Rebane's Ruminations

Today’s ChatGPTs are robustly left-leaning

George Rebane 

In ‘The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation’ three German academicians - Jochen Hartmann, Jasper Schwenzow, and Maximilian Witte – publish the result of an early milestone study that confirms what many ChatGPT users have already experienced.  To give you more than an idea of its contents, here is the paper’s opening abstract in its entirety.

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts how humans interact with technology. Recently, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art dialogue model that can converse with its human counterparts with unprecedented capabilities. ChatGPT has witnessed tremendous attention from the media, academia, industry, and the general public, attracting more than a million users within days of its release. However, its explosive adoption for information search and as an automated decision aid underscores the importance to understand its limitations and biases. This paper focuses on one of democratic society’s most important decision-making processes: political elections. Prompting ChatGPT with 630 political statements from two leading voting advice applications and the nation-agnostic political compass test in three pre-registered experiments, we uncover ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian ideology. For example, ChatGPT would impose taxes on flights, restrict rent increases, and legalize abortion. In the 2021 elections, it would have voted most likely for the Greens both in Germany (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and in the Netherlands (GroenLinks). Our findings are robust when negating the prompts, reversing the order of the statements, varying prompt formality, and across languages (English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). We conclude by discussing the implications of politically biased conversational AI on society.

In the paper’s conclusions the authors state –

As political elections are one of the most consequential decision-making processes of democratic societies, our findings have important ramifications. Moreover, the “partisan content” that ChatGPT automatically generates at unprecedented scales may attract users who share similar beliefs. In turn, the feedback that OpenAI actively solicits from its user base to improve its model outputs may amplify and perpetuate this ideological bias in a vicious circle. As automated chatbots have the potential to influence user behavior, it is crucial to raise awareness about these breakthrough systems’ flaws and biases.

Thet then point out the meticulous care that was taken to ‘fine tune’ ChatGPT which included mediation by humans in the attempt to remove ideological bias.  The obvious inference here is that there exist unbiased humans with demonstrated processes that can politically sanitize (neutralize?) right/left tilts.  To my knowledge no such individuals have yet to be identified who are acknowledged by both sides to possess such neutral attributes and the talents to apply them.  If we can’t find genuine middle-roaders among ourselves, what chance to we have of training politically vanilla chatbots to advise us with such problems as public policies and elections?

From my perch during these pre-Singularity years, I recommend taking the ideological opinions and political advice of AIs in the same manner as one accept that from any other intelligent and selectively informed being.

‘Democracy Dies in California’

“To impose a new burden on fast-food restaurants, the state plans to ignore the constitution’s right of voters to review laws.”

George Rebane

California suffers a continuous stream of social, economic, and political disasters.  All of these are formulated, brought to bear, and implemented by the state’s virulently anti-American Democratic Party.  Most of the public policy tragedies arrive unknown and unannounced to the state’s shrinking share of maker residents.  The takers don’t care since they know that all the wealth transfer programs, no matter how scurrilous, all go to buy and pay for their votes.

The latest of these promises an historic change in how California’s referenda will now be treated.  Slated to go into effect tomorrow (1jan23) – “The law creates a state council to dictate wages, working conditions and benefits, among other things, for fast-food workers who aren’t unionized. The law is intended to coerce fast-food franchises to surrender to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).” (here)

What’s different is that this law was passed late in the legislative session to deny Californians any reasonable review of the matter.  However, an astute watchdog organization, Save Local Restaurants, has gathered over a million signatures on a petition opposing the referendum and filed it with the state.  According to California’s constitution “a law is required to be put on hold once a referendum petition with enough signatures is filed.”

The constitution is very specific about this 1911 amendment which reserves “to the people the power to pass judgment upon the acts of the legislature, and to prevent objectionable measures from taking effect.” Once a referendum is filed, “no such act or section or part of such act shall go into effect until and unless approved by a majority of the qualified electors voting thereon.”

The state is ignoring its constitution, and has stated it will “temporarily” implement the law until the signatures are verified, a task that will be completed sometime in October 2023.  At that time the law will either be withdrawn or made permanent.  Such an unconstitutional, temporarily-in-effect provision has never been attempted before.

If allowed to stand, this legislative tactic – passing bills late in the legislative calendar in order to limit their opponents’ ability to stop them from taking effect - will become yet another tool and precedent for our monopoly political party to continue its destruction of California.  Sleazebags on parade.

The only remaining hope on this is an order by a state judge prohibiting enforcement of the law until a hearing is held in two weeks.  Else “businesses would have to temporarily comply even though the laws may be later suspended once signatures are verified and eventually overturned by voters.”  So it is no surprise that we continue to witness large numbers of our businesses and people vote with their feet by leaving California.

The Kennan/Byrnes Foreign Policy Conundrum

George Rebane

I recently finished reading a most fascinating and informative account of the international geo-strategic process of decision making by the Allies during WW2.  The work titled Speaking Frankly (1947) by James F. Byrnes (here), diplomat, jurist, and politician extraordinaire, was a command performance and hit the top of the charts when it was published in October 1947.  (In these pages we first met Byrnes in ‘America’s Foreign Policy’)

Byrnes concludes his ‘diplomatic chronology’ of the war with new challenges for making and keeping the peace after hostilities ended in 1945.  The problem was the USSR.  Dealing with them had been difficult during the war since they were ousted from the Axis powers by Hitler’s double-cross in 1941, after which they quickly became the second (some say ‘first’) front of the Allies against the Nazi war machine.

Byrnes concludes his considerable tome with the Book IV chapters ‘Building a People’s Foreign Policy’, ‘Control of Atomic Energy’, ‘What Are the Russians After?’, ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’.  It is the last two chapters that concern us.

But before we consider these, let’s turn to George F. Kennan (here), accomplished and enigmatic diplomat with some outrageous social views.   More importantly, he was our Russia expert, fluent in Russian, who during the war in 1944 was made ‘deputy chief of mission’ in Moscow under ambassador Averill Harriman.  During this service Kennan developed a detailed and highly accurate understanding of the USSR, Stalin, and the international communist movement.  He was the vociferous critic of America’s foreign policy who launched his post-war career with the now famous ‘Long Telegram’ (1946) which he sent to President Truman through his then SecState boss James Byrnes.

So here comes the conundrum.  Byrnes, who experienced the long, detailed, and frustrating negotiations with the Russians firsthand during and after the war, concluded that Soviet leaders were a bunch of totalitarian lying sonsabitches who could not be trusted to carry out the provisions of any treaty that they finally deigned to sign.  Time and again he watched the Soviets undermine duly elected/established post-war, east European governments, and bring them under communist regimes in preparation for ultimate membership in the USSR’s expanding coterie of soviet republics and compliant client states when the Iron Curtain finally dropped in the spring of 1948.

Yet Byrnes kept trying to wring out of the Soviets the remaining and still missing peace treaties with major governments like Germany and Italy, which were now occupied countries under martial law administered within the framework of the existing armistices that each signed after the guns were silenced.  Truth be told, an overarching reason for Byrnes continuing to treat the USSR honorably was to employ and promote the functions of the then nascent United Nations, the institution in which many in the free world had faith in becoming the successful international peacekeeper.

Election 2022 – America’s Voters Tested (updated 15nov22)

George Rebane

So, election day 2022 is finally here.  It arrived with a months-long preamble of leftwing lies about the current state of the country and the portents for its future were we to deviate from the sorry road that got us to where we are under this administration.  The question now is how many of us believed the crap spewing from the White House, Congress, and their lamestream lackies.  And yes, it is the most momentous election since I started paying attention in my pre-teen years.  Communists of all stripes used to be pariahs in the American political menagerie.  Not anymore.  Now communism is being taught in our schools as one of the more beneficial ways to organize society after we rid ourselves of the capitalist democratic republic that we have had foisted on us.

