For Sale - White Privilege Card.  I'm selling my white privilege card.  It's over 70 years old and still in mint condition. It has never been used.  Full disclosure - reason for selling is that it hasn't done a damn thing for me! No free college, no free food, no free housing, etc.  Prefer cash but would be willing to do an even trade for a different race card that is much more widely accepted!  Interested?  Contact me on my non-Obama cell phone that I pay for every month…  Serious buyers only!  (H/T to correspondent seeking a similar transaction.)

[26jan21 update]  Dr Fauci has an intimate connection with the development of the Corona virus, a relationship that calls into question his continuing role in the Biden administration as the head of its task force to develop national response policies.  This was reported Sunday night by FN’s Steve Hilton, and comes as a shock/surprise to most of the country. (more here)  It will most interesting to see how the current administration handles what normally would be a politically hot potato, and, of course, how the lamestream lackies then subsequently report on it.  (H/T to reader.)

[27jan21 update] ‘The 1776 Report’ by the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission arrived yesterday in the mail. (download report here)  This is a magnificent document that successfully counters the fanatically anti-American 1619 Project’s version of our country’s history and what our nation represents to the world. (more here) ‘1619’ forms the basis for a perverse curriculum that the country’s Left, supported by the Democratic Party, is injecting into our public schools as the main plank of its program to re-formulate our educational system according to the worldview and mandates of ‘critical race theory’ (full text pdf here).  For that reason, one of Biden’s first EOs was to shut down the 1776 Commission, and bury its work.  To those for whom the survival of the United States as a sovereign nation-state is paramount, ‘1619’ and CRT are manifestations of pure political evil.  Their intent is to fill the ranks of American citizens with people ‘educated’ to accept and comply with our collectivist elites, ensconced in the Democratic Party, whose aim is to meld what was America into a global amalgam of centrally-controlled satraps under a one-world government.  These are the times we live in.

Scattershots – 15jan21 (16jan21)

George Rebane

The Capitol assault reports are getting curiouser and curiouser.  Instead of quickly blaming Trump supporters for the mob action while labeling them ‘seditious insurrectionists’, and then quickly calling the case closed, we keep having reports coming out documenting feds who now admit that they knew in advance that Trump haters were planning to enter the Capitol and visit violence in the midst of Trump supporters who would follow them in.  Here is one such report that has yet to be censored.  Readers should contribute their own pros/cons to such reports.

Also, the entire timing and preparations for the assault viz Trump’s speech is turning into a mendacious muddle.  Law enforcement agencies report that the assault began significantly before Trump’s alleged call to march to the Capitol.  And also that stores of assault equipments like crowbars, etc had already been stored in convenient locations for the perpetrators of violent entry into the building.  We need to be reminded again of the House article that gave rise to the half-day snap impeachment.  From my perch it sure looks like a historical political hit job has just gone down with pre-orchestrated rallying cries coming from both sides of the aisle.  What the hell is going on?  Is this Deep State on parade, while the rest of us are threatened with re-education camps?

California’s C19 vaccine distribution system is, predictably, one of the worst in the land.  Last night FN reported on the relative amounts of received vaccines distributed by the states.  California was next to the lowest with only 26% of its vaccines having been administered.  With each passing day our political monopoly in Sacramento finds more ways to screw up and make life worse for every taxpayer within its borders.  All of this is invisible to our local leftwing lackies.

Big business is making a sharp left turn, as we have noted in these pages.  This is now being picked up (here) by national columnists like WSJ’s Kim Strassel who notes, “Corporate America took a big step this week, moving from captives of wokeness to active accomplices. The legal and political consequences may prove profound.”  One political consequence that will fit the Dem socialists to a tee is that already corporatist big businesses will become protected extensions of the state, taking their operations marching orders from relevant (and possible new) cabinet departments, bureaus, and agencies.  This is the established route from Hitler through Xi Jinping to America’s radical left now going through birthing pains as it spreads its tentacles over the land.  None dare call it capitalism.

Last night on FN’s Bret Baier program we noticed something very shocking to us.  The program’s balanced panel of commenters has recently ensconced Harold Ford Jr (former congress critter from Tennessee) as its reasonable liberal voice.  The panelists currently join the program online from their homes.  Ford broadcasts from his elegant living room from which the man accidentally and momentarily revealed his deeply held values.  He pulled back his video camera so that it showed the room’s center-piece fireplace, and over the mantle on the wall, centered over the fireplace hung a large (Andy Warhol) portrait painting of a smiling Mao Zedong.  The prominent place in a former congressman’s home afforded this killer of over 100,000,000 of his own people made our jaws go slack.  This camera shot was quickly corrected as it became his turn to speak again.  Nuff said.

Grand opening coming soon.

And then there's more suppressed news 'Media Mostly Silent As BLM Activists Clash With Capitol Police'.

[16jan21 update]  Today The Union saw fit to publish my censored 6jan21 KVMR commentary.  (more here)

The Left's cry of "Insurrection!!" continues as they have filled Washington with about two divisions of National Guard troops to counter the predicted assaults by armed citizens.  There will be no such assaults, any more than the mob in the Capitol was the launch of an insurrection.  As I've pointed out, those clowns didn't anticipate any success in getting into the building which was made possible by the mysterious melting away of the Capitol police.  A planned insurrection has a few attendant requirements to make such a label credible.  The most important would be to have a replacement government-in-waiting ready to assume the critical functions that communicates success to the tuned-in masses.  The people milling in the halls of the Capitol couldn't even organize a Sunday school picnic if their lives depended on it.

Covid Related – 26dec20

George Rebane

The evidence against our lunatic lockdowns continues to pour in.  And as fast as it arrives, it is rejected/ignored by our anti-American, pro-control, anti-science Left.  Assemblyman Kevin Kiley writes, “California, with the nation’s most severe lockdowns, now has the most new cases per capita in addition to all the other harms. It’s hard to imagine a more catastrophic failure of political leadership.”  We are truly the poster-child for failed lockdowns and other evidence-free nostrums for fighting C19.  (more here and here) 

Epidemiologist, professor of medicine, and Greater Barrington author Dr Jay Battacharya, MD, PhD has been telling us for months about the foibles of quarantienes and lockdown in the face of this pandemic.  He and a bevy of notable colleagues in the field of infectious diseases have been promoting the diligent monitoring of seroprevalence (q.v.) instead and using that to implement focused responses that target primarily the vulnerable population segments and leave the rest of the people to go on with their work and lives while taking prudent non-draconian measures so as not to solicit infection.  All of this has fallen on deaf Democratic ears as these politicos revel in their new-found opportunities to once more dial back our liberties and attempt to install a new slate of permanent control regulations into lightly-read, compliant minds.

