Rebane's Ruminations

Sandbox – 20jan22

[I’m interested in how our liberal readers contort themselves to overlook the disastrous first year of the Biden administration – mostly by regurgitating their ongoing TDS affliction.  Never mind 'this is now', keep your eye on 'that was then'.  The recent AP/NORC poll puts the whole thing into a perspective that should be of interest to our liberal poll watchers.  gjr]

Sandbox - 9jan22

[Apologies for such a big interval between fresh sand.  Too many other good topics to address directly.  gjr]

Sandbox - 27dec21

[Well, the old year is going out like a lion.  The whole county got plastered with its biggest snow storm in years, and there's more to come.  Power went out 1215 this morning, and our new 24KW powerbox has been humming along ever since.  Everybody will be ordering propane.  Time to hunker down, stay warm, and pray for RAIN.  gjr]

Sandbox - 15dec21

[Bumblebrain again promises that the feds spending an extra $5T this decade under its BBB plan will be the best thing for the economy since "it will cost nothing" by taxing the bejeezus out of everyone in sight.  You really didn't believe that "only those making over $400K" did you?  What is it that makes all leftwingers terminally stupid about economics and as to how humans respond to armed confiscation?  Perhaps that mental deficiency is a prerequisite for becoming a leftwinger.  gjr]

Sandbox - 27nov21

[While not overflowing, the last Sandbox was getting a bit dated.  So here's a fresh one that you can fill with holiday cheer, or not.  gjr]

Sandbox – 15nov2

[With today’s signing of the trillion plus ‘infrastructure bill’ the Democrat perfidy is made visible.  The bill contain1s so little (about $100B) for actually fixing roads, bridges, etc that municipalities are not prepared to issue massive new amounts of municipal bonds – usually a jurisdiction’s ‘matching funds’ to garner federal subsidies.  Therefore, the outstanding tax-free municipal bond prices are rising and their yields falling.  The infrastructure bill is yet another Biden travesty that misses the mark as the feds (the Fed) continue printing new money.  So the question stands – name ONE thing that Bumblebrain has done right.  gjr]

Sandbox - 30oct21

[Happy End of Fire Season!  Exit question - what potion should one take to get excited about the World Series this year?  gjr]

Sandbox – 16oct21

[Looking at the increasing number of stores with empty shelves and long lines of customers waiting to buy what’s left, we are told by Biden’s lackies that all this signifies another administration success as a sign of a booming economy where the people are exhibiting their ample ‘buying power’ that outpaces the nation’s ability to manufacture enough goods.  The same arguments were made in the USSR when newsreels showed Russians standing in long lines waiting to get into stores with empty shelves.  gjr]

Sandbox - 8oct21

{The Hill reports (here) the Dems are getting real worried that Trump will run in 2024.  One of our readers has specialized in telling all who will listen that Trump's candidacy would be a blessing for our Left.  He should provide his fellow ideologues a great deal of comfort if he would share his reasoning with them.  gjr]

Sandbox - 3oct21

[“Falling Unemployment Adds to Worries About the U.S. Labor Market.  A lower rate could signal that many people are staying out of the workforce, which could add to employers’ hiring difficulties.”  This is among the flood of maladies that Bumblebrain’s socialist policies and promises now causing suffering and hurt in the land.  Has anybody yet found a SINGLE THING that he and the Dems have done right?  gjr]

Sandbox - 23sep21

[My how time flies when you're having fun.  Apologies for letting the last Sandbox get a little too ripe.  At our house we were busy with our last eagle on final, guiding it in for a secure touchdown.  gjr] 

Sandbox – 13sep21

[New revelation about Facebook’s history of selective gatekeeping and lying was discovered by the WSJ and is reported here.  gjr]

Sandbox – 29aug21

[The genesis of our wildfires.  Here’s a topic everyone is afraid of discussing.  Almost all of our wildfires are manmade – they are started by indigents, crazies, and people with a political agenda.  The fires started by accidents and natural causes are well-known, few and far in between.  However, our politicians, liberal activists, and media of all hues treat western wildfires as if they were ‘acts of God’, and therefore their genesis need not be questioned, let alone examined, any further.  Given the number of annual wildfires, notice how rare is there any subsequent mention of arson investigations or what these may have discovered.  It seems that the ‘vulnerable underprivileged’ have a natural right to start fires and then be left alone.  And it is not a stretch to imagine the damage anti-American terrorists can do in a free country by simply setting wildfires with easily fabricated, time-delayed pyrotechnic devices.  But from what the public sees, our authorities neither suspect nor pursue such errant behavior – the fires just magically flare up and cause totally acceptable devastation.  gjr]

Sandbox - 23aug21

['I am NOT a victim'  Worth watching before YouTube censors it, especially by our portside progressives.  gjr]

Sandbox – 14aug21

[Mark Levin’s American Marxism has been #1 nationwide since it was published some five weeks ago.  It is an exhaustive compendium of America’s body politic and can serve as a handbook for anyone researching items of national concern.  It is also a page-turner that contains an enormous number of substantial quotes drawn political writings that precede Marx, include him and buddy Engels, and go on to the socialist literature that has swept us through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, terminating with the outpourings of today’s Left and their more strident neo-Marxist organizations.  Unless you know the stuff in the book, you are at best lobbing small caliber rounds, and more likely shooting blanks.  Levin is a good wordsmith with whom those on the Left and Right should spend time, first, to learn more completely their own ideologies, and then to discover what really drives the other side beyond the daily ad hominems and diversionary dollops of fake news.  gjr]