The fault is not with our politicians, it lies upon those of us who put them in positions of power.  “A republic, if you can keep it.”

[9nov22 update]  The much-vaunted Red Wave has now turned out to be recognized nationally at best as the Red Ripple – and that appellation is still hopeful since neither the House nor Senate results are yet in.  Our Nevada County went predictably Democratic – RR has acknowledged for years that the county is blue, not quite as badly as California, but close enough for government work.  So what happened yesterday and its weeks-long preamble of early voting was a disaster for our republic.  My takeaways can be enumerated as follows –

1. The irretrievable decline of our constitutional republic is confirmed. The fraction of our electorate that is terminally ignorant of collectivist governance, economics and capitalism, the beneficial role of entrepreneurship and financial risk, elements of science, American history and history in general, AND the basic skills of literacy and numeracy has now breached the 50% level. (cf National Center for Educational Statistics)
2. The effectiveness of our progressive educational institutions working in tandem with our compliantly propagandized Fourth Estate is beyond question when it comes to the kind of learning and related behavioral changes that are still possible for our adult population to again support capitalism and American constitutionalism. There is no feasible road back from collectivism and collectivist dogma for a major share of the American electorate whose post-reasonable belief systems have become immune to evidence.
3. The Republican party is not an effective alternative to the Democrats, and continues to shrink its political efforts to champion the nation’s Right, which currently has no viable alternative through which to seek ideological resurgence.
4. The fork in the road of our national future lead to autocracy cum tyranny or the Great Divide. The peaceful resolution would be a negotiated Great Divide, the several forms of which have been discussed in these pages.  What stands in the way is that the Right wants to separate from the Left, but the Left wants to prevent separation and favors controlling a subdued, subservient, and shrinking Right.  This is made clear daily by their political leaders and media talking heads.
5. The above asymmetries to governance and social order are uniform across the land and visible daily even in our little rural county. In today’s Union, its op-ed pages featured a skewed admonishment of the newspaper’s political orientation which has faithfully represented the county’s invasion by coastal liberals who have soiled their former homes.  The paper does print rightwing authors whose sparse offerings are regularly decried for being allowed in print in a community with a majority leftwing population.  Such illustrative responses to inhibit free speech and opposing views are innately foreign to people of the Right.
6. No matter what the final counts will indicate, this election has proven to be a disaster for Republicans. Never since FDR’s atrocious New Deal policies have we witnessed a more incompetent, corrupt, and corrupting administration with ample evidence of its doings becoming increasingly available over the months.  The hopeful sentiment was that this much government corruption, imbecility, and anti-Americanism will surely make an impact on leftwing constituencies.  The results didn’t pan out and gives proof to the indelible mentality of the main street Left.  (The polls have been worthless, no good ways of random sampling remain in this age of screened telecommunications.)
7. The only glimmer that has come out so far is some visible migration of Hispanics and blacks away from the devastating inflation and crime that the Biden administration has brought about over the last two years. But even that was not enough keep the wave from turning into at best a ripple.

Coda: Apparently I’m not alone in the assessment of the American electorate.  Stephen Kruiser of PJ Media writes, ‘We're Done–American Voters Are Idiots’.

[15nov22 update] 'Tragically Trump' is Victor Davis Hanson's major essay on the election, the role of Trump, and the Republican Party's future that heavily depends on what Trump will do now.  I don't believe he will go quietly into the dark night of political has-beens.  H/T to commenters who also picked up on VDH's commentary.

America’s Ingrained Indelible Ignorance

George Rebane

Union columnist Terry McLaughlin penned an important column in today’s (3nov22) newspaper titled ‘Perceptions and reality’.  In there she cited studies from academe and data from government agencies about the large deficits in what our adult population, which includes the electorate, knows about our country and what beliefs they actually use on which to base their decisions.  The information derived from academic surveys paints a picture of a population that has almost no knowledge about the important parameters that define the country they live in.  McLaughlin does an excellent job in summarizing the skewed view our neighbors have about America.

For example, Americans’ average belief in share of adults who belong to unions is 36 % to the actual value of 4%.  They believe that about 26% of American household incomes exceed $500,000 when the real share is about 1%.  They also think that about 41% of Americans are black when the reality is approximately 14%.  The numbers are 39% for Hispanics instead of 17% according to the census.  We believe that 30% of us are homosexual when again the real number is 3%; that 21% are transgender which in reality is 0.6%.

It's not hard to attribute the reason we have such a grossly misinformed citizenry.  Almost all of them have been educated by barrel-bottom teachers in unionized public schools which promote the country’s leftwing narrative, and that recently have started incorporating various neo-Marxist ‘critical’ curricula based on the teachings of the Frankfurt School (more here).  All of these educational institutions, even at the university level, are teaching the country to believe that there is a new norm in place that is markedly different from what the older folks were taught and grew up with.  And all of this is reinforced daily by the preponderant leftwing (aka lamestream) media.  When we look at its emphasized news items, ads and commercials, and entertainment program contents, we see such skewed population shares being foisted on the consuming audiences with brains in neutral.

And to put a bow on this state of our nation, McLaughlin cites "research (that) seems to indicate that shining a light on public misperceptions and providing accurate data may have little or no impact on changing the firmly held positions and opinions of Americans on almost any topic."

The lament of those who are not so encumbered is what will this existential plurality take into the voting booth next Tuesday.  Looking at the condition of our country, and especially California, we know how they have mis-marked their ballots in the past.  Given the hysterical level of daily lies from the Left – the economy is sound, crime is low, borders are secure, Republicans will destroy democracy, wind and sun will replace fossil fuels, higher taxes and more regulations are good, … - does not promise anything better from the upcoming mid-term election.  But then again, I may be wrong.  Even a pecking blind chicken will eventually find a seed.

Scattershots – 12oct22 (updated 16oct22)

California is a warning to the nation.  Kevin Kiley

George Rebane

Unhinged leftwinger op-ed in the 12oct22 Union. (here) In this community the ideological sentiments (aka blinders) of Ms Cheryl Cook are well known.  In today’s column she corroborates her reputation as a woke progressive who strives for a world repulsive to anyone to the right of Joe Manchin.  She highlights her ignorance from the gitgo with “At River Valley High School in Yuba City recently, it was three shirtless Black students who suffered humiliation during a videotaped mock slave auction. They were lined up against a wall with objects hanging from their bowed heads while they were yelled at and assigned monetary values by a few Varsity football team members.  That’s humiliation! That’s embarassment!(sic) Yes, sir! Right there in Yuba City, California. With a capital C, that rhymes with C, that stands for Cruel.  Ever wonder how the pain of unresolved history is inherited by our own children?”  Anyone with a minimum room temp IQ knows that this was an historical enactment willingly participated in by the black students wanting to graphically act out the unsavory and tragic aspects of US history.  From there Ms Cook’s screed goes down hill winding up with the assertion that MAGA Americans are Nazis equivalent to those of pre-WW2 fascists who brought Hitler to power.  And, of course, you know who is the MAGA-Hitler.