‘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.

Scattershots – 18dec20 (updated 22dec20)

George Rebane

The recall of Gov Gavin Newsom is making good progress, and petition signatures may be collected until 10 March 2021.  Here is the link to get your signature on a petition to recall this hubristic progressive idiot before he does more damage to our state.

Cato’s annual Human Freedom Index just published; it rates each country’s freedom along twelve dimensions.  The top ten countries in order of rank were - New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and Germany and Sweden (tied in 9th place).  The United States and United Kingdom tied in 17^th place.  And it appears that, given the Democrats’ headlong progressive plunge toward socialism, our freedoms will be more limited as Team Biden builds back leviathan and its stifling laws, regulations, and taxes. (more here)

[19dec20 update] California finally has a draconian plan to chase away the rich, and then keep stalking them.  Now going through the state Assembly is “a proposed wealth tax (that) would apply for a decade to anyone who spends 60 days in the state in a single year.” (more here)  I have prophesized this future for us for some years now.  The state has been so badly mismanaged by collectivist Democrats for decades that it now needs to go after the already-taxed assets of its residents, starting with the wealthy, and then as always, working the damage down to the middle classes.  “Assembly Bill 2088 proposes calculating the wealth tax based on current world-wide net worth each Dec. 31. For part-year and temporary residents, the tax would be proportionate based on their number of days in California. The annual tax would be on current net worth and therefore would include wealth earned, inherited or obtained through gifts or estates long before and long after leaving the state.”  The ongoing exodus of our producers will now sky rocket, to be replaced by the new battalions of Biden's border bandidos.  These are topics worthy of discussing with our progressive readers who will not touch them with a ten-footer.

Expanding on the theme that Democrats are butt stupid and evil, we should note some stats over the last couple of years as reported by the WSJ –

• 660 companies have left California,
• 765 companies’ facilities have been moved out of California,
• Over 200,000 Californians have emigrated to Texas, more to other destinations,
• Welfare recipients and illegals continue to arrive in droves to keep the population stable.

And all because we have a political monopoly of double dummies who have no idea how humans behave (‘Tax rates don’t affect economic behavior’) and how to manage a productive economy.  All they know is that to stay in political power they need ever more ignorant voters buttressed by illegal aliens on the way to citizenship and the ballot box (not necessarily in that order), and tax the bejeezus out of those who have money and can still earn.

[22dec20 update]  Corporatists are racing to implement racist policies, and pledging big bucks to assure the new woke administration and their lamestream mouthpieces that they indeed are virtuous to a tee.  But it’s hard to tell where all those millions and billions will be spent to the advertised goal of "racial equity" in lending to and locating in black communities.  And no one is sure that the promised amounts aren’t just coming back to other businesses not owned by blacks.  But the puffing and parading under banners of social justice in the media is worth twice price paid to PR outfits to promote the newly progressivist participants.  BTW, haven't we tried all this at least a couple of times before? (more here)

Misguided Public Safety Power Shutoffs

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 October 2020.]

Dear Gov Newsom – This is an open letter to you from an old and very disgruntled citizen who has spent the last 63 years of his life in this beautiful state.  During these decades I went to school, earned my living, raised my family here, and watched the steady decline of a once golden state.  And I can attest that it truly was the Golden State because I was there.

Today, after decades of a virtual political monopoly in Sacramento, our state has landed on the bottom of the barrel with several other equally discredited states.  We purposely raised our taxes to the highest levels, became the leader in regulatory burdens heaped on our businesses and homeowners, and are now the hands down mecca of the nation’s welfare recipients – one out of three live here.  We lead the nation in the number of homeless, and invite their filthy tent favelas that now stretch from the coastal cities to the Sierra foothills.  Our food and fuel prices have sky rocketed to the highest in the nation.  Our roads, bridges, and other infrastructures are in third-world disrepair, public employee pensions are unfunded to the tune of unpayable billions, and businesses and middle-class taxpayers are departing in droves to greener pastures.

Add to this California’s highest electricity costs and disastrous power outages that now resemble the availability of electricity in second and third world countries, and you almost have the complete picture of where we are today and the direction we’re headed tomorrow.  (more here) And that, because the state’s legislative and regulatory pipeline is chuck full of a lot more of what already pains us.  But governor, this is just a short summary of California’s deficits and decline, about which long and detailed books have been written.  On top of all this, the state’s political leaders and bureaucrats have created a problem that’s even more up close and personal, one that affects all Californians, especially those of us who live in the rural counties.

Scattershots – 29sep20 (updated)

George Rebane

AI remains a mystery.  To the overwhelming share of people AI is nothing short of software magic.  Latest evidence of this is how smart gasoline pricing systems formed duopolies and oligopolies in Germany’s gas station sector.  This surprised the so-called experts who had recommended installing such systems in gas stations, so they could dynamically adjust prices in any given neighborhood in order to squeeze the last euro out their customers.  The AIs worked beautifully, increasing margins up to 30% as they were fed data on nearby competitor prices.  But then someone noticed that the implemented pricing policy resembled that of collaborating duopolies and oligopolies.  Well, no s#!t Red Ryder.  Given their embedded utility function of increasing margin amounts, they would naturally work together to boost prices to the maximum ‘hilt’.  And they did it without any obvious collusion other than knowing what others in the region were charging, and their own sales volume.  And FYI dear reader, it doesn’t take a very smart system to achieve such results.

