Rebane's Ruminations

When Compassion Kills

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 December 2019.]

‘Tis the season of peace, joy, and giving, of both the complimentary and compassionate kind.  Every year during these weeks we are deluged with pleas to open our wallets for uncountable good causes.  ‘Twas ever thus.  But compassionate giving on an international scale has often been the precursor, if not the actual cause, of the subsequent death for tens of millions.  And as a nation that continues to give and has given lavishly in the past, this should give us Americans some pause as we reflect on the history of such gifts.

Recently published is one such history of a program of compassionate giving that turned out to give rise to the subsequent deaths of 20 to 30 million Soviet farmers in the 1930s.  The book is The Russian Job – the forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin (2019) by award-winning historian Douglas Smith. (reviewed here)  In it Smith describes in devastating detail of how during 1921-23 the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, working over a vast land area, saved 10 million Russians from certain starvation.

A Progressive’s ‘Common Ground’

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

George Rebane

Sierra Business Council CEO Steven Frisch took to task my criticism of Terry McAteer’s Union column (here) in which he glossed over the real problems that California has under Democrat leadership.  Along with McAteer, Frisch also appears to be blind to California socialists’ homegrown catastrophes, and counsels those who would point them out to “stop acting like a bunch of babies and work together."

A Different and Dangerous Impeachment

George Rebane

‘This Impeachment Is Different – and More Dangerous’ writes Lawrence Lessig in Politico.  He is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and according to my lights tilts a bit to the left.  But he has penned an insightful piece that more or less flies in formation and abets Rebane Doctrine on the Great Divide (you know, confirmation bias and all that).

Lessig correctly argues that the current impeachment imbroglio is not a rehash of America’s past impeachments.  Today, the plethora of politically polarizing media have so divided the country that both sides are totally sustained in their beliefs without even considering whether there is any middle ground remaining, and, if so, should we seek it out.  He points out that past impeachments were carried out by elite cadres operating, more or less, out of the public glare.  The impeachers were not pored over by the public, whose changing attitudes were not constantly apparent to the impeachers.  Today, Americans have a choice on how to view the impeachment process, and their attitudinal temperature is taken multiple times a day by countless polls.

Democrat Public Education – The gift that keeps taking

George Rebane

Public schools are a government institution, and its teachers are civil servants and public sector workers.  As FDR warned more than 80 years ago, unionizing public sector employees is a very bad idea, and that has proven to be true over the intervening generations.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in what has happened in our unionized public schools over the last half century.  The Democratic party has filled our classrooms with undereducated leftwing ideologues and propagandized union flacks, which accurately characterize the aggregate of America’s classroom cadres of ‘educators’.

What they have produced in this interval is an innumerate citizenry with minimal critical thinking skills and a knowledge base to match – more than one in four Americans do not know the structure of their governance and the three branches of our government, never mind knowing what each does.  Internationally, we are at the bottom of the barrel of developed first world countries, and this considering that we are still the world hegemon and the second largest economy on the globe.  Our youth’s academic achievement, upon which our future and wellbeing rest, is poor and stagnant, while we watch teachers strike ‘for the children’(!?) demanding ever more money for their pension funds, administrative staffs, and unions.

Take a look at the most recent PISA test scores just released.  The Asian countries, led by Red China, are eating our lunch in each of the three critical academic categories – reading, math, and science.  (more here)

All this while daily, without being aware, we relinquish more freedoms to the state in the false promise of more prosperity and security.  The Left has been faithfully following Lenin’s dictum on education, and achieving the predicted results.  We now have an electorate half of which consists of a cohort of compliant slogan reactive sheep, ideologically herded by a lamestream media totally beholden to and the hand servant of the Democrat Party.  It is difficult to believe that our poor schools are just the natural result from being staffed by two generations of incompetent teachers.  But it is easy to cite reams of evidence from their own ‘educational literature’ that the product our academic factories produce is the result of a purposive and cynically conspiratorial effort by the Left.  And all this for the objective of weakening America internally through compliant collectivism so as to eliminate it as an impediment to globalization.

Once more we turn to Thomas Jefferson – ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  The Democrats live by it, and the Republicans don’t have a clue.

