Rebane's Ruminations

‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’

George Rebane

F.A. Hayek was one of the world’s foremost economists and a giant among the original thinkers of the 20^th century.  In this post I want to interest readers in his ideas and works with a short discussion of one of his small and often overlooked monograms – The Intellectuals and Socialism - published in 1949, the year I arrived on these shores.

From the monogram currently published by the Mercatus Center of George Washington University we read,  “Friedrich A. Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1974, is best known for the book the Road to Serfdom (1944), which has been widely translated.  Receiving doctorates in law and economics from the University of Vienna, Hayek served on the faculties of the universities of London, Chicago, Freiburg, and Salzburg.  (His major books may be seen here.)  Hayek has attracted a growing body of scholarship, and in February 2000 a writer in The New Yorker observed that ‘it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.’”

One of the main lessons from the monogram is the reader’s ability to distinguish between the purveyors of ideas variously, and often carelessly, labeled as ‘theorists’, ‘experts’, and ‘intellectuals’.  The first two are people who originate ideas and those who are actually able to implement ideas by applying their skills.  However, it is the countless intellectuals with whom we should concern ourselves.  They are overwhelmingly of the Left and populate our media, academe, institutions, and bureaucracies.  Hayek defines them as follows.

“The term "intellectuals," however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer, and the fact that we have no better name by which to describe what we have called the secondhand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not understood. Even persons who use the word "intellectual" mainly as a term of abuse are still inclined to withhold it from many who undoubtedly perform that characteristic function. This is neither that of the original thinker nor that of the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.” (emphasis mine)

The intellectuals are the distributors and champions of ideas formulated by the elites.  They are drawn to the Left and socialism primarily because of its simplistic utopian vision of the future.  This is opposed to the Right’s ideology having always emphasized individual liberty and its manifold benefits.  In short, the Left’s intellectuals distribute simple easy-to-understand, high-level ideas to the masses, while those of the Right attempt to communicate their more complex ideas of, say, liberty, individual effort, and market capitalism on a person-to-person basis.

We are a Republic, NOT a Democracy

George Rebane

The country’s socialists and globalists have found the corruption of language to best serve their purpose of blinding Americans to the critical aspects of our society and culture.  First and foremost is today’s established custom of considering precise semantics to be somewhere between irrelevant and unimportant, and most certainly politically incorrect.

As an example, many of us have come to accept open borders on the basis of promoting ‘immigration’, firm in the knowledge that today’s invasion of illegal aliens from countless countries violating our law is somehow similar to the process that populated our empty lands in days gone by, for are we not a country of immigrants?  No one from the highest levels of government to main street wants to acknowledge that immigration is a two-party process between willing participants – a pact between a discriminating government and the alien seeking residency in a new land.  Using the correct legal term ‘illegal alien’ to describe those wading across the river (formerly also known as wetbacks) has now become proscribed and not for proper use in a public forum.  Instead the naked term ‘immigrant’ is now the norm in lamestream media, and the right-of-center outlets barely use the appended ‘illegal immigrant’, all preferring more obfuscating labels like ‘migrant’ to describe the foreign lawbreakers crossing our borders.

Other similar examples can be offered to illustrate the desecration and demeaning of our language over the last several decades.

Perhaps the most egregious and dangerous of such examples is the new idea promoted by collectivists, especially of the woke variety, that our nation is a democracy that promotes (civil) equality.  Our Founders were keenly aware that democracies, promoted under the banner of indiscriminating equality quickly devolve into autocracies cum tyrannies.  This is the reason that they conceived and formed our nation to hold liberty sacrosanct within a constitutional republic, governed under a document that severely limits the powers of government.  As the thinking reader knows, universal equality and liberty are incompatible.  Our founding principles recognize and promote equality in the sense that we Americans are equal only under our laws and in the eyes of God.  Elsewhere, most certainly in our Constitution, equality is not mentioned and liberty is supreme.

Our socialists know this truth, and have twisted our public education, abetted by the media, to preach their unquestionable glories of equality cum equity in all things.  The damage to our republic that this perversion has caused was already evident almost sixty years ago.  Dan Smoot was one of the nation’s leading conservative commentators back then, and in 1966 he recorded this very clear and succinct 10-minute commentary about the real difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic (here), and the danger of our citizenry remaining confused about the two.  Today that confusion has been replaced by total ignorance.

US Drops to 25th Place in Index of Economic Freedom

George Rebane

The Heritage Foundation published its 2024 edition of its Index of Economic Freedom (here) for all the countries of the world.  Thanks to Bidenomics the US continues to drop in the prestigious ratings to its historically lowest place.  And the alert reader is already aware of California's rank in the various freedoms being in the toilet among the states as recently reported in Cato’s ‘Freedom in the 50 States’ (here).