‘Let my people go!’,  Moses called out to the pharaoh a few thousand years ago, an appeal which we all should echo as we face toward Sacramento.  The lockdown powerplays by our power-hungry, socialist party politicians are doing nothing but provide grist for their anti-Trump propaganda mill.  The CDC has underlined the wrongheadedness of this policy in publishing its latest findings on Covid-19 survival rates –

Ages 0-19: 99.997%
Ages 20-49: 99.98%
Ages 50-69: 99.5%
Ages 70+: 94.6%

For those who have some trouble with probabilities, these survival rates apply to people who have been infected with C19.  To get the actual measure of C19 risk, i.e. the probability that you will contract the disease and die, you have to multiply one minus the above numbers by the probability that you’ll get infected.  Say, that your probability of infection over the next year is a generous one in ten thousand or 0.0001.  Using this number, your probability of succumbing from C19 is shown below –

Ages 0-19: 0.0000003% or 3 chances out of one billion;
Ages 20-49: 0.000002% or 2 chances out of one hundred million;
Ages 50-69: 0.00005% or 5 chances out of ten million;
Ages 70+: 0.00054% or 54 chances out of ten million.

Now how do you spell s-t-u-p-i-d, or is it c-y-n-i-c-a-l?

[Update] Lamestream media continues its policy of fake news, a practice which includes omitting major news events that go counter to the narrative dictated to them by the Democratic National Committee.  This past weekend more that 50,000 Americans gathered on the Washington Mall for a prayer march from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. (more here)  Not a peep of this major gathering of religious Americans was told to the rest of the nation.  To the Left, these deplorables are to be terminally shunned by all politically correct Americans, and that they are.  We have to remember that those denied such a major news event are people our progressives characterize as sensitive, inclusive, non-discriminatory, multi-cultural, non-racist, … .  Were they to be shown such scenes of mass attendance at a prayer march, who knows what levels of PTSD or other psychological distress they might suffer?

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are neck and neck vying for the top spot for the Leftwing Liars championship.  Schumer is currently pulling ahead with his repetition of the Democrats’ Big Lie du jour, that the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett was “illegitimate”.  He does not even attempt to substantiate his allegation with a citation of what law or constitutional provision her nomination and subsequent empanelment violates – why? because he doesn’t have to.  He knows that the most evil part of such material Big Lies is that they totally bamboozle the lightly read voter who has neither the intellect nor the gumption to check out the crap his party’s leadership dishes out.  So, trusting scumbags like Schumer and Pelosi, he winds up voting against his own and his family’s best interests.  And, of course, our local leftwing lackeys will again send in their Collectivist Crickets Chorus to respond to such reports.

Blackouts Transparency

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 9 September 2020.]

Two weeks ago in this commentary I discussed California’s blight of 3^rd-world country blackouts, and argued that the Power Shortage Blackouts were unnecessary and caused by incompetence at the highest levels of California’s state government.  The other kind of blackouts we are being trained to accept are the so-called Public Safety Power Shutoffs.  These blackouts, we are told, are necessary to prevent wildfires like the one that burned down the town of Paradise.  The real reason for such tragedies is that the power transmission lines which cross our forested mountains have not been properly maintained for decades.

Power companies like PG&E have prematurely focused on the administrative and political machinations involved with the mandated conversion to green power.  All this hullabaloo has been going as they have let their existing power lines deteriorate and become invaded by dangerously flammable foliage, waiting for a spark from a faulty connection or insulator to trigger the next disaster.  In short, our power utility mavens have ignored their existing infrastructure required for reliable power generation and delivery, in favor of new, more expensive, and insufficient means of providing electricity for California’s homes and businesses.

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.

Revolution Diary – 29aug20

George Rebane

How do you talk math with someone who believes 2+2=5?

As I scan the morning papers and posts, some inevitable thoughts, idle and maybe not so idle, bubble to the surface.

The above tag line is apropos to the total breakdown in America’s public discourse, and I do mean total.  This week ‘Thousands Flood National Mall to Protest Racial Injustice’ screams a headline with photos showing the usual crowd with t-shirts and signs assembling at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.  None of them know that they are blessed to live in the world’s most racially just country.  And the overwhelming share of them, those not of cynical purpose, suffer from ignorance on steroids.  Along with world-class racial justice in our land, every metric that may have pointed to racial injustice has been trending in the right way over the last decades.  What remains of evidence for residual racial injustice has been fomented and perpetuated for decades under Democrat administrations who have established and administered the plantations of reliable voters in inner cities. (more here)

None of the know-nothings can describe what in their minds racial justice would look like in America.  Their only insane conclusion, embedded by their corrupt thought leaders like Sharpton, is that President Trump is the underlying cause of racial injustice and must be tossed from office this November.  Then with Biden there will be happy dancing in the streets while bullets continue to fly, and the thousands of black lives that don’t matter will continue to drop like flies.  Since they have no clue about or desire to improve black lives, you can bet the ranch that socialist planners are now busy coming up with the next round of rightwing scapegoats to blame for black under-achievement that the Democrats in charge can again sidestep.

Taking the 50Kft view, it’s hard to tell where is the boundary between ignorance and stupid.  How many of them and theirs are intellectually irredeemable?  What dialogues or training remain in the realms of the possible or even the plausible?  It would not surprise me if tomorrow’s socialist planners will lament the premature rejection of eugenics (introduced and touted by America’s socialists), as they contemplate the latest uses of technology for creating Marx’s ‘perfect man’ to inherit the Earth.

A parallel stream of contemplation comes closer to home when we consider the sorry state and direction of California.  In ‘California Needs Ideas’, Holman Jenkins reminds us of the utter idiocy that forms the foundation of our Democrats' obsession with what they believe to be preventable manmade global warming.  “No climate policy is available that would operate on a time scale relevant to California’s hellish wildfire challenge, except throwing enough opaque particles into the atmosphere to cool the Earth. … Anything that greens might favor, such as subsidizing green energy or taxing fossil fuels out of existence, is irrelevant. The effect would only manifest itself imperceptibly over many decades. To boot, it would require the participation of the world’s major economies, including China’s and India’s, which leaders answerable to California’s voters are in no position to deliver. … I make these points to underline an absurdity. California politicians spend much of their time obsessing about a climate change problem they can’t fix. Their state accounts for less than 0.1% of global emissions. There’s nothing they can do.”  In Sacramento stupid is forever, and the saddest part is that stupid is contagious in California – look around you.