Consciousness and uploading your mind

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 December 2019.]

OK, let’s try something different this week.  This being the Christmas season and all, it’s time to think about our souls and eternal life.  Well, on second thought, maybe we should back off on all that divisive spiritual stuff, and just take the secular humanist look at immortality which, since the sci-fi novels of the 1950s, has focused on ‘uploading’ the contents of your brain into some super-computer, or a phantasmagorical robot, or cyborg which then in principle can live forever.

Democrats’ Big Lie #4688 – Voter Suppression

George Rebane

Voter fraud in America is real and bipartisan according to evidence presented by the Heritage Foundation.  To combat voter fraud, states have instituted “voter identification laws and programs to clean up wildly inaccurate voter rolls to help verify that only eligible individuals are voting, and that they are casting ballots in the jurisdictions where they actually reside.”  California recently had to be taken to court to start removing over 5 million inactive registrations from its voter rolls.  Pew reported back in 2012 that “one out of every eight voter registrations were inaccurate, with 2.8 million people registered in two or more states.”  And across the country, hundreds of counties record more registered voters than they have residents.

These visible and verified instances of voter and voting data are “just the tip of the iceberg” of vastly more cases of people voting fraudulently.  But for some reason known only to our legal beagles, manifest voter fraud is hard to prove in our courts.  However, most revealing, re the bipartisan argument, is which party is in perpetual denial that significant voter fraud is happening, and overwhelmingly opposed to combating the country’s efforts to field fair and honest elections.  (more here)

And the Democrats are equally busy on the other side of this coin.  Here their longstanding and comprehensive propaganda involves keeping alive and growing where possible, the message that Republicans are eternally engaged in the suppression of minority voting.  (Now this is really rich, coming from the party that invented minority voter suppression and practiced it for generations, and continues doing it to this day while hiding under the Alinsky argument.) 

This is a really cynical Big Lie that the Democrats direct toward the most vulnerable and least educated minority constituents who have demonstrably minimal critical thinking skills and even less motivation/ability to discover the truth for themselves.  Instead they listen to existential racists like Mad Max Waters, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris.  These Democrat demogauges, echoed by their lackey lamestream, continue to lie to their black and Latino voters that there exists an active and effective national program of minority voter suppression carried on by Republican conservatives.

Their latest ‘evidence’ of this is the defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams who refused to concede defeat because of supposed “voter suppression”.  Again, nothing of the sort happened.  What really defeated Abrams was the increase of black voter registrations from the last midterm which “actually topped white voters in percentage terms, 68.4% compared with 66.8%.”  When you really dig into the actual voting data on nationwide black and Hispanic turnout – “despite voter ID requirements, registration checks, and limits on early voting in some states” – you see the real percentage increases as cited by the US Census Bureau.  The details are even more damning to the Democrats, whose Big Lie actually does cause many minorities to believe that their votes won’t matter anyway because, out of frustration, many of their neighbors will not vote.  And such big lies continue keeping minorities compliant and on the plantation where Democrat political leaders unanimously believe they belong.  (more here)  

These are the kind of Democrat big lies we will keep covering as the Left continues their attempt to focus the country’s attention on Trump’s foot-in-the-mouth braggadocios and impeachment circus, instead of his accomplishments which daily benefit almost all Americans.  And as always, I invite progressive readers to present substantive arguments/data that counter the above commentary.

Ruminations – 21nov19 (updated 22nov19)

George Rebane

Those creative Dems on Team Schiff have again expanded the definition of ‘evidence’.  The initial expansion qualified 'allegations' for inclusion. And from yesterday’s hearings we learned that ‘perceptions’ have now joined the ranks of culpable evidence.  For those paying attention, ‘feelings’ are waiting in the wings, and are next to shoulder and again lighten the burdens of what we formerly knew as evidence.

Last night’s Democratic debate was kabuki komedy taken to a new level.  Moderated by four fierce femmes, crack journalists all, from (gasp!) MSNBC, the carefully staged candidates were repeatedly lobbed fuzzballs like, ‘We all know Trump is a brazen and corrupt scumbag, who has done this (insert allegation), and that (insert allegation), …, and even this (insert allegation); what other things can you add to his sins, and how would you be a better president if elected?’