Democrats continue their reputation as the anti-science party while loudly claiming the Alinsky alternative.  The Steamboat Institute had a hell of time putting together debates on college campuses on the resolution: “Climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”  Dr Steve Koonin, MIT theoretical physicist and prominent author (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters), has agreed participate in all three scheduled debates to argue the negative.  When this became known to the leftwing ‘scientists’ proclaiming climate hysteria, they went ballistic.  Ms Jennifer Schubert-Akin, CEO of the Steamboat Institute, informs us (here) that “Some of the responses we received from well-known climate scientists and academics stated that we are “wildly irresponsible” for giving Mr. Koonin a platform, that there is “no room for debate on these issues,” and my favorite, from a well-known climatologist who is on Reuters’s “Hot List” of the world’s top climate scientists: “I don’t debate climate science. It’s a poor way to get at the truth.”  To socialists, the way to truth, goodness, and light is take Marxist maxims as ex cathedra.

Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.  For those truly interested (and concerned?) about climate change, here is a look at it from an apolitical perspective and one that really relies on all that science has to offer on the subject.   “The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC, as its name suggests, is an international panel of scientists and scholars who came together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. NIPCC has no formal attachment to or sponsorship from any government or governmental agency. It is wholly independent of political pressures and influences and therefore is not predisposed to produce politically motivated conclusions or policy recommendations.”

[15oct22 update]  ‘How EVs Can Power the Grid’  Well, they can’t really do that today, but governments are keenly interested in using the increasing number of EV batteries as a distributed storage cache for electricity.  These EVs will have bidirectional inverters that let you plug in and charge your EV or, when the utility decides, then to drain your battery for the greater good of the grid users.  Utrecht in Holland is leading the way in studying this possibility with the city’s EV charging stations.  Implementing this V2G capability will give someone else the ultimate control of your EV - whether you can drive it or not, when and how far.  No grousing allowed; it’s for the common good you see.  (more here and here)

[16oct22 update] ‘The Biden Admin Has Been A Chaotic Disaster. But Will It Matter?’ That is my perennial question; are there enough Americans informed and smart enough to make it count in the voting booth?  The affirming evidence is hard to find. Jared Whitley of the Daily Caller writes, “The first two years (God help us, it’s just been two years) of the Biden Administration have been an irrefutable disaster. Biden has wiped out $9 trillion in wealth from the stock market. The rate of inflation is 8.2%, four times what it was under former President  Donald Trump. The cost of energy is up almost 33%, whereas Trump sold oil to the Middle East. … After a 25-year trend of decreasing violent crime across the country, hopelessly blue cities have seen a spike, with murder rates up 44% since 2019! … The president is himself a barely coherent, maladroit zombie. Whereas the corporate media roasted George W. Bush for saying nucular instead of nuclear, today they blissfully ignore the gaffes of a man who was gaffe prone even before he was senile.’ (more here)

Thus spake VDH

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.

 To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.

 Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.

 So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often unforgiving nature.

 But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.

 As a result, the once-prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.

 We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.

 We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish Green New Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age—as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.

 But meanwhile, Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.

 Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.

 What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.

 The Biden administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.

 When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.

 The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that they might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.

 The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals.

 It’s not to hector soldiers based on their race. It’s not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It’s not to become a partisan political force.

 The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes such as Iran.

 At home, the Biden administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.

 Utter chaos followed. Three million migrants have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high school diplomas, or capital.

 The streets of our cities are anarchical—and by intent.

 Defunding the police, emptying the jails, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It’s now open season on the weak and innocent.

 America is racing backward into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure them exemption from punishment.

 Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.

 But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support—as green nihilists are attempting—and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.

 Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.

 So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed, and sheltered America.

 Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite—terrified of what they have wrought—selfishly retreat to their private keeps.

 But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism can’t even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.

 As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization.

 When stripped away, we’re relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.

 Victor Davis Hanson

Dark Days Diary – 30sep22 (updated 1oct22)

George Rebane

Sen Joe Manchin has turned out to be another double dummy political hack and a major disappointment, succumbing to the predictable and obvious wiles of Sen Schumer.  Ol’ Joe had us all fooled during the past year as being the staunch stalwart, along with Sen Sinema (D-AZ), against the economic ruin the Dems were cooking up with their Inflation Reduction Act bamboozle.  They got Joe’s vote with the promise of including his pipeline and permit facilitation bill, which most on the Right correctly saw as Lucy’s football.  Now that the bill has no chance of passing as is, Manchin’s reputation is in the mud with Republicans, moderate Democrats (vanishing breed), and, of course, his West Virginia constituents who expected more than the meadow muffins he wound up delivering.  Tough to see how he’ll ever recover.  (more here, here, and here) 

Fire tax – Nevada County voters will have a chance to vote down the proposed ½% sales tax increase that’s supposed to fund wildfire prevention and mitigation.  Actually, the collected monies will go into the general fund where the Supes promise they will be carefully watched and audited by a “citizens oversight committee”.  California’s Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association warns us once more (here) how such taxes will be misused as they have been in the past.

J6 show trial postponed closer to election – Moving the century’s biggest-to-date show trial closer to the election again tells you all you need to know about this hyper-partisan kabuki theater.  The Dems have no viable platform or record of achievements to present to the voters, so all they have left is to pump up the J6 hysteria of imminent attacks by Trump led ultra-right MAGA white supremacist terrorists.  The real tragedy is that there are millions of muddle minded Americans who swallow this political swill. (more here)

Dems’ Big Lies – As opposed to counting Trump’s political bombast as lies, the real material lies that continue unabated from the Left need to be reviewed, revived, and reinserted into the public’s attention span.  This, of course, is the job of the Republicans who have not shown much political moxie in keeping these highlighted in the public fora.  Oh, to again have two viable political parties.  Here is the list from a recent post -  

When the dissemination of prime-time, first-rate whoppers comes up for discussion, our leftwing neighbors, both national and local, volubly maintain that both sides are at least equally guilty, with the Republicans dispensing the majority.  By any comparative listing of such poetic truths (aka Big Lies), the contest is not even close, nor has it ever been.  Historically socialists are the big liars, for that is the requirement for their public square bamboozles to gain any traction in governance.  Today’s examples overwhelm –

‘Our southern border is secure, there is no border crisis’,

‘Crime rates are not up, there is no urban crime wave in America’,

‘Increasing taxes will not exacerbate the ongoing stagflation’,

‘Increasing taxes will grow the economy’,

‘Tax rates do not affect investment and productivity’,

'You can keep your doctor ...',

'Obamacare will reduce national healthcare costs',

‘Fossil fuels are bad and unnecessary; our energy needs can be met entirely by renewables’,

'America is better off being energy-dependent on foreign suppliers,'

‘Illegal immigration and illegal aliens in the workforce are necessary for economic growth’,

‘Capitalism and minimally regulated markets are arbitrary, cruel, and don't work’,

‘Men and women are exactly the same, making sexual distinction racist and unnecessary’,

‘Christians are intolerant’,

‘Trump’s collusion with the Russians swung the 2016 election’,

‘The tenets of Critical Race Theory are not taught in our K-12 schools’,

‘Merit based education (especially in STEM subjects) is racist’,

'Western culture is intrinsically racist',

‘America is a systemically racist country’,

‘Blacks don’t overwhelmingly kill blacks, cops gratuitously kill blacks,’

‘Government enforced equity motivates better than equal opportunity,’

‘Multi-cultural factionalism serves to unite America,’

… and on and on.

[1oct22 update]  Competing for the biggest of the Dems’ big lies is their ‘Republicans want to destroy the Constitution, censor free speech, do away with our freedoms, and establish a totalitarian state.’  This message to their cognitively constrained constituents is Alinsky and Lenin on steroids, each part being exactly 180 from their own daily demonstrated policies and activists on the march.  Today’s fragmented conservative pro-life movement is as close as any leftist can get to some Republicans wanting to limit your freedom to kill your unborn child.  Other than that, it is ONLY the Republicans who work for fewer regulations, lower taxes to support a smaller government, and a nation of constitutional laws instead of a corrupt and growing administrative neo-Marxist state.  And to put a bow on it, today’s Republicans leave a lot to be desired in their efforts to keep our republic.