Continuing this line of thought brings us to this morning’s editorial in our beloved (29aug20) Union.  Their Saturday editorial reflects the aggregate thought of the newspaper’s editorial board – full disclosure, Jo Ann is a member.  Today they ask us to ‘Imagine if everyone voted’.  The piece begins by recounting the adoption of the 19^th Amendment and the (silly?) reasons people argued against women becoming franchised to vote.  Well and good, but then they launch into a bit of perspective and philosophy to “give us a chance to reflect on where we’ve been, and remember what it took to get where we are.”  Immediately they trip over the much-disproven but still politically correct shibboleth – “The past is a chapter already written and set in stone.”  Nothing could be further from the truth today, if ever.  The past has always and many times over been rewritten by the victors.  Such wild revisionism continues to this day, and there is no sign that the practice will ever let up.  Today’s curriculum about our past is in a froth of wordsmithing that seeks to capture the most woke interpretation of our history to inculcate the current generation of young people. (more here) 

The Union’s collected wisdom concludes with a heavy dose of hopeful fog.  “Imagine what our country would look like if everyone who could vote did, and exercised that right regularly.  Just imagine.”  Before our fevered imaginations can take wing, we do need a bit of clarity here.  Who are the “everyone who could vote”?  Are they all American citizens, or just registered American citizens, or just all legal adult residents of America, or all adult residents of America, or also our nascent middle school students, or …, who?  Our imaginations would be directed in very different directions were we to know who were the intended who.  Given the strong leftwing tilt of The Union, people of my ilk would not err much if such imagining began with some considerable trepidation.

‘Critical Ethnic Studies’, say whaat??!!

George Rebane

California’s public education system has been dysfunctional for years, and now in the age of riots and the growing socialist revolution, it is ready to take its final turns around the drain.  You will not read any of this in the lamestream, because the new curriculum to be adopted by Sacramento next spring will put a nice bow on finally acknowledging that unionized state-run public schools will become literally nothing more than finishing schools in Marxist propaganda.  However, our Left considers that the country’s remnants of traditional American thought still number enough to require the adoption of this new brainwashing initiative not be publicized.

Former US Asst SecEd and Independent Institute senior fellow Williamson M. Evers lays the whole thing out in the 28aug20 WSJ – ‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California.  His report goes a long way to answer the perennial question of how our younger generation has turned out in the aggregate to be so uncritical, compliant, and just plain dumb.  And for the country’s hardworking Orwellians, the adoption of this new mandatory curriculum into our high schools promises that for them the best is yet to come.  No student will graduate without having passed this course.  Dr Evers makes the case that “the state’s new curriculum prefers victimization to minority achievement, and Marxism to liberal values.”

Critical ethnic studies is actually making its second appearance at California’s Board of Education.  The “radical and jargon-laced” 2019 version was sent back for a more “toned down” draft.  Well, it didn’t work.  The new and improved 2020 version not only didn’t correct any of the 2019’s “conceptual problems”, but has now been told by our state’s Dept of Education “to resuscitate” the really bad parts cut from the 2019 version.

Among the litany of dreadful stuff that our students will have rammed down their cognitive craws are the newly focused victim “groups that dominate the curriculum … African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians.”  However, “excluded from California’s model curriculum are the white ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles and so forth)”.  The course will actually “boil down to vulgar Marxism, identity politics, and victimology.”  Among the identified bad people in the world will be America’s Irish and Jews; why? because they have “secured white racial privilege.”

As you might expect from such bilge water, “the revised model curriculum in California portrays capitalism as oppressive and gives considerable weight to America’s socialist critics.”  These critics are portrayed as ideologically correct and pure, without a tinge of bad parts like racism or discrimination.  Yet, as Evers reminds us, “history and political science show that the state can be used readily under socialism for racist purposes. Obvious examples include the Soviet Union’s 1948-49 purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, Jews—and its 1951-53 Doctors’ Plot attack on Jewish physicians. Under socialism, a bureaucratic elite controls all job assignments, news media, courts and the secret police. When that elite is envious, insecure or looking for a scapegoat, what chance does an ethnic minority have?”  Other horrific examples are easily obtained from Nazi Germany, Red China, Yugoslavia, Turkey, … .

All this history is omitted, and will neither pollute nor divert our high schoolers.  For our young minds the world out there will be exquisitely formed so that what they are carefully taught will stick when they hit the streets to look for a job, vote, and demonstrate.  They will have all the correct answers they need to understand and interpret what they see and experience.

Dr Evers concludes his essay with –

The proponents of critical ethnic studies are so insulated by Marxism and identity politics that they miss insights from other fields. The new curriculum doesn’t give a balanced picture of America and, in these racially charged times, it could ignite truly ugly disputes. Perhaps worst of all, it gives short shrift to minority achievement and deprives students of the optimistic view of America. Following this curriculum, students would have no basis on which to understand Frederick Douglass’s defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a glorious liberty document” and his celebration of the potential of a country based on natural and inalienable rights.

All this, coming to a California high school near you.  And some still wonder why SNAFU continues so perfectly to describe the state of our state.  Now you need wonder no more.

California’s Blackout Blight

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 August 2020.]

California’s irregular power blackouts remind us of visits to third world countries.  As with our state’s recent and still ongoing water shortages, these power blackouts are totally manmade.  We are needlessly doing it to ourselves to achieve political objectives neither known nor shared by most Californians.  Our electrical grid is operated by the California Independent Systems Operator or CAISO, the organization that determines the amount of electricity available to the utilities and allocates it across the state.  For years we have known that the politically proposed schedule of switching the state to renewables was untenable.  Last September, CAISO warned that electricity shortages were possible during a normal heat wave in the near term due to our rapid shift to renewable and less reliable power sources like solar and wind.

The blackouts we’re talking about here are Power Shortage blackouts and not the Public Safety Power Shutoffs to prevent the start of disastrous wildfires by tree branches blown against power lines.  The power shortage blackouts are due only to our premature removal of natural gas and nuclear generating stations, and their replacement by sometime wind and solar power.  Gov Newsom responded to the increasing public outcry against blackouts by admitting, “We failed to predict and plan for these shortages”, and then followed that with a tautology and a sanguine conclusion – “Our capacity for storage in particular substantially needs to be improved, but I am confident in our capacity to deal with that”, since the state “cannot sacrifice reliability” going forward.  And with those pronouncements delivered, we continue with business as usual.

Even Loretta Lynch, former US Attorney General and California Public Utilities Commission president, states that “CAISO doesn’t know how to manage the grid.”  Such assessments from Democrat leaders further support that because government has been the incompetent and unreliable watchdog of the power industry, all kinds of games are being played by utilities, middle-men, and generators, as politicians have come up with poorly thought out policies for our state.