Someone with a caring and sympathetic heart should really show Uncle Joe to the Senior Statesman Suite at a first class Baltimore assisted living center.  He doesn’t deserve what his ‘friends’ are doing to him in the public forum.

The current desperate push to to embrace preventable man-made global warming (aka climate change) is causing its science-free adherents and echo chambers to cite and regurgitate ever more ridiculous reasoning supposedly from 10,000+ “climate scientists” warning of civilization’s impending doom that can only be saved through ample applications of central planning and socialism.  A more sober assessment of all this (‘Climate ‘Science’ Riddled With Dishonesty, Incompetence’) comes from Dr Walter Williams, economics professor and syndicated columnist.  It’s definitely worth perusing with cup of coffee in hand.  (H/T to correspondent)

[22nov19 update]  The Left’s assault on education and America’s public schools continues full speed ahead.  Yesterday in Howard County, Maryland the school board redistricted school boundaries so as to cover their collective asses and once more denigrate underachieving black kids with a policy that explicitly says ‘black kids can’t learn’ - they will not benefit from better teachers and schools.  To equalize test performance scores between a mostly white district and a mostly black district, the school board redrew district boundaries so that smarter white kids will be bussed longer distances into badly performing black schools, and vice versa.  The school board doesn’t give a big rat’s ass about the kids, black or white, but only covering their political butts from criticisms of “inequality”.  So they gave up on the black kids and will now ‘equalize’ the test scores by bussing more kids longer distances, thereby winding up with lower scores from both districts which, however, will be more equal.  All this is going on while we’re pissing and moaning about the House impeachment circus, which takes up all the news bandwidth.  Try to find a SINGLE Democrat congress critter who will point out this atrocity.

Scattershots – 15nov19

George Rebane

‘Schiff’s Obstruction Theory’ is a particularly revealing analysis of constitutional law and its SCOTUS interpretations by David Rivkin and Lee Casey, two well-respected lawyers with White House experience who practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington DC.  A key point in their analysis is Schiff’s reluctance to formally adjudicate his claimed evidence of presidential obstruction of justice.  “If (Schiff) were confident in his legal position, he’d want to put the case to a judge.  Yet he seems desperate not to.”  Schiff’s main and legally intractable argument circles the contention that it is an impeachable offense for a president to resist impeachment.  The detailed expansion of this important constitutional interpretation about the role of separation of powers in an impeachment process is worth knowing, especially if you’re going to debate the matter in a reasonable manner.

Teachers union leader Glenn Sacks has come up with “the cure for what ails America’s schools”.  And as we would expect, the man has not a clue about the real ailments of our public schools, for the simple reason that he has not looked in a mirror.  In his 15nov19 lecture (here) he details all of the extra “clerical work and other chores (that) sap educators’ limited time”, and provides the simplistic and proven ineffective solution – “hire more support staff” (aka new union members).  Nowhere does he even hint at how the unions have increased the teachers’ list of clerical tasks and “other chores”, and nowhere does he mention that his solution will require more funding for schools already misspending their large allocations of taxpayer funds.  And to put a ribbon on it, nowhere does he recognize that the new progressive parenting prescriptions have led to the breakdown of the students’ social contract with how they respond to teachers and how they behave toward each other and the school’s infrastructure while on campus.

‘170 Years of Earth Surface Temperature Data Show No Evidence of Significant Warming’ by T.K. Bjorklund of the Dept of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Houston presents a somewhat technical but still accessible discussion of evidence that our current climate hysteria is way overblown.  This is one of a legion of papers by learned skeptics of the politicized global warming alarums promoted to substantiate more restrictive and expensive collectivist public policies from ever larger and more intrusive governments.  I look forward to our leftwing readers’ comments that address the substance of Dr Bjorklund’s presentation.  (H/T to reader.)

The Silence of Socialists

George Rebane

This morning’s cartoon in the 12nov19 Union (filched below) was a heartening surprise.  Our leftwing political cartoonist Bob Crabb is possibly the first from his political pole to recognize the Great California Exodus frequently covered here and recognized nationally.  The state’s socialists, echoed by our local progressives, are in terminal denial that California is losing its wealth creators and attracting the country’s transfer payment dependents and illegals to keep the population growing.