What continues to shake the confidence of so many Americans in their ignorant and/or socialist neighbors is that they have no clue that the more a nation or state restricts economic freedoms, the lower is its citizens’ standard of living.  Our leftwingers just continue voting for Democrats who promise to curtail business activities, reduce personal freedoms, and ‘tax the rich’ while expecting bigger checks from the government.  The graphic below summarizes it all.

They are VERY different from us

George Rebane

I view with reinvigorated alarm today’s broadcast joys of socialists, wokesters, liberals, and leftwingers in general celebrating the $400M+ fine demanded of Trump for what is termed his  committing ‘civil fraud’.  They uniformly and unanimously agree with the ‘legal basis’ on which the New York attorney general prosecuted and the judge adjudicated the Trump trial.  All these people look forward to a totalitarian state in which capitalism is banned, the beneficial mechanisms of market pricing, and the ownership of private property are dispensed with.  That is exactly the harbinger that letting the verdict stand will foster across the land.  (And students of our Founders and Bastiat know that the fundamental rights upon which our personal security and manifold liberties are based will also disappear.)

The other cohort of people celebrating Trump’s fine are those too stupid to think through these ramifications.  All their little TDS sotted pea brains can muster up is that if it hurts Trump, it must be good.

Nevertheless, some on the Right still believe that we can find common ground to reunite as the America of yesteryear – this even though no such path has been identified.  RR invites these worthies to step forward and illuminate us with their vision of how we regain E Pluribus Unum.  (And here is info on a related and contributing problem in our land.)

Scattershots – 9feb24 (updated 17feb24)

George Rebane

KJP, Biden’s excuse for a press secretary, defended the president’s dementia – attested to in the recent special prosecutor Robert Hur report about his mishandling classified documents - by reading from a desperately compiled list of Republicans who have misspoken in the past.  That tack further illustrates how intellectually challenged are most members of Team Biden by confusing the constant stream of forgetfulness, mistakes, and malaprops that come out of our sitting president’s mouth with the one-offs that most mentally healthy people make now and then.  One can also counter this argument by pointing out that it isn’t ignorance about Joe’s condition at all, but intimate knowledge of the man’s incapability of handling spontaneous communications in the public forum.  Therefore, his exposure to such ‘opportunities’ must be minimized at all times during this election year.  Half the country’s consumers of lamestream media are also clueless about this aspect of the man they voted for.

Another vast area of ignorance cum imbecility is shared by leftwing Californians who have no idea about the sources of the state’s tax revenues.  Over the years RR has contained numerous reports of the outlandish fraction of such revenues paid by ‘the rich’.  (e.g. 1% of top earning taxpayers pay 42% of our taxes while the bottom 70% pay just 11%.)  And most recently a column by Thea Hood in the 12jan24 Union (here) detailed the percentages as reported by various state agencies.  She was immediately attacked by local socialists who would have none of it, claiming that such numbers are nothing but rightwing propaganda, proving again that not only can you have your own opinions, but also your own convenient facts.  And some call this the information age?

“Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI.  OpenAI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E. for a project possibly requiring up to $7 trillion.” (more here)  All of this is due to the massive processing and storage requirements needed for training large language models (LLMs), today’s epitomy of machine intelligence that has the potential to surpass humans in every conceivable task and will create markets for microchips and energy that cannot be supplied by today’s industry and infrastructure.  Altman is attempting to prepare for those days, and wants most of the new chip plants to be built in the US.  But I predict that our anti-American socialists will do all that they can to throw sand in those gears like they are already doing in Arizona to slow progress on the new big chip factory being built there.  For global collectivists America cannot remain the world's hegemon.

[11feb24 update] Review time.  A conspiracy is usually defined as “an unlawful, harmful, or evil plan formulated in secret by two or more persons.”  In actuality the conspiracy need not have a dark side, but could also be something benevolent that is planned in secret by two or more persons.  And labeling something as a ‘conspiracy theory’ does not necessarily mean that it is false.

Maintaining our open southern border has been planned and perpetrated as an anti-American conspiracy by the Left.  Inviting millions of illegal aliens to irretrievably spread themselves across our land is in fact unlawful, harmful, and evil to the extent that it foments the destruction of our culture and political structure, to replace it by a governance that promotes globalism through the destruction of the United States into a powerless second-world socialist country.  The lamestream media deny this conspiracy; and even Fox News is afraid to explain it to their audiences, leaving that to individual commentators who are then labeled ‘far right’ and ‘radical’.  This goes on as the Biden administration has no better explanation for their unconstitutional conspiracy other than repeatedly parroting the blatant lie that “the border is secure.”