The bottom line here is that if we’re to continue progressing toward 100% renewables while providing reliable power to consumers and industry, then we must have fossil or nuclear back-up generating capacity of years, perhaps decades, to come.  Pursuing any other policy today is to guarantee increasing power shortage blackouts and their collateral damage indefinitely.

Looking at today’s big picture for California adds power shortages to water shortages to highest fuel costs to regulatory overburdens, housing shortages, ever higher taxes, homeless encampments everywhere, and on and on.  The result today is that only the large corporatist enterprises and the very rich are the benefactors of California’s still growing economy, as they are immune to the nation’s top tax and regulatory burdens that are visited primarily on the backs of the remaining middle class.  The result is the great California exodus – we export productive workers and businesses, and import the indigent and illegals seeking the loudly promised government handouts that are the common currency for vote buying.  The poor, sheltered from the heavy hand of government for all the obvious reasons, are the recipients of ever-increasing redistribution of largesse.

The most plausible and visible reason for this dismal state of affairs is our long-reigning political monopoly.  Single party management of public affairs has allowed state regulatory agencies to become both indifferent and incompetent.  In all spheres of human activity, competition is the only cure for incompetence, and that applies to single party control of a state’s politics, policies, and administrative oversight.  Dominant socialist and communist regimes have demonstrated this truth for over a century now.  For decades voters in California have succumbed to the siren song of ever more socialist policies promised and delivered by the Democratic Party.  In the final analysis, what we have today we have done to ourselves by ensconcing single-party state and local governments that have effectively shut down all opposing political and policy alternatives.

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

[Addendum]  The major impediment to the availability of affordable renewable electrical power is the lack of affordable storage of excess power that cannot be ‘banked’ either in storage devices like batteries or heated fluids or pumped water, or sold to current users who would be reliable sources of power when California’s generating system cannot meet the state’s needs. The answer is $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent. That’s around a 90 percent drop from today’s costs. While that is entirely within the realm of the possible, there is wide disagreement over when it might happen; few expect it by 2030.  (more here)

Today more people, including productive black families, are moving out of California than moving in.  In recent years this net exodus phenomenon has occurred occasionally.  For example “From 2015 to 2017, California saw a net loss of between 129,000 and 143,000 residents to domestic migration each year, according to census estimates. ... California has lost more people to other states than it has gained for much of the last two decades, census figures show.” And this year’s census is expected to show a net loss of at least 40K residents.  Such losses will be an historical first, since California’s population annual growth rate has averaged a bit under 3% for generations.  Nevertheless, the state’s population dynamics remain a subject of debate and disagreement that all depend on how one counts the immigrant and emigrant cohorts.  But there is no reasonable debate about where on the productivity scale lie the aggregate of workers and businesses. (more here and here)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

 

Returning to Race-based College Admissions

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my resumed regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 3 June 2020.]

Former University of California regent Ward Connerly founded the American Civil Rights Institute in response to the corrupt racism that affirmative action introduced into state government contracting, public jobs hiring, and deciding who would be admitted to state schools.  Almost 25 years ago he launched Prop 209 which was the successful ballot initiative that made it illegal for California to consider race in performing any of those functions.

Being able to award contracts, jobs, and admissions on the basis of race was a big progressive vote getter for the state’s Democratic Party, and leftwing politicians have been chafing for all these years trying to figure out how to make racial patrimony legal again.

In the meantime, race-based admissions into the nation’s universities and colleges has become a much-publicized issue, especially after it was discovered that elite universities were leading the pack with racial quota systems in their admissions programs applied in the most corrupt and merit-free manner.  For these elitist administrations academic merit became a racist criterion when considering applicants for their freshman classes.  Since African-American and Hispanic students ranked way below the Asians and whites in academic achievement, it was clear that something had to be done to ‘level the playing field’ and bring social justice to bear.

The result was that race quotas were pushed to the top, and academic merit was demoted in the ranking of factors that would recommend admission.  The proponents of academics started pushing back when these admissions policies came to light.  However, nobody really cared how the white applicants were discriminated against.  What really hit a nerve on the race-based policies was the dirty deal dealt to Asian-American applicants.  This cohort of minority students always blew the tops off their high school grades, achievement tests, and any other criteria like extra-curricular activities and breadth of interests.  If the new progressive race-based admissions standards were fairly applied to all minorities, the Asian-American kids would have flooded the enrollment rolls.  What to do now?

Well, the answer to the progressive administrations was obvious, lay on another layer of corruption and eliminate any semblance of balance between minority and academic requirements.  If you were black or Latino, you went to the head of the line until the quota was filled, and that was that.  However, when the Asian-American community got wind of such obviously biased and unfair practices, they got active and involved.  The result was that these tilted playing field practices made national headlines with our polarized country predictably lined up on both sides of the issue.

Today, California’s Democrats see an opportunity to eliminate the last barriers to race-based admissions policies.  This week the State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee will vote to pass ACA5, the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn Prop209, and again legitimize race-based admissions.  The 81-year-old Ward Connerly has returned to work with a handful of very devoted Asian-American civic groups to stop ACA5, which most likely will be railroaded through the Senate during this pandemic season without a single public hearing.  It will then appear on the November ballot to let Californians again decide how they want to diminish and demote the state’s higher education systems.  The reinstatement of this corrupt practice will be sold to our electorate under the guise of affirmative action.  In opposition, Asian-Americans against ACA5 know that “If it passes, Asian-American students will be further scapegoated and penalized in college admissions.”  Those Californians who believe in a colorblind society when it comes to government preferences and perks should join to oppose ACA5 on the November ballot.

Should it pass, lawsuits are already being prepared to fight this discriminatory amendment.  And there’s a good chance the case will end up before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs hope that the court would then rule as clearly and categorically as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” (more here)

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

Image of ignorance and/or incompetence (updated 14may20)

George Rebane

To again illustrate what we have been talking about the government’s basis for C19 policy decisions, the above graph and its annotation (from the 13may20 SacBee here) show raw test positive (TP) ratios over time, giving no hint of either the test’s reliability parameters, the tested sample (size and provenance), or knowledge that raw TP fractions are next to useless in low prevalence populations and need to be corrected to obtain actual population fractions to support policy decisions.  If any of these people, starting with WHO personnel and working down to the state level, claim to have a relevant education to qualify them for their positions, they have every right to demand a full tuition refund from the school(s) they attended.  Unfortunately, the beat goes on.