[2oct22 update]  One of our astute readers and commenters posted a link to a recent VDH piece, ‘The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization’.  In communicating the current state of western civilization, the good professor has again hit it out of the park.  Definitely a must read and share.  One wonders how much of such writing is comprehensible to our Left.  Dark days indeed.

Underserved, really?

George Rebane

Underserved groups used to describe populations without adequate access to goods and services, e.g. education, medical care. This included rural, elderly, low-literacy, blue collar, and poor populations. Minorities (i.e. Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, transphiles, illegal aliens, …) per se were not included, but often belonged to one or more or the included categories.  The current politically correct definition first and foremost characterizes all minorities as being underserved, and therefore needing wealth transfers along with a growing slate of “socially equitable” laws, regulations, rights, and permissions.

Today the underserved minorities are grist for the Democrat voting machine.  But the government’s own wealth transfer data from its myriads of welfare programs tells a markedly different story.  Starting around 1970, when the Great Society laws and programs started kicking in, it turns out that if anything, the minority populations in the big urban areas have been overserved.  (Culture and public education explains away why these monies have not been used more wisely.)  What keeps the underserved Big Lie alive in the lamestream is the way that progressive government bureaus, agencies, and departments keep score on the dispensed cash.

A good illustration of this is the cited statistics on the country’s child poverty rate.  Nationally prominent economists Phil Gramm and John Early debunk (here) the leftwing claim that currently one in six (over 16%) children live in poverty.  When you look more closely, you find for openers that “the Census Bureau’s tallies still don’t include $1.9 trillion in government transfer payments. … If the Census Bureau had included the missing $1.9 trillion in transfer payments, child poverty would have been only 3.2% in 2017, compared with the official rate of 17.5%.”

A similar Big Lie treatment generates the “myth of American income inequality”.  The authors treat this issue in an excellent online version (here) of their similarly titled book.  The income inequality ‘facts’ are cooked from statistics that garble earned income and the myriad of transfer payments that induce people not to work.  The continually cited poverty stats range in the one in five or six level (16-20%), when the actual rates are really less than one fifth (about 3+%) of that.  This fact is known by all illegal aliens who risked life and limb to get here.

The bottom line of all this is that these lies are used by our Left to perennially bolster their voter rolls with the unread and diseducated of the land.  At the same time this narrative forms the basis for the Democrats’ constant drumbeat of promoting vote-buying payments to these populations which require ever more taxes and national debt increases.  You can bet the farm that none of this has been covered in the Dems’ lamestream media, and therefore at least half the country has no idea of who is underserved, and to what extent these populations are actually being overserved.

Scattershots – 21sep2022 (updated 23sep22)

George Rebane

Do any of them know what they’re talking about?  Here’s a comment from a liberal sackhead –

I sense much desperation on this site from the host's diatribes against women, blacks, and the march toward MAGA extremism. ... The hosts(sic) denigrates educated women, and assumed anyone not a rank MAGA is an idiot when in fact the QAnon prone MAGA are far more dangerously ignorant and mind controlled.  Posted by: Whole Foods | 21 September 2022 at 07:21 AM

As the record shows, RR contains no “diatribes against women, blacks,” nor has it ever given evidence of any “march toward MAGA extremism.”  Does the commenter have a definition for ‘MAGA extremism’, or even know the tenets of MAGA?  My money is on ‘Not even a clue’.  Naked allegations without a shred of substance behind them is the progressives’ de rigueur of accepted indictments.

They also have a very coarse, actually a binary, concept of ‘hate’.  Their lexicon between embracing and hating is a barren desert.  Once you criticize something or someone, especially one of their totems, then you are automatically accused of hate.  Nuanced semantics are relegated to their never-neverland.  An example of the other bookend, once someone embraces any one of the many conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, they are automatically relegated to membership in the internationally fractionated and unstructured organization, along with embracing the entire smorgasbord of socio-political worldviews attributed to QAnon.  There is no middle ground.

On the lighter side.  Here’s a brain teaser reputed to have even caused Einstein a moment of puzzlement.  An old car is to drive a stretch of 2 miles, up and down a hill (one mile up and one mile down). Being so old, it cannot drive the first mile (the ascent) faster than with an average speed of 15 miles per hour.  How fast does it have to drive the second mile (on going down, it can, of course, go faster) in order to have an average speed of 30 miles an hour for the whole journey?

[23sep22 update]  Democrats’ partisan 501c3 charities use tax deductible contributions to register leftwing voters.  Such charities are not supposed engage in partisan activities.  The evil party has done this for decades knowing that the IRS will continue to give them a pass (consider if the Repubs did this).  Kim Strassel provides chapter and verse about this crap in the 23sep22 WSJ, “America’s charitable giving laws have been an enormous force for good, but Democrats are cynically abusing the system for partisan gain. If Congress wants to keep dollars and politicking in the political sphere—and under the remit of the Federal Election Commission—it needs to change tax law to prohibit ‘charities’ outright from taking part in voter-registration or get-out-the-vote drives. The problem isn’t ‘dark money’—it’s the sham ‘philanthropy’ voter-registration racket, taking place in broad daylight.” (more here)  Talk about election fraud; and what has the incompetent GOP leadership done about this?  Nothing, absolutely nothing.

‘The Real Threat to Our Republic’ (updated 12sep22)

George Rebane

Over the years I’ve touched on the impact that the ‘educated’ liberal woman have had on our society and our republic.  My own experience with such people has been uniformly informative and corroborated by many readings on the subject.  I’ve been meaning to write a definitive piece on these females who pervade our big cities and suburban communities, and now Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has beat me to it with his excellent essay, ‘Why ‘Educated’ Liberal Women Are the Real Threat to Our Republic’.  Along the way he coined ELF as the efficient acronym for future reference.

Through my many years I have had the opportunity to take the measure of ELFs in divers social and professional situations.  They all share a set of common characteristics which start with a collectivist ideology expressed through fewer than 50 tried-and-true leftwing shibboleths and slogans, an ideology which they can neither dissect nor defend, and which is sustained on a solid foundation of unwarranted hubris held together by generous dollops of ignorance and one-sided mis/disinformation.

These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.

Institutionally, they have co-opted formerly non-partisan organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women.  Additionally, in academe they have been stalwart foot soldiers in both pedagogy and administration to turn our public schools and institutions of higher learning into critical-thinking-free zones operating under the façade of ‘education’.

At the core of the ELFs' (intellectual) vulnerability is their ignorance, if not at the top, certainly among the masses.  This should not surprise.  Everywhere and always, men have performed better on political knowledge tests than women (just as conservatives routinely outperform liberals and independents).  Researchers exploring this particular gender gap long ago gave up on questioning whether this was true and have focused instead on why.

When ELFs vote, they vote as a homogeneous block.  The DNC and Democratic leadership have long been painfully aware of this, and the fact that they only trust and get their news from the lamestream media and social media sites.

In the not too distant past, women attended college with the expectation of finding a spouse.  Today, they would have much better luck hanging out at a construction site.  As late as 1970, there were five men for every four women in America's four-year colleges.  By the fall of 2021, there were almost two women for every man. … Once in college, the progressive grooming that began discreetly in high school now publicly and proudly moves to center stage.  A study of faculty voter registration at 40 leading U.S. universities showed a more than ten-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans with the numbers skewing higher in liberal arts and among young faculty.  In some fields, there are no Republicans at all. … Lacking a male counterpoint in their lives and often majoring in subjects with a social justice agenda, college women enter the political arena not so much uninformed as misinformed.  Given that communications/journalism faculty members skew 20 to 1 Democrat, the media these young ELFs consume will only reinforce the biases nurtured in college.