[14feb24 update]  A couple of climate scumbags were arrested in the National Archives for throwing pink powder on the protected display of the US Constitution.  These people confirm daily the many ways they hate America.  Do not be fooled that the climate activists among us are loyal Americans.  The evidence against that notion abounds.  (more here)

[17feb24 update]  FCC bans AI-voiced robocalls in wake of ‘Biden’ calls to NH residents.  Well, it’s started.  Scammers have begun using the new AI-voicing technology to convince consumers, voters, et al of thins being true that really aren’t.  And the voice over their telephones sounds very convincing.  It will be interesting to see how the FCC and the states’ attorney generals are able to enforce such censorship.  When this technology is combined with already existing video synthesizing real people saying wrong things, then the media consumers are really flummoxed because the scam messages will be marbled in with the authentic video and audio segments, and no one will be able to tell the difference.  News outlets will have a new challenge in vetting such media and convincing their audiences of the authenticity of what they broadcast. (more here)

A Worthy Extension of Federalism

George Rebane

We see that SCOTUS has given the feds permission to remove some razor wire barricades from federal land on the Mexican border.  This permission enables the anti-American Biden administration to enable more illegals to easily enter the United States.  No consideration was given to national security in the ruling which included two so-called conservative justices. (more here)

Most of us know that the US Constitution primarily limits the powers of the federal government to those specifically delineated in the document.  Powers absent are reserved for the states and its more local jurisdictions.  The federal government is mandated by law to carry out and implement certain specified powers, among the leading is to provide for and maintain national security.  This definitely includes securing the nation’s borders so that only lawful transit is both authorized and made possible.

Unfortunately, the Constitution is silent when it comes to the enforcement and execution of its provisions and derived laws when the federal government cannot or will not carry out its obligations.  According to Rebane Doctrine, in such cases the natural and rational solution is to expand federalism by authorizing the states to fulfill such obligations and implement the functions of the absent federal government.  A corollary to such a ruling would be to then prohibit the federal government from interfering with the states as they fulfill the constitutional obligations abandoned by the feds.

This new protocol could be implemented by a SCOTUS ruling in response to, say, a suit brought by any state harmed by the feds’ delinquent behavior.  The ruling would then set an enduring precedent like other such SCOTUS rulings.  Of course, if it were deemed sufficiently important, then the ruling could be promoted into a constitutional amendment.  According to my lights, recognizing this clarifying extension has become necessary as our country becomes more fractionated with large numbers of states in frequent disagreement with a federal government that often acts unconstitutionally.

AI in the Medium and Message

George Rebane

Argentina’s president Javier Milei delivered an important speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  In it he described the history of Argentina’s tragic descent from being one of the world’s leading developed countries, enjoying the fruits of free market capitalism, to a nation today with a destitute and chaotic economy after it began reorganizing itself under various forms of collectivism centered on socialism.  The speech is an excellent and well-delivered warning to that annual conclave of true-believer globalists.  You can view it here in its entirety – I recommend it.

But perhaps the equally or even more important aspect of the speech was the mode of its delivery.  You see, Milei delivered the speech in Spanish to a live audience who wore ear pieces to get a realtime English translation by a human translator. Yet in the above video of the speech Milei delivered it in perfectly accented English in his own voice.  The video was generated offline by an LLM AI that correctly coded his voice and modified the video image to perfectly synchronize his lips to express the English delivery.  (Here is the follow-up to illustrate the human-translated version of the video.)

The astute reader will instantly understand that this speaker could have been made to deliver any kind of speech desired at that WEF venue.  Such translations will soon become realtime in the sense that the actual speaker speaking in language L3 delivering message M7 will be seen and heard on monitors and/or live broadcasts to speak in language L12 delivering message M5.  For the latter we will need the source file to contain metadata on facial expressions and, perhaps, gestures etc – all in the realm of today’s offline large language AI models.

For good or ill, in these pre-Singularity years this is what we now have to look forward to from here on.  And this election season will no doubt provide us with examples of both.

California Stupid Perseveres (updated 10jan24)

George Rebane

As a part of its latest bevy of idiotic laws and regs, Sacramento continues its perennial attempt to remove the Second Amendment from the Constitution for those of us living in California.  It has passed a new restrictive law (currently appealed) that prevents the state’s CCW holders from carrying their concealed guns in 29 new public areas.  The explanation given to our sheeple is that the new law will save human lives, when in reality it will do anything but that.

The law is nothing less than the latest incremental ratchet to constructively remove firearms from the hands of law-abiding citizens.  However, it does communicate to the mentally deranged killers and terrorists that now here are more areas in the public forum which for them are free-fire zones where they can wantonly murder and create mayhem with no fear of being opposed by a legal gun.