[update]  Here’s another example of what NO ONE is telling the unquestioning public, and no one knows to ask (or even cares as witnessed by RR commenters).  The graphic below shows two curves for a certain ‘infection test’ – the blue one is the probability of actually being currently infected with the C19 virus, given that your test came back positive; and the orange one gives the probability that you are free of the virus, given that your test came back negative.  The test's sensitivity, P(TP|V), and specificity, P(-TP|-V), are shown.  Our prevalence (fraction of population currently infected) is at most 5% or 0.05.  So if your test came back positive, the chance P(V|TP) that you actually had the disease is only 0.333 or one out of three.  That means that it’s two out of three that you are not infected.  However, at such a low prevalence if your test came back negative, the chance P(-V|-TP) that you don’t have the coronavirus is 0.9994, or almost certain that you are virus free.  The problem now is what are you or anyone else going to do with those test results.

Well, if you tested positive you can always request to be tested again.  Given that first positive, if the second test comes back positive again, your probability of having the virus jumps up to 0.826 or a little more than 9 out of 11.  If the second test comes back negative, then your probability of being infected drops to 0.027, or about 1 out of 40.  The question now is, what facilities will be available to do multiple testing on each individual so as to push the probability of infection or of no infection beyond some required threshold that determines what to do with the patient.  The answer is ‘no one knows’ because no one has considered these questions amid the cries for testing and more testing – there is no guidance to the states, and apparently the states aren’t smart enough to determine and announce their own probabilities and response thresholds.  Among all the shouting about testing, that’s the reality of how the pandemic is being handled by government healthcare ‘experts’.

[14may20 update]  As we have been telling readers, lockdown is NOT a solution - short or longterm. 'Stanford Antibody Studies Indicate No Safe Option for Eradicating COVID-19, Including Lockdown'.

Hunker Down Diary – 9may20

George Rebane

Today is HD63 in the Rebane household, and we are beginning to see little stirrings of sanity across California with even timid Nevada County showing signs of developing a C19 resistant backbone.  Now we are starting to see appeals from various late comers for letter writing campaigns to our electeds to exhort them to end our county’s lockdown.  In response, our Supes are now meeting in secret with the county health officer and others to develop plans to return to some semblance of normalcy, having taken the first baby step to loosen things to the level dictated from Sacramento (really a cop out, here).  Many other counties have more courageously and correctly led the state in returning their communities to prudent post-C19 environments of business, commerce, and social interaction.  That one-size-fits-all policies are wrong can be seen from the data on the disparate impact that the virus has had on our country. (here)

The upshot of it all, one that escapes many people and all progressives, is that we will sooner than later end the lockdown no matter what our command/control governments tell us.  This is an easy deduction, and one that RR (along with other conservatives) has attempted to communicate for the last two months.  We can open up quickly and purposefully with a set of broadly agreed prudent behaviors that are integrated into our new social contract, thereby saving the substantial part of our economy that remains and can launch into rapid recovery.  Or we can continue hunkering down toward a complete destruction of our economy so that unemployment rates go north of 50%, and result in a wholesale grassroots rebellion of a paupered citizenry with unpredictable results.

Scattershots – 28apr20 (updated 2may20)

George Rebane

501c3 bets to co-locate money and mouth.  RR’s commenters have over the years made assertions and predictions with such deeply held convictions as to draw more than a smile from the rest of us.  So here’s a proposal (again) – offer odds and a material dollar bet that your measurable assertion will come true.  The bet may be taken up to a specified dollar amount by challengers.  The loser must remit his lost amount to the bona fide 501c3 charity chosen by the winner.  Say, one of our lefties and true believers in Bumblebrain’s November victory offers 2:1 odds for a maximum of $500.  Then if I take a $100 of that and lose, I have to mail a check to the 501c3 that he specified.  If I win, then the leftie has to mail a $200 check to my 501c3.  The bettors will confirm and adjudicate their own bets – honorable behavior is paramount. The comment streams will become the indelible archive of such bets, and I will keep an updated post of all such pending bets similar to how I ran the Dropout Derby.  The aim here is to sanitize RR comment streams from the reams of unmitigated bullshit posted by commenters, some who have the courage to use their real names, and the sackheads who don’t have any perceivable courage of their convictions as they continue spouting anonymous crap in these pages.  I have labeled these as ‘501c3 bets’, and a commenter can challenge the veracity of another commenter with such a bet, that if refused will communicate to all the level of conviction.  My own prediction is that most commenters will be happy to continue just passing hot air anonymously.

Socialist scumbags want others to pay off their perfidious vote buying debts.  For the last few decades our progressives have bought the votes of public sector employees – police, first responders, teachers, pencil pushing bureaucrats, … - through thug-like union negotiations for lavish pension plans that are now unfunded to the tune of trillions.  Today the evil Dems in Congress are attempting to attach to C19 relief legislation pension bailouts for the various Dem run states.  In short, they want future, say, Floridians to pay for the retirements of, say, Illinois state employees.  As Sen Rick Scott (R-FL) points out (here), federal bailouts like these are a very bad policy to begin with, but more so because they reward the continuance of blatantly corrupt and cunning incompetence by liberal politicians in such state governments.

‘You can never, ever trust the Communists.’ is a wise exhortation memorialized by William McGurn writing (here) about an elderly Hong Kong lawyer and democracy activist recently arrested by the Chinese communists for his role in illuminating the illegal conversion to totalitarianism of the former British colony.  The takeaway here is that today communism sports a broad halo of similar ideologies embraced by the greater Left who range from kitchen table communists, through practicing progressive academics, to legions of liberal politicians, media personalities, and entertainers, all abetted by a solid phalanx of leftwing government employees embedded in countless agencies and bureaus across the country.  Their common denominator is the Alinsky Almanac of public propaganda which was first institutionalized by V. Lenin who held that “Communists have only contempt for the ‘bourgeois’ idea of objective truth, replacing it with a morality that holds ‘truth’ to be whatever is expedient for the party at that moment. “  We see that replicated daily in our lamestream media.