Jack Cashill expands on all these points, citing many studies that corroborate the above characterization of ELFs and the institutions under their influence.  We can put a bow on it for now by also recognizing the current thrust of the Democrats’ divisive pre-election rhetoric, especially Biden’s Philadelphia speech that could not have been better staged by Joseph Göbbels himself.

In November, Biden needs the ELFs to vote en masse.  This will happen only if they remain ignorant of the things that should worry them — the border, crime, inflation — and scared silly of things that need not.  Something tells me that the producers of Biden's Nuremberg-style spectacle knew what they were doing.

Incapable of giving it further thought, the ELFs will confidently vote us into the kind of American autocracy that the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has been planning for decades.

[12sep22 update]  Victor Davis Hanson’s recent essay ‘American Delira’ puts the above threat to our country in its greater and proper context.  In recent years such essays have appeared regularly, not only from his pen, but also from other astute observers of the American saga.  Nevertheless, VDH has a unique gift of being able to wordsmith a comprehensive description and analysis of what has brought us here and what we are doing now to undo ourselves.  A hat tip to one of our regular commenters who has also regularly been the first to alert RR readers to the timely contributions of VDH and others.

California Exodus Refuted?

George Rebane

A reader and correspondent sent me the following article – ‘A Shocking Number of Californians Are Moving to Texas Unless You Do Basic Math’.  Therein the author cites data and analysis from a market data firm Placer.ai which sidesteps the long-running and well-established California exodus phenomenon, focuses on the California-to-Texas migration, and erroneously concludes that there is nothing unexpected about the numbers that Placer has collected.  To wit –

The logic here is very simple. Some people move between states every year for normal life reasons. That’s good and normal and not cause for alarm. And California has the most people of any state. Therefore, all things equal, we’d expect lots of people from California to be moving to Texas. In fact, we would expect that more people from California would be moving to Texas than from any other state, again, because California has the most people. This would not in itself imply anything is wrong with California or great about Texas. It would simply mean people are doing what we would expect them to do. The only way this particular data point would suggest something is indeed amiss is if a disproportionate number of new Texans came from California relative to California’s population.

That may sound confusing, but doing some quick math makes it all very clear. The population of the United States minus Texas—because people already in Texas cannot move to Texas—is 300.86 million people. California’s population is 39.35 million, or 13 percent of the U.S.’ non-Texas population. Therefore, more than 13 percent of Texas’ new residents would have to be Californians in order for there to be something of note going on here.

But that’s not the case. According to Placer.ai, which uses “foot traffic data” gleaned by tracking people's phones, 11.1 percent of new Texans from July 2019 and July 2022 are from California. That’s actually slightly less than one would expect based on an even distribution. If anything, the pertinent question from Placer.ai’s data is: Why are so few Californians moving to Texas?

The main flaw in the argument here is that people move randomly between states with ingress and egress rates proportional to source and target populations.  This is a gross error in the current situation where most of migrating Americans are motivated by economic (taxes, regulations) and socio-political (crime, education) reasons.  For example, Texas receives many new residents from so-called shithole cities in states like New York, Illinois, New Jersey, in addition to California.  Such movements can invalidate any arguments based on randomness.  For example, California’s lower percentage of “new Texans” can be completely explained away by the greater number of the state’s immigrants arriving from the other escape-worthy states that need have no relationship to population proportions, and greater numbers of Californians moving to other states such as Idaho, Wyoming, and Florida.

Bloomberg reports, “The long-term migration out of California accelerated during the Covid-19 crisis, with Texas, Washington and Florida as top destinations for people moving out of the state, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.” (here)  The LA Times continues its ongoing reports of the exodus with ‘California Exodus Continues: LA, San Francisco lead the way’.

Liberals across the land are desperate to refute the mass migrations out of the major shithole regions that Democratic administrations have created since the launch of Great Society programs.  This gives rise to a number of loudly argued but logically weak pieces that appear in various lamestream outlets.  The fundamental reality is that California continues to create conditions that drive out large numbers of its wealth-generating workers and businesses.  This is apparent from all types of correctly analyzed data starting with what we learn from the Dept of Commerce (Census Bureau) and going all the way down to California’s historic first-time reduction in the number of representatives we send to Congress.

‘There Is No Climate Emergency’

George Rebane

Similar to the subsequently corroborated Great Barrington Declaration on Covid (here), a new declaration on climate change was released in June 2022 entitled ‘World Climate Declaration: There Is No Climate Emergency’.  This declaration is signed by hundreds of scientists and thousands of technical professionals from almost every country in the world (here).

In asserting that there is no climate emergency, the undersigned state –

Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.

CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet. Additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also profitable for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2

They conclude with –

To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. Should not we free ourselves from the naive belief in immature climate models?

The Democrats' evil is professionally inbred

[This piece came across my email transom forwarded by a lawyer who apologized for his profession and how it confuses litigation with governance.  gjr]
 
Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate – Biden (no surprise) was at the bottom of his class).  Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.  Barack Obama was a lawyer. Michelle Obama was a lawyer.  Hillary Clinton was a lawyer. Bill Clinton was a lawyer.  John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards was a lawyer.  Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is a lawyer.  Former Senator Harry Reid was a lawyer.
 
The Republican Party is different.  President Trump is a businessman.  President Bush 1 and 2 were businessmen.  Vice President Cheney was a businessman.  President Eisenhower was a 5 star General.  The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor.  Dick Armey was an economist.  Ex-House Minority Leader John Boehner was a plastics manufacturer.  The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.  Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer?  Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against actor Ronald Reagan in 1976.  The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers.  This is very interesting. I had never thought about it this way before.
 
The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers.  Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Trump, Bush, and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich.  The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America .  And, so, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, we have seen the procession of official enemies grow.  Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail?  Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation. 
 
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers.  Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, which, in this case should be the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.  Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation.
 
When politicians, as lawyers, begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming.  Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government.  We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit.  We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
 
Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives.  America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked.  When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big.  When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
 
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
 
The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers!  Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits.  This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party.  When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association go to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high.

The ‘Party of Science’ aka Idiot’s Delight (Addended)

George Rebane

Well, the cat is finally clawing its way out of the bag, bit by piece.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is beginning to admit that it has completely mismanaged the major pandemic of the 21^st century.  As numerous observers, analysts, and scientists have repeatedly pointed out over the last four years, the agency has “failed in its core responsibility, which is to track diseases, collect data to inform decision-making, and deploy resources to support local public-health responses.”  Instead, it became the lackey of the evil Democratic Party which has long proclaimed itself as ‘the party of science’ and used the CDC as its willing political pawn.

CDC’s main mama, Dr Rochelle Walensky, can’t quite bring herself to admit the utter catastrophe that she launched with the aid of Dr Anthony Fauci, spiritual advisor who only spoke ex cathedra with words directly from God.  America put up with their gobbledygook for almost four years, and continues in some measure to follow it today.

As data kept pouring in from all over the world that contradicted their various and varying policies dictating masking, social distancing, lockdowns, vaccination, boosters, etc, they remained steadfast in their own ‘science’ which supported the command and control stance of the Democratic Party hard on the heels of hunting Donald Trump.

Scattershots – 18aug22 (update 21aug22)

George Rebane

Dear People, we are back from our travels and almost recovered.  Driving endless miles across the country's western deserts and highlands is not recommended for maintaining mental health.  Besides, being on travel is greatly over-promoted.  But everything worked out well; Jo Ann’s new van performed beautifully, and we had a great time with our friends, grandkids, and great-grandkids – they’re still growing like weeds.