This reminded me of the many other issues about which our Left does not want their voices heard – for the simple reason that they have nothing reasonable to say and their usual apologetics to their cognitively challenged core constituents sound utterly foolish in the public forum.

This country-wide sound of silence starts at the national level where congressional Democrats have totally given up legislating and are focused solely on removing a president they know they cannot defeat at the polls; most certainly not with anyone still riding in their clown car of current candidates.  Even their own brain trust has let it be known that they are seriously looking for a Plan B, someone who will have at least a snowball’s chance in hell come next November should their almost four-year effort to impeach fail.

California is already a lost cause.  Its decades of one-party rule has left one third of its population without a voice as its socialists continue to tax, price, and regulate out the last vestiges of individual effort, initiative, and enterprise.  The message from the Sacramento socialists continues to be ‘my way or the highway’.  And millions of productive Californians respond by choosing the highway as each additional and more insane than the last diktat issues from the statehouse.  Our lefties have nothing to say about that in the public debate, save that the more looney ones deny that it is happening.

On the national scene the Democrats present us with a list of freebies designed for those legions who can’t or won’t.  No one with a functioning intellect knows how to contend with or pay for the proposed Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Free College, Open Borders, Wealth Taxes, Welfare for Illegal Aliens, … .  These pages witness the response of the national Left – none want to address these issues, and instead focus only on what they consider ‘evidence’ for impeachment and President Trump’s standings in the most recent polls.

For years I have pointed out in my commentaries policy questions and principles to which our leftwing readers will not respond, and instead either ignore or side-step the relevant issue.  A textbook example of this can be found in the response from the Left to my recent commentary on income inequality. (here)

Debating relevant and substantive issues for the country has never been a strong suit of our progressive Left.  They cannot understand, let alone offer, a cogent structure of the relationships of influences and causes which impact the outcomes of a public policy.  Not being able to go deeper, they simply respond by repetition of a strong opening assertion and expect that to carry the day.  This is akin to their concept of social justice and justice in general, where widely and frequently trumpeted allegations are taken as proxies in good standing for evidence.  When we compare the national experience of our socialists’ sound of silence with what history records that has been experienced in other lands under collectivist assault, then we find that it was ever thus.

Income Inequality Revealed (addended)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 6 November 2019.]

Income inequality in America has become a hot button issue.  People in the street are being convinced daily that the inequality is somehow morally reprehensible since they are made to believe that the inequality comes from the rich stealing from the poor.  And to nail this notion into people’s heads, we are told that the top fifth or quintile of households’ average earnings are 17 times more than the average of the bottom quintile.  The problem with this number is that it is a blatantly false statistic. 

Scattershots – 3nov19 (updated 6nov19)

George Rebane

Our increasingly dysfunctional school system makes itself felt every time any of us uses a text editor such as MS Word, or one embedded in some app such as the TypePad comment box.  The programmers who write the code that edits what you type are really drawn from a class of dimwits who are not very familiar with the English lexicon, contemporary American usage, spelling, and most certainly grammar.  And yet they blithely generate code that, for example, will take an obvious usage of a plural and make it into an erroneous singular possessive.  What’s really astounding about the de minimis qualifications of these turkeys (most certainly all of them wet behind the ears) is that they live in the 21^st century where our technology driven language continually morphs into novel word forms, yet their software continues to reject anything new that the writer seeks to use or compose, and instead imposes a garden variety proximity algo which converts the desired string into something out of a 20-year-old Webster’s dictionary.

The recent lackluster GDP growth numbers are now trumpeted by Democrats as something, anything to use against the stellar performance of the economy since Trump took office.  Their attempt to convince their constituents (who don’t even know the three branches of government) and fellow hangers on that such GDP growth is the important and impactive number that tells the real tale.  What they completely miss is that Main Street’s conception of the economy is formed of much more pragmatic data that people can experience where they live, shop, and work.  And there they see the real picture composed of record low unemployment, especially for minorities.  They see more open jobs wanting workers, they experience steadily rising wages, continuing low inflation and interest rates for their mortgages and debt, and enjoy store shelves filled with goods that they can afford.  They understand why consumer confidence numbers are so high because they are living daily in that sector of commerce.  And then they have to put that together with an editorializing ‘news’ reporter on some lamestream outlet telling them that Trump ‘lied’ when he promised them 3% GDP growth.  What all these TDS pundits don’t understand is that to the man-in-the-street GDP is at best just a confusing proxy for an economy, one that never trumps direct experience.