Nevada County government is turning out to be a toady when it comes to asserting the obvious fact that rural counties are not the same as urban counties, and should therefore not be forced to adhere to the one-size-fits-all lockdown mandates from Sacramento.  Absent our county, six northern California counties have joined in a publicized protest (here) of the governor’s wrong-headed program to fight the C19 virus at great cost to the state’s private and public sectors.  Gavin Newsom, along with other Dem governors, sees this as another opportunity to ratchet up the state’s power over citizens, power once institutionalized that will be hard for citizens to walk back once the crisis is over.  ‘How Louisiana Reopened After Hurricane Katrina’ is only a recent example of how the government takes and keeps.  Closer to home, Nevada County has now issued a formal legal lockdown order that is to stay in force until 15 May 2020 (here).  The document is beyond byzantine government-speak with detailed exceptions that continue for pages and can be gratuitously interpreted 20 ways from Sunday.  Reading such prolific verbiage always makes me wonder again what happens to otherwise normal and reasonable people after they enter politics.  To various degrees they all become tainted personages who confirm their obvious blemishes by posturing themselves as being exalted by their positions of power.

[29apr20 update]  Anti-C19 drugs are on a rollercoaster ride of acceptability.  First we heard good things about re-purposing hydroxychloroquine (HCL) plus additives as being both a C19 prophylactic and a curative, then the lamestream screamed at Trump for suggesting its use and studies were dug up to show that it didn’t work.  The same happened to Gilead’s Remdesivir, first it was good (here), then it was totally ineffective according to the lamestream.  Now it looks like both HCL and Remdesivir are back up on the C19 Pharma Hit Parade.  As of 1030 29apr20 the Dow is up 609 (2.55%) on news of a most comprehensive study showing that Remdesivir works (here and here), and also other studies coming in showing that HCL also works (here).  A kicker for this news is that several pharma companies developing C19 vaccines report progress is being made much faster than the experts anticipated with at least two candidates going into early human trials.

[30apr20 update]  C19 mortality rates.  A correspondent sent me a link to a website (here) that specializes in collecting data and making information out of it.  Of current interest are the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  This posting covers the age and health factors on C19 deaths.  Analysis of the data delivers the punchline – “both aging and being unhealthy, separately, contribute to a greater risk of dying from Covid.  The risk from being unhealthy, though, is far greater.”  This important finding is backed up by numerous clearly laid out charts and tables from which I lifted the one below.  (Actually, TypePad is partially up right now, but won't accept graphics for posting.  1may20 - and now it will.)

[1may20 update]  More C19 data to assuage the TDS sufferers who can read.

[2may20 update]  The mentality of the Nevada County BoS.  The Supes shut down our local ‘transfer station’ (aka county dump) for a week before wholesale public uproar made them rescind their dictum.  What haunts me about their action, as the most recent and locally accessible decision by government politicians, is how could they possibly have come to such a conclusion to limit the hours and number of vehicles that the Waste Management dump could, should, and would service in a day.  When some county staffer laid such a proposal before the Board, why was it not unanimously rejected in the first, say, 3 to 5 milliseconds?  Cleaning up junk from your household and land during an imposed lengthy quarantine is an extremely useful, rewarding, timely, and safe activity.  Packing your vehicle or trailer with junk and taking it to the dump exposes no one to unnecessary risk of infection, including to Waste Management’s workers who need their hours in this time of economic distress.  All that became obvious to our Supes only after they were overwhelmed with the public pushback that they had acted with blatant and palpable idiocy to compliantly place yet another such unreasonable restriction upon the citizenry.  The item of enduring interest is what went through their collective minds when they issued that edict.  The record shows that not a single supervisor stood to publicly oppose it.  Understanding this same process, as it is historically practiced by politically powerful assemblies at all levels across the land, is important for us as a free people, so that we can be vigilant and work hard to reduce and/or eliminate its effects on our lives.

 

Hunker Down Diary – 23apr20 (updated)

George Rebane

We are now in HD47 and watching how the national lockdown has slowly turned from a health safety policy to yet another political match between the Left and the Trump administration.  These days we do a lot of reading about C19, recognizing new data on the extent of existing herd immunity, greatly lowered death rates, and contagion numbers a bit higher than the annual flu, in addition to the curves already being flattened.  And therefore, by our lights it’s long-past time to end the lockdown; at least start a rapid phased loosening of commerce that’s based on regional factors.

It is clear which side wants maximum misery and economic disruption/destruction in these months leading up to the election.  The party with no policy but continuing criticism of those fighting the pandemic is working wonders to rend the country during this global pandemic.

In the meantime, we note that Placerville has already appealed to Gov Newsom about pulling back on his ‘one size fits all’ statewide C19 proscriptions so favored by socialists.  Placerville correctly argues that it is a low-density rural town which does not compare with LA and the other metro areas of the state.  Meanwhile, our own county and city governments continue to meekly toe the lockdown line, making not a discernible peep to Sacramento as to the growing insanity and hardship of practicing the statewide policy in these foothills.  The correct way forward here is to let the shops and public spaces open, and then deal with any jackboot responses from state bureaucrats – always better to ask for forgiveness than permission.  What the hell can they do to us anyway as other states and regions of similar descriptions are already going on with their lives?

In the ‘don’t let a crisis go to waste’ department, we note that California has now issued a new set of guidelines to start statewide death panels in healthcare facilities like clinics and hospitals.  People will be scored based on age and health to determine their priority/access to healthcare.  The whole process is sold on the basis of “life-cycle considerations” to allocate treatment resources.  The idea being that older folks have already had enough enjoyment out of life, and since the younger ones haven’t, scores based on age should be used in allocating limited care.  There is no provision in these guidelines for other factors like the social contributions that many older people continue to provide their communities. (more here)

I think such an allocation policy has been done informally on a case-by-case basis for years, and I see nothing wrong with that practice.  But bureaucratized formalization is a giant step toward bringing the state into the middle of intimate doctor-patient relationships, and a notch away from new requirements for healthcare professionals having to request permission before providing this or that type of care, and then reporting what was provided and its aftermath.  As most of us know, once this kind of command/control starts, it is almost impossible to walk back.  And within the greater embrace of encroaching socialism, in America it has already started.

In the 23apr20 WSJ Dan Henninger writes a compelling column – ‘How We’ll Live With Coronavirus’ - wherein he argues that human nature will trump egregious lockdown policies, and people will learn to live with C19 as just another disease that needs to be recognized and dealt with in the daily round, much as we did with all the other dreaded diseases before we eventually conquered them.  Extended cowering has never been a prominent part of how people behave – save perhaps under the tender mercies of a KGB or Stasi.