So now we have two big reasons the GOP will be split and lose in 2024.  First, Liz Cheney will splinter the party by running for president on a third party ticket if Donald Trump is nominated by the Republicans.  And then again, if the Repubs don’t nominate Donald Trump for president in 2024, he may choose to become the third party candidate.  Either way the Repubs loose the presidency in 2024, and the evil party will be free to continue in the evil ways it has made known to all under the Bumblebrain Administration. 

[21aug22 update]  Raid vs warranted search.  The lamestream is beginning to influence FN et al in eliminating the ‘raid’ label on what happened at Mar-a-Lago.  LE agencies execute search warrants by the hundreds every day across the country.  These are overwhelmingly done during normal waking hours by a small team wearing civilian clothing and packing, at most, an inconspicuous 9mm semi-auto.  When a platoon of FBI descends unannounced in a convoy of flashing lights vehicles during pre-dawn hours on a private residence, armed with sub-machine guns (fully auto assault weapons) to surprise the residence’s skeleton Secret Service detail due each former president, then that is a raid.  Why the heavy artillery?  Did they expect a firefight with fellow feds?  Characterizing the warranted search as a raid was a deliberate political act to fuel and continue the anti-Trump hysteria.  The Left clearly over-played their hand, and therefore immediately quit using ‘raid’ to characterize the historically unprecedented raid.  That some conservative outlets are falling in line confirms that their claims to ‘Fair, balanced, and unafraid’ reporting is bullshit.

FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Residence

George Rebane

Tonight the FBI raided former President Trump’s Florida residence unannounced.  This is an historical  and unprecedented action which has horrible portents for our republic.  I’ll have more to say about this, and so will RR readers who need a place to record their sentiments as this story develops over the next days.  If there is no smoking gun produced by the DoJ in this case, then we have definitely transitioned into a political thugocracy.

Lowest Rung Problem with No Good Solutions

George Rebane

To solve a problem, first you need to correctly define it.

The 1aug22 WSJ had an entire section that examined ‘Why Black and Hispanic Workers Get Stuck on the Lowest Rung’.  In these pages we have covered related aspects of this issue over the years.  Last year noted scholar and political scientist Charles Murray (reviled by progressives) published Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021), which I reported on extensively in ‘Equity Denies Reality’.

The WSJ looked at the lowest rung problem from several angles, with lots of stats showing that the country’s 12.4% Black population is not matched in the 8% of entry level jobs held by Black workers.  Apparently, in the literature these are called “front line workers”, a politically correct euphemism for those on the lowest rung of the employment ladder.  And very few of our larger companies employ even 10% of Black workers.  From there the record gets murkier with smaller shares of front line minorities being promoted to higher positions in mid-management and top slots in corporate leadership.  The unstated thesis of this reportage is that we are falling short on the equity scale in America’s workplaces if we don’t achieve pro-rata population shares of Black and Hispanic workers at each level on the corporate ladders.

Unfortunately, these analyses all ignore some seminal factors needed to understand this employment issue – these being intellectual capacity and intellectual ability.  All the articles in the section make the tacit but questionable assumption that all people have an equal intellectual capacity from which, through education and training, various intellectual abilities can be acquired.  Everyone having equal intellectual abilities flies in the face of government data as reported by Charles Murray and others.

It should be clear that an individual’s capability to acquire intellectual abilities is determined by his intellectual capacity.  Intellectual capacity, also known as ‘cognitive ability’, has various metrics, the most popular being IQ now suffering from bouts of political correctness.  Over populations consisting of all racial and cultural cohorts, average IQ has been normed at the average value or mean of 100, with a standard deviation of 15.  (In a bell curve 68% of the distribution lies between +/- one standard deviation of the mean.  That means that 68% of humans have an IQ ranging from 85 to 115.)

The figure below is from Murray’s Facing Reality.  As can be seen, there is a relative paucity of ‘Latin’ and ‘African’ people, i.e. workers overall, and of those even fewer in the higher cognitive ability (intellectual capacity) region.

This data says that if pro-rata equity is going to be enforced, then companies will need to hire and promote minorities who do not measure up to the existing intellectual standards required to fill upper-level jobs.  The obvious result of that is an expected decline in corporate performance wherever such mandates are implemented.

The woke extremists will continue to claim that there is no difference between cognitive abilities based on race, that the government and academic data is somehow biased and deficient.  But the reality is overwhelming when we take in the K-12 academic performance of the various races cum cultures.  Blacks and Hispanics continue to perform significantly lower than the Asians and European, that happens to be an easily discernible fact also in the workplace.  One can argue that all this is due to the minorities getting the short-end in our public schools, but that is not a factor in the present discussion.

However you come down on our public education and its delivery to, say, whites vs minorities, that is not the point.  We are here discussing ONLY the existential results of the schools’ output as it enters and survives in the workforce.  It would be beyond silly to presume that minority workers as a whole do not bring with them the deficits they demonstrated while in school.  And so far, corporate and government post-school remediation programs have been an utter failure in both their acceptance by the minorities and their effectiveness.

Now that doesn’t mean we should give up and accept race-based promotions or keep the minorities on the low rungs of the workplace.  But it does mean that continuing to do what we have been doing and expecting different results guarantees that we as a society are behaving insanely.  And you can bet the farm that not acknowledging the real dimensions of the intellectual capacities vs abilities reality will continue to prevent us from correctly defining the problem which we as a country have to solve.

Scattershots – 27jul22 (updated 31jul22)

George Rebane

Biden, the killer president – When the tally of all the deaths resulting from his announced policy of abolishing our southern border is calculated, the numbers will now reach well over a 100,000 annually during his term in the White House.  The deaths occur on both sides of what used to be our border.  Thousands have died trying to make it from their native countries before reaching the US, thousands die in transport after crossing over, but the overwhelming number of Biden deaths occur all over the land in America from drug overdoses.  The major cause now is Chinese-produced, cartel-delivered fentanyl that daily floods into the US in amounts that can kill our entire population.  Local jurisdictions are overwhelmed with the number of overdosers dying and requiring critical care (example here).  And the primary cohort of victims is made up of our black, Hispanic, and Indian populations.  Reading the NYT this morning, and monitoring other lamestream outlets, there is no mention of this national emergency of deliberate, ongoing, and cataclysmic human tragedy and flaunting of America’s border and immigration laws.  From the Left nothing but silence and ongoing lies about systemic racism, white supremacy, and social injustice.  If ever there was a reason to impeach the entire executive branch as criminal sacks of … .

Woke medical schools have arrived.  Mandatory woke ideology and CRT curriculum has now infected another STEM field – medicine.  “Future doctors will be obliged to learn how health relates to ‘systems of oppression.’” (more here)  Medical students and residents will be expected to master new “diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies” according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.  These additional courses will be required in all accredited medical schools.  And make no mistake, including this added curricular crap is going to displace real medical education required for today’s physicians to keep up with the rapidly accelerating technology that impacts all aspects of healthcare.  Today’s physicians are already woefully behind on diagnostics, treatments, and pharmacology, as can be verified by any patient with some technical training.  From here on out, according to the AAMC, “aspiring doctors will have to become fluent in woke concepts such as ‘intersectionality’ (defined as) overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.’ Med students who managed to avoid learning critical race theory in college will now get an immersive course.”  Medical mistakes already take more than 200,000 lives annually (here).  And when we calculate the new stats on medical morbidity and mortality, all of us will pay for this next helping of death by government.  Socialism on the march.