The state’s claim that CCW holders are perpetrators of mass shootings is utterly without merit or evidence.  What the FBI data have consistently shown is that CCW holders are the safest and most responsible gun toters in the nation.  A recent study reveals that sworn law enforcement  officers, already a responsible and trustworthy cohort, are still six times more likely to murder someone than a gun-carrying citizen holding a CCW permit. (more here and here)

But being able to peddle that kind of pabulum to Californians confirms again that as an electorate we suffer from a widespread, massive, and chronic intellectual deficit (aka are butt stupid), which explains why decade after decade we vote for corrupt politicians of the anti-American evil party to make our laws and administer our beautiful state.

[10jan24 update] 'California Stupid Perseveres and Amplifies' - Now the troop of Democrat Socialists in Sacramento are again pushing through a tax on assets.  This is supposed to make the 0.5% Californians who already ante up 40% of state revenues to now start paying their "fair share". (more here)

The Sins of Trump

George Rebane

2024 will be a tumultuous year that will tax all of our ‘goodwill toward men’.  The world is full of wars, incipient wars, and hot spots.  In America we and much of the rest of the world will be focused on our November national election.  And embedded in the run-up to that election will be the indictments and trials of former President Trump and the impeachment and scandals of the Biden administration.  RR commenters of all stripes have circled the ‘sins of Trump’ barn innumerable times over the last couple of years.  Here, for the record, I want to enter my own take on Trump’s sins.

An Octogenarian Reflects

George Rebane

I received the following reflection from a friend who received it from another friend.  Apparently, this piece has been going around a bit.  I share a slightly edited version of it because it reflects the view of so many of us still alive after having already lost most of our longtime friends and now going through a sequence of health crises, one of which will inevitably nail us.  But oh, what a time we have had and what we have witnessed over these very special decades in the course of human events.

@@@@@@

We grew up in the 40s-50s-60s.

We studied in the 50s-60s-70s.

We dated in the 50s-60s-70s.

We got married and discovered the world in the 60s-70s-80s.

We ventured into the 70s-80s.

We stabilized in the 90s.

We got wiser in the 2000s.

And went firmly through the 2010s.

Turns out we've lived through NINE different decades..

TWO different centuries...

TWO different millennia...

We have gone from the telephone with an operator for long-distance calls to video calls to anywhere in the world, we have gone from slides to YouTube, from vinyl records to online music, from handwritten letters to email and WhatsApp..

From live matches on the radio, to black and white TV, and then to HDTV...

We went to Blockbuster and now we watch Netflix...We got to know the first computers, punch cards, diskettes and now we have gigabytes and megabytes in hand on our cell phones or iPads...

We wore shorts throughout our childhood and then long pants, oxfords, Bermuda shorts, etc.  We dodged infantile paralysis, meningitis, H1N1 flu and now COVID-19..

We rode skates, tricycles, invented cars, bicycles, mopeds, gasoline or diesel cars and now we ride hybrids or 100% electric...

We have seen the dawn of a new age when our machines are becoming smarter than us in all our endeavors.

Yes, we've been through a lot but what a great life we've had!  They could describe us as "exennials" people who were born in that world of the fifties, who had an analog childhood and now a digital adulthood.

We're kind of Ya-seen-it-all.

Our generation has literally lived through and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.  It is our generation that has literally adapted to "CHANGE".

A big round of applause to all the members of a very special generation, which is UNIQUE.  Here's a precious and very true message:

TIME DOES NOT STOP!  Life is a task that we do ourselves every day. When you look, it’s already six in the afternoon; when you look, it's already Friday; when one looks, the month is over; when one looks... the year is over; when one looks... 50, 60, 70 and 80 years have passed!

When you look... we no longer know where our friends are.  When you look... we lost the love of our life and now, it's too late to go back.

Do not stop doing something you like due to lack of time.  Do not stop having someone by your side, because your children will soon not be yours, and you will have to do something with that remaining time, where the only thing that we are going to miss will be the space that can only be enjoyed with the usual friends.  This time, unfortunately, never returns.  That day is today!

WE ARE NO LONGER AT AN AGE TO POSTPONE ANYTHING

Always together, Always united, Always brothers/sisters, Always friends.  The happiest people don't have everything, they just make the best of everything!!

Hopefully, you have time to read and then share this message... or else leave it for *Later* and you will see that you will never share it!  Pass it on to your best friends. Don't leave it for later.

A Little Brainbone Exercise

George Rebane

Here are a couple of problems that our high school students taking the annual merit scholarship TechTest may encounter.  The solutions require no higher math, actually only a little bit of lower math, and can be puzzled out on the back of an envelope.  You, however, may use a full sheet of paper.

Problem 1: What are all the feasible clock times at which the minute and hour hands lie concurrently (on top of each other) on a standard clock face?  Calculate your answers to the nearest second.