[update] Newsom’s 6-point plan to lift lockdown was released about a week ago - I forgot to mention it above.  On the face of it, his plan ranges somewhere between cynical and insane.  For openers, most of its provisions are either unattainable or will only come to pass in the far future.  You can review them here.  His message to the state’s idiots is a warning that the dependers on relaxing the shutdown would hang on “science, not politics”.  Now that is one the largest cartloads of bullcrap any politician has delivered in a long time.  Of course his decision will depend on politics – the current delay in opening up already confirms it.  The many considerations that will go into his actual decision will be munged over only in the political arena, and science will enter in only for CYA purposes to camouflage some more partisan and self-serving factor that cannot be revealed to the public.

The whole thing reeks of the usual subterfuge used to cover the socialists’ perpetual campaign to remove citizens’ rights and freedoms.  I’m reminded of the ongoing 2A battle that cites ‘gun violence’ as its raison d’etre.  There the Left has been diligent in constructively abrogating our 2A rights.  How?  By not being able to directly confiscate our firearms, they instead continue to pass collateral laws and regulations which make their purchase, possession, storage, transport, use, and purchase of related equipments (e.g. ammo for openers) between difficult to illegal.  This approach works wonderfully with those in the land grouped under the ‘myth of the rational voter’ (cf. Bryan Caplan).

The Second Wave of Covid-19 (updated 15apr20)

George Rebane

[A rewrite of this piece for broader audiences - 'The big decision and the second wave' - appeared in the 18apr20 online and print editions of The Union.]

As we start to turn the corner on the initial wave of C19 infections sweeping the land, people are already talking about the second wave and what it may look like after we carefully restart the economy.  I did some noodling with Epidyne about what a second wave might look like as it takes another cut at us in California.  Our state is thought to have had a large TBD fraction of people who already became immune last fall and early this year through asymptomatic infections.  This is plausible from what we now know about the 2019 timeline of the Wuhan virus.

This assumption goes a long way to explaining why California’s infection, morbidity, and mortality numbers are so low, especially since we are one of the major Asia gateways into the US.  The bottom line here is that we in our state already had developed a high level of herd immunity (q.v.) when the real C19 hit the country in early February of this year.

I ran a number of scenarios of a second wave using the latest CDC max reproduction rate of 2.6 which gets whittled down as herd immunity grows.  And everyone now says that the Germans have calculated the most accurate death rate of 0.4% of the infected for developed country healthcare systems.  Using these numbers on California’s 40M population, and letting the immunity fraction from the first wave vary from 0% (no one became immune) as an unrealistic bookend, to 50%, which most epidemiologists now think is closer to truth, I generated the infected population curves shown below.

The Epidyne model (here) illustrates the highly non-linear nature of epidemic spread experienced in populations with various levels of herd immunity.  We see the impact of the disease weakening as the percent immune increases in a fairly orderly way with little change in the second wave’s onset and its duration.  This begins to markedly change as the immune percentage passes 30%.  Then we see the curves flattening out with a delayed onset and a longer duration.  Keep in mind that the infected cohort is made up of the asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and those requiring professional medical attention.  The latter comprising of about 10% of the infected according to the latest figures.  It is also from this cohort that we derive the mortality numbers.

The table below shows the maximum infected, the maximum hospital load, and the number deceased for the second wave as a function of the initial percent immune.

From the graph above we see that the duration of the wave for the lower immunities is about 2.5 months, and for immunities above 40% the epidemic’s onset is later, of lower intensity, and lasts about 3 to 3.5 months.

We must also note that the above numbers don’t reflect any imposition of a second statewide quarantine.  Were we to take a more reasoned look at what kind of second wave we would have, I would agree with those who calculate that California’s immunity percentage would be very close to 50% coming out of the first wave that includes the cohort of pre-first wave immunities.  Of course, if a second widespread quarantine is imposed that impacted proportionately the uninfected vulnerable and immune populations, then the intensity curves would all be lower and also more spread out.

Important in all this policy making is the ability to conduct immunity (antibody/antigen) testing on random samples from the state.  I have extensively discussed testing previously (here and here), and also introduced readers to Epidyne (here).  And when all is said and done on running these numbers, it sure looks like we should be ready soon to loosen the reins on our economy, and then not be too apprehensive about the so-called second wave - it will be quite manageable.

[update]  So what all should policy makers actually consider as they wrestle with the decision of when and how to reopen the economy?  Items definitely to include involve and understanding of the scenarios I have illustrated above regarding second wave infections.  (We assume they have access to spread models at least as powerful as Epidyne.)  But before that, one needs to take a measure of the situation in answering the question, what is and/or should be the immunity level in the target population I’m considering opening up.  From above we saw that the immunity level should be somewhere north of 40% so that herd immunity can kick in and reduce the severity of the second wave after we have again started doing business in the land.

That decision will again involve another round of testing a random sample drawn from such a population.  This time the test will be for the presence of immunizing antibodies/antigens, and these tests will also have their own levels reliability expressed in their sensitivities and specificities.  More formally these are respectively the probabilities of test positive given the presence of the ‘antis’, here P⁺. and test positive when no ‘antis’ are present, here P^-.  I explained the whole process here, for those needing a review.

The remainder of this update has a couple of squigglies in it that makes it easier to read from this pdf - Download SecondWaveUpdate 

[15apr20 update]  The Epidyne second wave results shown above are now beginning to be described by prominent contagious disease experts and epidemiologists in interviews and columns that forebode ill if C19 returns to a population with a still WIP herd immunity.  They are now doing some Monday morning quarterbacking on the governments' policies of people quarantining, sequestering themselves at home, and social distancing on their infrequent forays to gather their necessaries (more here). Their arguments about “unintended consequences”, of course, make sense.  All epidemics burn themselves out primarily through the beneficial action of herd immunity among the survivors of the disease (else they just kill everyone infected).  But herd immunity is inhibited by premature and too comprehensive and longlasting quarantines.  This means that once the people are ‘released’, any residual contagious agents will necessarily reinfect and start the disease cycle all over again.  I have illustrated that with the Epidyne spread model, generating a number of epidemic return scenarios as a function of various levels of herd immunity being in place when society was opened up again.