The Great Divide is both dunned and promoted by the Democrat brain trust.  They cannot abide the thought of separating themselves from the cash they drain from the country’s middle class, small businesses, retirees, and the wealthy who would abandon them in a heartbeat were life possible under an alternative form of governance than the fundamentally transformed America now promised by our Left’s proto-communists.  And yet the double-dummies continue to pursue a transparently partisan inquisition to overturn the 2016 election.  Even the November issue of the leftwing The Atlantic prominently laments that ‘Americans Hate One Another. Impeachment Isn’t Helping’, wherein they report – “According to a growing body of political-science research, Americans largely no longer feel a shared sense of national identity. Democrats and Republicans see their political opponents as enemies with totally incomprehensible beliefs and lifestyles. On impeachment, members of the two parties see things radically differently, not just because they have dissimilar political opinions, but because they have entirely divergent views on how to approach life. The vicious impeachment fight ahead may further exacerbate polarization in America, leaving Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between feeling even more suspicious of one another.” (emphases mine)  And the local leftwing loonies continue to believe that serious consideration of a Great Divide was invented in these foothills and remains a mental masturbation for some solitary and senile seniors.  (and more here)

[4nov19 update] Big tech companies in the Bay Area subsidizing housing is breathlessly reported by some liberals as vindication of capitalism transforming into altruistic collectivism – a long-held dream by all socialists.  I addressed one of our local breathless types in the last Sandbox with this - What some light (non?) thinkers miss is that CA’s state govts have put big tech’s tit in a wringer with its no growth and anti-housing policies so that the employees they need no longer have affordable housing available to them within commuting distance. So their PlanB is to pay such employees astronomical wages, or attempt the alternative of subsidizing their housing costs. None of this is altruistic or intended to alleviate the state’s mid-class housing shortage or provide homes for the homeless. Lefties, desperate to find any salutary evidence for socialist governance, will grasp at any straws, no matter how fantastic, to sustain their perpetually absurd narrative.

More homeowners are staying put longer.  This is the big finding from looking at the country’s real estate inventory numbers (here and google ‘homeowners stay put’).  Given the general shortage of housing in many states – on steroids in CA – this creates a problem for new home buyers, especially the middle-class folks trying to locate near their jobs.  Even though mortgage rates are low, the appreciation of house prices in a demand driven market makes the tax bite huge for sellers seeking to upsize for growing families or downsize for empty-nesters.  So people are staying closer to 20 years in their homes, where ten years ago their average stay in a house was about 10 years – hence, slower sales and a depressed housing market.  And all this is created by your state and local governments with their anti-development laws and regs as the economy is booming with jobs, wage growth, and consumer confidence at their highs.

‘Government is the problem’ has been a constant message in these pages since the launch of RR in 2007.  The examples provided by me and our right-leaning commenters over the years are legion and a matter of record – and, as seen above and below, they continue pouring in.  A more precise form of this truth is that ‘Upon closer examination, almost every one of society’s problems can be traced back to poor public policies adopted, implemented, and enforced by large self-serving, disconnected governments and their incompetent bureaucracies.’  In view of this history, today I am advancing ‘Government is the problem’ to axiomatic status in the Rebane Doctrine.  Recall that in reasoned apologetics an axiom is a statement of self-evident truth that requires no further proof in the logical development of an argument.