Problem 2: What are all the feasible clock times at which the counter-clockwise angle from the minute hand to the hour hand makes a right angle (90 degrees) on a standard clock face?  Calculate your answers to the nearest second.

Hint:  It’s possible (advisable?) to puzzle out the approach to both problems in your head before making a single mark on paper.  But in any event, always draw a picture.

Scattershots – 19nov23

George Rebane

Trump’s intent to deport illegals here less than two years is considered by the looney tunes lamestream as being “extreme”, and further evidence that he intends to destroy our democracy.  So the questions again are 1) is it illegal/unconstitutional to deport aliens who have entered the country illegally?, and 2) what length of residency by the illegals qualifying for deportation then is not extreme?  It’s idiotic to put this threshold at zero, since then the invitation goes out to the world that just getting your wet butt across the river and hiding out for a bit is all that is necessary for permanent residency, qualifying for all the benefits, and more.  This is exactly what today’s illegal aliens making their way to the border are betting on.

If you use the same or similar words as Hitler used to describe his enemies, then you are automatically a fascist, Nazi, … .  This is the twisted reasoning that Trump’s opponents are telling their under-educated constituents who are innocent of history and the uses of language.  Now I’m not a proponent of Trump’s own record of shooting off at the lip.  But to tell the double dummies out there that such usages are proof of Trump’s sinister political ideology and governance when elected does not serve the county well.  But it is one more bit of evidence that benefitting the country has never been the intention of the woke progressives and other collectivist fellow travelers.

Most journalists like to be the recipients of leaks – well almost.  When pressed in public, these reporters immediately do a little back-tracking by telling us that they are not in favor of leaks that are illegal, immoral, or unethical.  The question this raises for me again is ‘what is our right to privacy?’  While the Constitution contains no express right to privacy, legal scholars do cite “the most obvious protection of privacy in the Bill of Rights is the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals in their persons, homes, papers, and effects from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government.”  The restriction ‘by the government’ should give us pause, because it doesn’t say anything about your neighbor prying into your affairs and broadcasting his findings.  Other students of the law cite the Basic or Common Law of Privacy – “The right of privacy is: the right of a person to be free from unwarranted publicity, the unwarranted appropriation or exploitation of one's personality, the publicizing of one's private affairs with which the public has no legitimate concern.”  So who does the warranting and assessing legitimate concerns?  To me it sounds like the issue of privacy is another plank in the full-employment platform for the country’s lawyers.

Flâneur

George Rebane

Years back in a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (see also ‘The Antifragile Taleb’) he described himself as having achieved the status of a flâneur.  His circuitous description of such a person was immediately inviting to me.  I am a long-time fan (student?) of Taleb, and admire his depth of knowledge about many things, even though personally he comes across as somewhat acerbic and stand-offish.  Anyway, I did more research on flâneurs and ordered a new set of business cards on which I describe myself as a ‘Flâneur-in-training’.

Since most people don’t know what is a flâneur, I made a little wallet card that I hand to those interested.  On it is my definition that expands a bit on its 1854 introduction as “an idle man about town”, and captures the more desirable traits with which Taleb and the modern definition have adorned it.

Flâneur – An accomplished gentleman of independent means, no longer having to scramble for a living, who is a keen observer of the human condition and has wide ranging interest in issues of currency and intellectual moment that include culture, politics, the arts, sciences, international affairs, etc.  He is often seen reading the news at a sidewalk café, perhaps sharing the passing scene with a like-minded friend.  Afternoons may find him invited to some exclusive salon, and evenings at a concert or lecture.  A flâneur is by nature a Bayesian, ascribing certainty or impossibility to no tenet in his credo of beliefs – the possibility of countering evidence is always allowed, nay, sought.  Flâneurs are basically elitists in that they discriminate, and are neither inclusive nor equitable in their choice of companions – they do not suffer fools – life is too short.

I have found my niche.

Redeeming Aspects of American Slavery?

George Rebane

One of our politicians, I now forget who, recently let slip the notion that American blacks have benefitted from having ancestors who were slaves – he stated that American slavery had bestowed redeemable aspects on those progenies who today share protected freedoms with our white population.

Of course, the politician was immediately attacked as a racist for proposing that slavery had any redeemable features at all.  In response he immediately succumbed and offered profuse apologies for his obvious error.  And the matter appears to have been settled as strong reminder that no one should ever again publicly imply that slavery was a “positive good in the United States” as was the regular habit of ante-bellum southern politicians during the 1810-1860 period. (more here)

Most people today reject the oratorical arguments of men like John C. Calhoun, et al. holding that regulated slavery vs unregulated free labor was indeed a “positive good” for civilized society.  But giving the matter a little more thought does bring up another perspective.  And that is in the comparison of the quality of life enjoyed today by the African-Americans to that of the trials and tribulations available to sub Sahel African blacks.  It is clear to many, most certainly to our African-Americans, that America continues to provide a much higher quality of life and opportunity for our black citizenry.  All one has to do is look at the predominance of which direction migration is taking place between the two continents.