Sandbox - 4aug21

['If Biden is Serious About Covid, He'll Protect the Border' writes Manhattan Institute scholar Jason L. Riley.  gjr]

Sandbox - 26jul21

[Yet one more indicator that we are no longer smart enough to govern ourselves as a free nation was the most recent WaPo/ABC poll in which 51% of respondents were satisfied with Bumblebrain’s handling of the economy – ignoring literally every related factor that is promoting the economy coming off of its C19 hiatus (thanks to Trump) while blind to the administrations plans to pass tax and regulation legislation to stifle the economy, launch rampant inflation, and push national debt to historical records not even seen during wartimes.  gjr]

Sandbox - 19jul21

[If the US was being damaged even a tenth as much as claimed by foreign state-sponsored rogue hackers demanding money, and we did nothing, then we are over as a sovereign nation-state.  Rebane Doctrine calls for 10:1 retribution on the infrastructures of such sponsoring states; none of this crap about ‘balanced’, 'measured', or ‘proportional’ responses that we might take some day when we really get pissed off.  We’re playing with thugs who worship and understand only force – it’s time to up the ante and convince Russia and China that the price of cyberwarfare just went up.  Gjr]

Sandbox – 10jul21

[With daddy’s help Hunter Biden has figured out how to collect on all of his international graft accounts – the sumbich has suddenly become a world renown artiste, ‘selling’ his paintings for up to $500K apiece.  Daddy and his DoJ are making sure that the art connoisseurs don’t get fingered as their money gets laundered.  It will be interesting to see if/how these ‘Paid in Full’ receipts are displayed.  So, no matter how they are run, elections do have consequences.  Or as Josif Vissarionovich observed, ‘It matters not for whom the votes are cast, only who counts them.’  gjr]

Sandbox – 2jul21

[The Chinese Communist Party is celebrating 100 years of perfecting the ‘Communist Man’ on mainland China.  Without even a close second, the CCP is the world’s most horrendous leading killer of its own citizens during peacetime.  Experts who do such body counts place the number of Chinese who have fallen under the hand of Mao Zedong alone at somewhere between 100M and 200M, and they are not yet done.  My conversations over the years with a number of native Chinese colleagues place the minimum killed at 120M.  It is important to know that these deaths took place over multi-year spans (e.g. during their Cultural Revolution) under the direction and with the full knowledge of the CCP leadership.  Communism, when a dominant form of governance and especially its Chinese version, is responsible for more purposed human death and misery than any other practiced form of such holocausts.  Stalin with a body count of 30M, Hitler’s 6M, Pol Pot’s 2M, and Vietnam’s 2M are pikers compared to what the CCP has been able to accomplish on their road to hone their draconian version of socialism.  None of this history is available to the devoted consumers of our lamestream media.  The attempt to make an omelet continues to be a grizzly business that, nevertheless, looks more and more attractive to our own socialists in their planned efforts to purge the country of ‘racists’, capitalists, and ‘white supremacists’. gjr]

Sandbox - 22jun21

[ (Critical Race Theory) isn’t really education at all, not in the sense in which the term has been understood in the post-Enlightenment era. It is closer to pre-Enlightenment religious instruction: the imparting of doctrinal truth with the practical aim of saving souls and reordering the world. Hence its migration from college campuses to K-12 schools, where its practitioners expect to find supple and more-suggestible minds. They have taken to heart the old Jesuit maxim about the first seven years of life. – Gerard Baker in the 22jun21 WSJ (here)]

Sandbox – 11jun21

[There are a couple of House bills that will break up Amazon and other big tech companies.  “One of the proposed measures, titled the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, seeks to require structural separation of Amazon and other big technology companies to break up their businesses. It would make it unlawful for a covered online platform to own a business that “utilizes the covered platform for the sale or provision of products or services” or that sells services as a condition for access to the platform. The platform company also couldn’t own businesses that create conflicts of interest, such as by creating the ‘incentive and ability’ for the platform to advantage its own products over competitors.”  This would change the face of online businesses; thoughts?  gjr]

Sandbox - 2jun21

[Over the last week or so, the evil party has done everything it could to divide us further and pander to their ultra-left faction and black constituents by hammering the centenary of the Tulsa massacre over every possible channel and at every possible event.  After dredging up the terrible details of that riot of the whites, these were repeated ad nauseum over the days as it awakened and drew predictable expressions of rage from the Left and black leaders.  Does anyone think that this kind "racial catharsis" has left us more united?  (more here) gjr]

Sandbox – 22may21

[My ongoing reunification commentaries saga with The Union augments what we’ve discovered in these pages - that grassroots leftwingers have no clue about the kind of America that their elite leadership has chosen for us, and are now implementing through a bevy of misguided policies not experienced in decades.  They’re ignorant of it because their more recent schooling did not reveal collectivist objectives, or because they only consume lamestream outlets which dutifully deny that the Democrats seek to instill the trappings of collectivism in the America they intend to uniformly pauper (equity) with their socialist nostrums.  These assume the classic historical format of the Left, applied devastatingly over the last century, that includes summarily politicizing science, education, and economics to fit their overarching narrative.  gjr]

Sandbox - 11may21

[Many apologies for letting the last sandbox getting a bit overfilled.  We are now in the Houston terminal waiting to board our flight to Sacramento - it’s been a long three weeks and we’ve seen a lot of our US of A that has changed so much from the pre-Covid days.  Everywhere you turn, insanity rules.  Much more to be said about the fundamental transformation now in full swing.  Gjr]