[31jul22 update]  President Newsom without a single cast vote.  People are now beginning to accept the likelihood of Biden’s early retirement; something that has been often foretold on these pages.  All the Democratic and socialist leadership of our country don’t want Bumblebrain to run in 2024, and everyone knows that the country’s First Kackle is a joke and will remain a joke.  A feasible and likely scenario has Kamala being offered big bucks (by, say, Soros) to resign and accept a position on the board of a global leftwing organization, purportedly working to save the world from one of many capitalist ills.  Kamala understands that it’s the best deal she can get after her embarrassing performance as VP – she accepts and resigns.  Ol’ Joe is then spoon-fed the reason for his early departure, and the need to make a deal with a compliant and drooling Gavin Newsom.  Newsom becomes VP, and soon thereafter Bumblebrain resigns for health reasons.  Newsom becomes president and immediately pardons every available Biden within that terminally corrupt family.  Newsom appoints his VP – someone like Stacey Abrams or one of the other well-known double dummies.  They go into Dems’ 2024 convention as incumbents, and to loud cheers and lamestream adulation, they emerge as the Democratic candidates for the party’s top of the ticket.  The scenario is perfectly legal and already tested by Richard Nixon when his VP Agnew was caught holding a sack of cash that didn’t belong to him.  Gerald Ford became VP, and the rest is history.

Speaking of double dummies, consider those sharp-witted journalists on the various rightwing media outlets starting with FN and FB interviewing the legion of liars that the administration fronts as their economic experts.  For decades, recession has been defined as two successive quarters of GDP contraction.  This definition has been used by the Fed, ensconced in economics textbooks, and touted by every politician over the last fifty some years.  Biden’s mangling of our vibrant economy during 18 months in office now requires rejection of the established definition.  We’re told by Team Biden and their lamestream lackies that the old definition was never correct (even though everyone is on tape having used it).  They tell us that recession is a more complex matter that has a technical definition which is never mentioned by the leftwing economic experts.  But what’s missing from all these interviews is the question that always goes begging – well then, tell us what is the correct definition of a recession.  There has not been a single journalist with the wherewithal between their ears to immediately ask that question when a Democrat again moves the recession goal posts.  Am I the only one who has noticed this dereliction of journalistic professionalism?  Please tell me it ain’t so.

Social Science Sucks

George Rebane

Harvard and Exeter social scientists just published a new study the implications of which go far beyond the answer to, “Did pandemic stimulus payments harm lower-income Americans?”  The correct answer was a clear YES, and for all the reasons that most RR readers would have predicted.

The study was done professionally, involving over 2,000 in the experimental group and over 3,100 in the control group, all properly controlled for the important societal parameters.  The bottom line was that those receiving the no-strings-attached handouts were not encouraged to practice “better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles. The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet. The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite.” (more here)

In fact, the free money recipients did exactly what most sane observers of human nature know – “Handout recipients fared worse on most survey outcomes. They reported less earned income and liquidity, lower work performance and satisfaction, more financial stress, sleep quality and physical health, and higher levels of loneliness and anxiety than the control group.”  Whouda thunk?

This finding (corroboration?) casts a serious shadow on the impact of contemplated guaranteed minimal income policies.  As RR has argued for years, the penultimate motivator of human behavior is to be relevant within and to one’s society.  Reducing relevance or becoming irrelevant is akin to being shunned by your fellows.  And no one really believes that you deserve to have your hand in others’ pockets just because you can fog a mirror.  They know that you contribute nothing and consume the wealth others create – you are a parasite.

If we peel back the social onion one more layer, we come to the real answer – the culture of the recipient group.  It is culture that determines how social groups behave in various environments of material and financial wellbeing.  Nowhere in human history was this demonstrated more explicitly than in the post-war displaced persons camps of West Germany which were home to tens of millions of east European refugees fleeing communism.  Under UN administration almost all the camps were culturally homogeneous and received equal amounts of aid; refugees were not allowed to work on the German economy and were simply wards of the ‘state’ awaiting determination of their fate over a period of approximately five years.  Many studies were done and books written on how the people in the camps organized themselves and what kinds of activities they pursued.  The spectrum ranged all the way from virtual prisons ruled by indigenous criminal mafias to flourishing societies that replicated the refugees’ native lands and allowed them to develop and pursue education, arts, trades, crafts, etc, some of which they were allowed to sell to GIs stationed in numerous military bases.

But returning to the real point I want to make here is that social science is a broken profession practiced by so-called ‘social scientists’, most of whom have not the most basic understanding of what motivates and rewards human behavior.  This sad condition exacerbates the making of public policies, especially those we are subjected to by leftwing politicians and legislatures.  Citing the results of the Harvard/Exeter study found no difference between the free-cash and control groups. 

But remarkable was the collateral finding, one that will be swept under the rug by the lamestream, that “These findings contradicted the predictions of 477 social scientists and policy makers the researchers surveyed. That’s not surprising. Most liberal academics and politicians believe government handouts are the solution to all problems. If transfer payments were a ticket to the middle class, the War on Poverty would have succeeded long ago.” (emphasis mine)

In sum, we see again that today’s social science is a farcical pursuit populated by the blind leading the blind – these guys are firing blanks and bamboozling both their students and policy makers.  At least half the population of our fair land would have correctly predicted the outcome of this experiment.  But in this light what should concern all of us is the portent of future wealth transfers being able to keep the peace as more and more workers become systemically unemployed, wards of the state, and conspicuously irrelevant.  And nobody cares – yet.

Scattershots – 18jul22 (updated 23jul22)

George Rebane

The Khashoggi murder continues to aspirate the pundits on both sides after Biden’s fistbump with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.  To me the whole affair is politically ridiculous and a diplomatic farce.  Khashoggi was not a US citizen, but a foreign national with a permit to live and work in America (among other countries).  While within US borders, our governments’ responsibility toward Khashoggi’s security is the same as it is for any US citizen and legal resident.  But our federal government has no responsibility for the security of ANY alien permitted to live and work in our country when they travel outside our boundaries, especially when they frequent one of their own legations in a third country.  To think otherwise would be a ludicrous contemplation.  So why then are we putting our important foreign relations on the line when this foreign national gets butchered by his own countrymen in a foreign land?  If some soft-headed pundit or politician thinks otherwise, why are we then so sanguine with the governments of Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, … who regularly murder their own citizens?  Why are all of them not also ‘pariah states’ denied handshakes when making diplomatic contacts?  And why is this consideration not brought up by all those sharp-witted journalists, pundits, and politicos?

Nevada County’s currently registered voters were made available to me by my bride who concerns herself with such things.  The CA SecState collects and publishes this data for all the state’s counties as of 23 May 2022 shown below. (more here).

What interested me was the prominent inclusion of the American Independent Party in the political party headings.  I’m ashamed to admit that I know next to nothing about the AIP, and had to do a quick read-up on the organization (here).  What I found was both surprising and refreshing.  With my longtime and growing frustration with the Republican Party, I discovered that the AIP’s tenets and platform were totally acceptable to me save, perhaps, their stance on marriage.  I share it with readers in hopes of soliciting a broader critique of that party’s statement of purpose and principles.  My only regret is that they seem to have gone dormant after the 2016 election as witnessed by their website.  But then, how do they maintain a self-declared, currently registered membership of 3,335 in the county?  My bride’s answer is that most of these people are really political independents who, when registering, were confused by that word appearing in the party’s name.