In short, one can argue that whatever suffering our slaves went through compared to the then concurrent life of their African cousins on a continent of constant combat and corruption, our slaves bequeathed their posterity a much better environment in which to pursue their happiness than did those who remained in Africa.

If this has been a redeeming feature of American slavery, it most certainly was not planned that way a couple of centuries ago.  But today it is what it is, and therefore may require some more thought when we reconsider the darker side of our history.

Basic pricing rules in an insane Democrat economy

George Rebane

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron in a 35-page opinion “found that Donald Trump and his family business committed fraud by making false and misleading valuations on much of his real-estate empire and ordered the cancellation of legal certificates that have allowed the Trumps to do business in the state.”  He claims that “the Trumps have repeatedly relied ‘on bogus arguments’ that ignore basic rules about how assets are valued. To the Trumps, rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated ones, and restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted property”. 

To Engoron “This is a fantasy world, not the real world.”  And to correct these egregious business practices “the judge said it was necessary to go ahead and cancel the Trump business certificates now because the defendants ‘have continued to disseminate false and misleading information while conducting business,’ even as an independent monitor has been overseeing their actions.” (more here)

This hands a pre-appeal victory to New York Attorney General Letitia James who has been hunting Trump for some years now.  Looking at the nature of the charges they have cobbled together, this puts the AG and the judge into the large cohort of Democrats in which evil and rank ignorance cohabit.  Consider the charge that a property owner cannot price his own properties, especially prices that have been accepted by some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated lenders who have repeatedly dealt with Trump in mutually beneficent deals that have enriched all participants.

According to these evil idiots – abetted by legions of Democrats and lamestream outlets - the government is the final arbiter of real estate prices (what next?), and can criminally charge citizens with fraud if they price their properties higher than what is acceptable to our overseers.  How does one find common ground with such senseless autocrats, let alone abide with them peacefully within the same borders?

The Latitude of Constitutional Free Speech

George Rebane

With the upcoming Trump trials it’s time to take a more focused look at how his indictments for exercising ‘unconstitutional speech’ are holding up in the land of the First Amendment and free speech.  As a starting point I’ll take a leftwing reader’s comment in the most recent Sandbox.

*****

George

Do you have the right to free speech to spread information you know is a lie or not verifiable when it is your official duty to deal with the truth? That's what Trump is accused of. Also can you note your sources that cite that Pence has the Constitutional right to pause the election certification and if so for how long. Also does that mean that Trump would remain President until the whole matter is sorted out? Also how would the other members of the Executive branch have to deal with it, for example cabinet members and Presidential appointments. Has this ever happened before?

Links supporting your contention would be helpful.

Posted by: Paul Emery | 13 August 2023 at 06:44 PM

*****

First Amendment of the US Constitution – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (more here and here)

As can be seen from his subsequent Sandbox exchange with other readers, Mr Emery continues to have a problem with staying on the topic he raises in the above comment.

Do you have the right to free speech to spread information you know is a lie or not verifiable when it is your official duty to deal with the truth? That's what Trump is accused of.   The short answer is YES since the Constitution is silent on such a question.  And we must remember that politicians have the same rights to exercise free speech as those enjoyed by non-politicians, especially when both are claiming to express and communicate their beliefs.

Also can you note your sources that cite that Pence has the Constitutional right to pause the election certification and if so for how long.

This question exhibits a misunderstanding of our Constitution which is not intended to be a document of permissions granted by the state.  If the Constitution is silent on some matter or issue, then it cannot be appealed to resolve the matter by any third party inserting their gratuitous interpretation (see Pence's letter below).  In the electoral vote certification matter, the Constitution is only clear in requiring the Senate, chaired by the VP, to examine and count the submitted electoral votes, and certify them if they found to be legitimate.  It prescribes no time frame nor process that the VP must undertake to become convinced one way or another about the legitimacy of what he has at hand.  Therefore, he is free to follow his own counsel on how to proceed toward a certified electoral vote.

Also does that mean that Trump would remain President until the whole matter is sorted out?  Also how would the other members of the Executive branch have to deal with it, for example cabinet members and Presidential appointments. Has this ever happened before?

Again, since the Constitution is silent on such a contingency, one can presume the sitting government remains in place and functional until a new in legally accepted – in this case, until the presiding VP makes up his mind on how to resolve the matter.  Here we see that Pence acted totally within his several Constitutional prerogatives in accepting the electoral vote as it was presented.  VP Pence stated in a letter (here and here) that he does not have the unilateral authority to reject the electoral votes presented to him.  That is an erroneous interpretation of the First Amendment.

This situation regarding the electoral college and the transfer of power has not happened before in our Republic’s history.  Here is the complete copy of Trump’s fourth indictment issued by a Georgia grand jury.

America’s Numeracy

George Rebane

America’s numeracy has been covered in these pages since RR launched.  As technology accelerates in these pre-Singularity years, our innumeracy has become more of a critical factor in how we govern ourselves and our general quality of life that depends on our ability to create wealth.  For example, it’s almost impossible for the innumerate among us to understand the axiomatic human behaviors that make the failures of collectivism hard to understand (e.g. the widespread acceptance of neo-Marxism).  A recent article that expands on all this is ‘I wish Americans would Stop Saying they are not Good at Math’.  The table below is from that article.

According to the OECD-PISA website [1]:  Mathematical performance, for PISA, measures the mathematical literacy of a 15 year-old to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts to describe, predict and explain phenomena, recognising the role that mathematics plays in the world. The mean score is the measure. A mathematically literate student recognises the role that mathematics plays in the world in order to make well-founded judgments and decisions needed by constructive, engaged and reflective citizens. [1]

For lack of a pinger …

George Rebane

The submersible Titan is now most certainly lost with five dead tourists aboard.  The search for Titan has been going on since contact with it was lost within two hours into the mission to visit the wreckage of the sunken Titanic resting at a depth of approximately 12,000 feet. (more here)

As an engineer with some experience in working with submersible systems ranging from nuclear submarines to remotely operated underwater vehicles, I’ve been struggling to figure out how such a tourist cum research vessel could have been designed to get lost in such a way that it could not be found with the latest underwater technology brought to bear.

All the submersible systems of any value on which I worked were always deployed, at a minimum, with a pinger to enable it to be quickly located should the need arise.  A pinger is an electrically powered transducer that emits a loud acoustic signal when activated, one that can be heard tens of miles away.  The simplest pinger can be turned on from inside the submersible by just pushing a button.  More sophisticated pingers, most certainly warranted for vehicles like the Titan, would entail programmable transponders which can listen to a coded interrogation from, say, a support vessel, and reply with a number of responses that report the condition and location of the submersible.  Such pingers can also be programmed to start broadcasting automatically when any one of a number of problems/contingencies is sensed.

In the scheme and cost of underwater operations pingers are cheap insurance.  Even when working with marine mammals on various recovery and attack systems, we always had a pinger on the target vehicle that we wished to recover or determine its location.  These were also standard components strapped on to various test missiles, mines, and other gear to be recovered later.

So it now boggles this technical brainbone to hear days of reports on the Titan recovery effort that lament the loss of the vehicle, designed by a first-rate engineering team, that supposedly passed its man-safe qualifications before submerging with a live crew.  The entire scenario is made even more amateurish by reports of potentially manmade pounding sounds being heard by the transducer field deployed by the rescuers, and still no one has offered the obvious observation about onboard pingers or the lack thereof.  If they didn’t think of it before hearing the possible sounds from Titan, then by now someone should have said, ‘Oh shit, we forgot the pingers!’ or at least reported the presence of dysfunctional onboard pingers when the pounding started.

Having now discovered a debris field potentially from Titan, some may offer that the vehicle suffered a massive and sudden decompression during its descent, thereby not allowing time for a pinger to be manually activated.  But we already covered how that contingency would have been overcome with a programmed pinger.  The sound of silence on the missing pingers deepens the mystery.

America’s Mass Suicide in Progress

[The following is a recent commentary by Victor Davis Hanson, an academic and national intellect familiar to RR readers.  In it he again summarizes the socio-political travesties that America’s Left, abetted by our foreign enemies, daily visits upon our people most of whom ill-prepared by their schooling to understand, let alone resist, these propagandized assaults.  VDH’s commentary was first posted on townhall.com.  gjr]

Victor Davis Hanson

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice.

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges.

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign - while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely "Russian disinformation." That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multi-year audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden's purported tax irregularities.

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden's appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar "reparations" payout to the state's Black residents.

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have.

One of the reparations board leaders asserts Blacks might be willing to accept an "installment" plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a "travel alert" advising Blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' announcement of a presidential bid.

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis - all outside Florida - have the highest Black murder rates in the nation.

Florida by contrast, with a Black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of Black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP's board of directors is himself a Florida resident!

Black Lives Matter has just announced it lost millions of dollars in investments and ran up huge deficits. The culprit was its former corrupt leadership.

Its extravagant spending, plush homes, and family hangers-on have nearly bankrupted the advocacy group. It cannot account for the millions of dollars in corporate guilt and protection money it leveraged following the George Floyd riots in 2020.