[21jul22 update]  Corrupt corporatism is ubiquitous in the land, and runs rampant in our automotive industry.  Reader Efox (@ 858am below) beat me to the report about Ford getting ready to cut thousands of white-collar jobs currently at work in its combustion engine division (here).  The reason?  Ford along with the other car makers are investing over $500B before 2026 to develop new e-vehicles.  Now why would all these capitalists go out on a limb and spend so much of their retained earnings to get ready for volume production of products for which there is no evidence of open-market demand?  Simple answer, they’re not going out on any limb.  Instead, they are colluding with federal central planner/controllers who have informed them of future federal mandates for us to purchase all the e-vehicles they can roll off the assembly lines.  You and I will soon be told to either buy an e-car, or walk.  Unabashed corporatist corruption on parade.

The Perennially Confused Grassroots Left

George Rebane

Imagine a country that does not recognize the right of their citizens to revolt.

These thoughts were resurfaced by a comment from local leftwing cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb responding to ‘A Case for the Right of Revolution’.  In it he accuses those of the Right of “blowing up what’s left of the constitution(sic)”, and seeking to install a tyrannical “new regime” that will imprison or execute “those of us who won’t swear fealty to the new regime.”

Bob shares these beliefs and worldview with most of the Democrat mainstream which has been inculcated in the country’s unionized leftwing public schools, with its tenets of received wisdom being reinforced daily by the country’s lamestream media.  These millions of fellow Americans are no longer capable of questioning, let alone critiquing what they are fed in a never-ending stream of propagandized media reportage and ‘entertainment’.

They demand no evidence for the allegations they willingly consume as factual indictments of the Right.  They can point to no part of the Constitution that has been ‘blown up’ by rightwing legislators, judges, or justices in the land.  They demand nothing of their thought leaders save the gratuitously naked lies that the unrevealed evidence exists somewhere, always to be presented at the proper time – e.g. yearslong ‘evidence’ of Trump’s Russia collusion.  Like the highland natives of Papua-New Guinea (here), the video corroborated evidence of a purposely open border is invisible to them as millions of illegal aliens continue to pour in daily.  They have totally ignored the Left’s destruction of the black families launched with the onset of the Great Society policies.  For them the loss of black lives by the thousands really doesn’t matter, which are noted only in their singletons or handfuls when it serves to support their overall anti-American narrative.

The Left’s grassroots have no clue of how their leaders and elites have trashed our Constitution, and constantly make the case for its irrelevance, lack of currency, and need for a total overhaul or rewrite.  All this to foster and enable the country’s progress toward a centrally planned and controlled state under the governance of an implausibly expensive and behemoth bureaucracy.  The Right’s appeal and initiative for a minimally taxing and regulating small government never impacts any inter-ear organ they may purport to have.

They continue their composed mantra that the Right is working to install a fascist state, without any understanding that fascism is a strong form of socialism that requires a very large government to monitor and master its masses.  All the historical and day-to-day evidence of implemented and proposed rightwing policies to the contrary - e.g. reducing taxes and regulations, federalizing national imperatives - they just go on parroting the Democrat party line that the Right is the party of limiting freedoms no matter the impact of leftwing policies in force from Main Street to the nation’s capitals – they are incapable of simply considering how our freedoms have been ratcheted down by the growth of the US Code, regulatory burdens by the thousands, and bureaucracies of leftwing minions numbering in the millions.

And the piece de resistance of their imperturbably smug belief system is their view of those on the Right as a uniform mass of fundamentalist Christian, bible-thumping end-timers who are itching to “empty the nuclear arsenal on the heathens” while “convinced you are going to your great reward in heaven, (thereby) burning the planet shouldn’t cause you any pangs of guilt.”

So there you have it, the latest communication from the Left’s grassroots, that continues to bear witness to the utter void where we might find common ground between our polarized population, each side seeking to go in a direction that is a complete anathema to the other.  There is no longer an opportunity to start a civil, let alone productive conversation.  How do you answer someone like Bob Crabb who believes in the sanctified state against which no hand shall ever be raised?

A Case for the Right of Revolution

George Rebane

[This piece appears as my column in the 16jul22 Union (here).  It is a response to the latest in the newspaper’s thread of Second Amendment debates that started with my response to ‘Read it yourself – A well-regulated militia’ by a local leftwing gun controller.  To this I responded with ‘The Many Ways to Regulate Militias’ published in the 14jun22 Union (and here)  This was responded to by another leftwinger’s 21jun22 column, ‘The role of a well-regulated militia’.  Just to pile on, yet another anti-gunner’s column ‘This July Fourth, enough with misguided patriotism’ taking me to task, was published in the 30jun22 Union.  The piece below seeks to put paid to my 2A critics, but unfortunately only those who have some claim to critical thinking.  I invite RR readers to examine the comments of those who lack such a skill in my column’s comment stream.  It is witness to the dominant sign of our times.]

In his 21jun22 column Mr Dick Sciaroni limits the 2nd Amendment, arguing that in our nation’s founding and the establishment of its republican government, “it defies reason that (the Founders’) focus would include condoning a revolt against that very government.”  Were Mr Sciaroni to expand his historical studies, he would quickly discover that it was exactly that focus which inspired, nay demanded, the inclusion of the “right and duty of the people to alter or abolish a government that acts against their common interest and/or threatens the safety of the people without cause.”

The Founders were learned men and students of Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Johnson, et al who taught the ‘Right of Revolution’ against governments gone rogue.  Our nation’s birth came about through the exercise of that right against its then government gone rogue.  History is replete with numerous justified revolutions against governments turning against their people.  Our Founders were very aware of that and enshrined their sentiments in our Declaration of Independence – “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (the citizenry) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

Our Constitution contemplates and provides for two distinct ways to change our government – an orderly process through amendments and constitutional conventions; failing that, then through armed revolt with the means provided the citizenry through the 2nd Amendment.  The Founders were neither hubristic nor naïfs when they gave us “a republic if (we) can keep it.”  They were sufficiently wise and humble to know that they had not created the perfect government incapable of going rogue, so they provided us, under law, with the ultimate means of redress.

SCOTUS to Congress: Legislate!

Know how to let the blame slip upon another ... .  Gracian #149

George Rebane

The overwhelming share of congress critters don’t like to make laws that spell out what we citizens can/should do in conducting our lives and businesses.  They know that if they put down what they really mean, then a good fraction of us would get pissed off at them and let it be known at the next ballot box.  So members of both parties have figured out how to avoid this pesky aspect of law-making.  They know the ideological and bureaucratic tenor of the various departments and agencies that will implement the laws, and they write the laws in a namby-pamby language that leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation by the unelected and anonymous bureaucrats who also regularly get sub-rosa offline directions from the camouflaged politicians.  Sleazy politics and corrupt governance.

Given that our federal and state bureaucracies are staffed overwhelmingly by incompetent leftwingers, it is the Democrats who are the architects of the most cynical, ambiguous, and amorphous legislation, while the Republicans stand by grumbling with their thumbs up their … well, you know.  In the 1jul22 WSJ Kim Strassel writes (here) -

Conservative Republican legislators report that this cynicism has now reached new heights. They note that their Democratic counterparts routinely write legislation that is deliberately vague, so as to give the administrative state maximum flexibility to impose programs Congress won’t take responsibility for passing. This also ensures that the federal bureaucracy—which largely shares the left’s political ideology—can continue its work even under Republican presidencies and Congresses.

America’s informed readers have known this for years, but they (we) too have yet to raise hew and cry about the matter that impacts the behavior of the bums they (we) send to state houses and Washington.  Perhaps this oversight is due to our having become too comfortable and ignoring our duties required to maintain the republic.  But the evidence of electoral ignorance and neglect are visible all over the land.  So finally, we get a SCOTUS with a majority that recognizes the problem and has the backbone to correct it.

Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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