In New York, a threatening subway career criminal with 42 prior arrests was subdued by a bystander and died during the confrontation. The criminal is now deified. The would-be Samaritan is charged with felony manslaughter.

The deceased's uncle is vocal about his late nephew's confrontation. But he himself was just arrested with stolen property and armed with a knife. He was mysteriously still roaming the streets despite 70 prior arrests and current active arrest warrants.

In almost every American city and town, biological males, with enormous advantages in size and musculoskeletal mass, routinely win women's sporting competitions.

They are systematically destroying decades of progress that sought to ensure parity between men and women's sports.

Corporate America has joined this cultural revolution hysteria. Companies are apparently now hellbent on destroying their brands, profits, and net worth.

Under pressure from the LGBTQ activists, the Los Angeles Dodgers reinvited the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to celebrate Pride night at Dodger Stadium.

Catholics and Christians had objected to the invitation because the group's notoriety hinges on its sexualized and often pornographic mockery of Catholic ritual, the Holy Trinity, and Christian faith.

The supposedly courageous group would never dare extend its street-theater blasphemy to other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus.

The Dodgers apparently do not care that Greater Los Angeles may be home to 6 million Mexican American citizens and resident Hispanic immigrants. Most are Catholic and many were avid Dodger fans.

Anheuser-Busch has nearly destroyed its best-selling Bud Light brand by hiring transgender performance-art activist Dylan Mulvaney to hawk the brand - and his own transitioning - to America's working classes.

The Disney corporation, for decades, has enjoyed multibillion-dollar concessions and a veritable 40-square mile private fiefdom gifted from the taxpayers of Florida.

No matter. Disney has rebranded it films, amusement parks, and television offerings to reflect radical transgender, gay, and race advocacies.

The results so far are billion-dollar losses in Disney stock, subscribers, and viewers.

A woke CNN has all but destroyed its once-global audience. It now has fewer viewers than certain popular podcasts.

All these implosions are not just shocking but surreal. Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide - to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?

Chain of Consciousness

George Rebane

The recent burst of large language models (LLMs) from AI research has reinvigorated the Singularity related topics of machine sentience, sapience, super-intelligence, agency, ethics, morals, …, along with prognoses of what they may have in store for humans when/if they become ascendant.  Most commentators, including yours truly, see a high likelihood of a dystopian post-Singularity future for mankind.

Among these well-known AI experts are internationally renowned scientists like Nick Bostrom (e.g. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014) and Max Tegmark (e.g. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 2017).  These tomes are worth reading more than once, which I am currently doing.  It turns that both Bostrom (Oxford) and Tegmark (MIT) are established physicists, philosophers, and AI researchers (and both were born in Sweden).

Their counsel for humanity to proceed carefully into a future not dominated by our species is countered by more hopeful futurists like Hans Moravec (e.g. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, 1990) and Ray Kurzweil (e.g. The Singularity is Near, 2005).

About the Singularity, Moravec (Carnegie-Mellon) advises his readers that “human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. … Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.”

And it is our postbiological future that I would like to expand on here.  Moravec, Kurzweil, and others of their ilk have been describing a post-Singularity world that is inhabited by both intelligent machines and various forms of ‘transhumans’ – humans who have shed their evolved mortal coils and taken up new forms in both the physical and computational sense.  A popular scenario has some of us living in cyborg bodies.  Another inviting future has us living in virtual worlds as computational entities, and still others have us co-habiting the material (real?) world with superintelligent machines exercising some manner of peer relationships.

Communism Arrives in California

From each according to his ability and to each according to his need – Communist Axiom

George Rebane

California consumers will soon be paying for their utilities according to how much money they make.  The long-denied face of Marxism will have arrived in full force if the utilities and the Public Utilities Commission have their way.

When this authoritarian regime gains a foothold, its principles will then be applied to control the means-based prices of life’s other necessities.  This is what always has happened when the butt stupid half of a country’s citizenry takes to using the government gun to milk their productive neighbors.  Our Left has always denied that their goal is organize America according to Marxist-cum-Communist principle.  Today they have gained enough support from our double dummies that they can talk about their progress to authoritarian rule out in the open.

All this is in the works in California because this is the way Gavin Newsom’s state government wants it: “The income-based bill proposal is part of the companies’ compliance with legislation passed by the California state government last year requiring these types of plans for utilities. The California Public Utilities Commission would have to approve the proposal and make a final decision by mid-2024. The fixed rate could start showing up on bills as soon as 2025.” After that, watch for the wall to be built around California to keep those who are productive from escaping becoming slaves to “equity,” unless the whole country has embraced Marxism by then. (more here)

 

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.