Sen Warren and her multifarious ‘plans’ illustrate a problem with ‘self-evident truths’, and nowhere more visibly than in her plan to nationalize America’s healthcare industry.  It is clear to me and mine that we share dismally few self-evident truths in common with her and hers.  Over the last days more and more people are taking a closer look at what her ‘Medicare for All’ proposal entails.  And an alarming number of people from both parties today conclude that the woman is either delusional or extremely ignorant about the ways and means of government operations.  Besides providing little to no realistic basis for paying for the $5T+ annual cost of this monstrosity that would double the federal budget, her ‘free healthcare is a human right’ fantasy would markedly increase the country’s cost of healthcare from what it is today.  And it would immediately bring to bear the EU’s practice of rationing (actually, every government-run health system in the world rations care”), and firmly ensconce ‘death panels’ at all levels in the attempt to contain runaway costs. (more here)

[6nov19 update]  The Big Lie has ALWAYS been the fundamental plank in the platform of collectivists – aka, socialists, communists, and the Democratic Party.  Their eternal goal is to form a comprehensively pervasive leviathan government that directs all human behavior into an amalgam of a compliant society based on Huxley’s Brave New World model.  Realizing that such organization for society is only preferred by those who neither ‘know’ nor ‘can’, they have perfected the Big Lie over the last century since Bolshevism first revealed that it was based on the Big Lie.  Today Democrats are the inheritors of American socialism that maintains socialism’s goal and the Big Lie in its well-oiled public relations and political toolset.  A commenter offers just one more piece of evidence of this in an admonishment by ABC’s Joy Behar for Dems to hide their true political intentions until after they are elected (here).  WSJ’s liberal columnist William Galston in his ‘Elizabeth Warren’s Health-Care Hara-Kiri’ takes Sen Warren to task for prematurely revealing her ‘Medicare for All’ catastrophe.  Note the response to all this from our progressive commenters.

A brief note on the formerly unbelievable level of national dumbth – the evidence just keeps rolling in.  According to current polls, fewer than 20% of Americans state that they do trust the federal government, yet over 50% of them prefer policies that would immensely enlarge it so as to control and provide for more of their lives.  We have known for some decades that our population in the aggregate (>95%) is innumerate.  After two generations of unionized public schooling, we now have daily demonstrations that we are a nation with few if any remaining critical thinking skills.  And this not because our genetically influenced intelligence levels have suddenly dropped, but simply because our government-managed knowledge base about reality continues to shrink.  At this point it’s always proper to cue Thomas Jefferson’s ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Bottom line - the Democrats have a winning strategy.

Dropout Derby (updated 1nov19)

George Rebane

It's funny when all the progressives dismissed Beto's "Damn right, we'll take your ...!" as being his exit speech.  Now they'll have no problem finding other excuses why this patently unqualified asshole is no longer in the Dem's line-up.  Welcome to Mr fish as our new leader.

Democrats’ Big Lies #s 4682, 4683, 4684 – Three Recent Biggies (updated)

George Rebane

Let’s start with Nancy Pelosi’s whopper proclaimed from the high altar of the House – “No one came to Congress to impeach the President of the United States.  No one.”

Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to American politics since 2016 knows that high on the do-list of all the country’s leftists, and most certainly of ALL Democrat congresscritters who successfully ran for office then and in 2018, is the impeachment of Donald J. Trump.  These people, all burdened with advanced cases of TDS, give a new definition of zealotry.  Their belief in the ‘democracy threatening’ evil of Donald Trump bypasses all forms of what we used to call reason and logic, where allegations now pass for evidence and their constant repetition is testimony to their verity.  The claimed ‘justice and fairness’ of their now resolved faith-based impeachment process is ludicrous on its face, and will convince only people for whom their TDS is merely an epiphenomenon of more serious psychoses.

Moving on to Sen Elizabeth Warren’s just released ‘plan’ to tank the nation’s economy with her (and Bernie’s) Medicare-for-All single payer, nationalized healthcare program, we hear her proclamation that the proximal funding of this $30T+ $52T+ ten-year catastrophe will not require raising taxes on the middle class.  Instead, she will squeeze the needed funds from our defense budgets, major increases in corporate taxes (remember, corporations don’t ‘pay’ taxes, their customers do), and launching the government’s unabashed assault on private property by robbing the assets of the wealthy who have already paid taxes on what they own.  Were that the only sources of funding the destruction of our nation’s healthcare industry.

History, along with a pencil and a used envelope, will quickly inform any well-read person that those revenue sources will not suffice.  The country’s real stash of cash and earnings are in the middle-class.  If this atrocity ever makes it past Congress, then you can bet the ranch that the federales will quickly go after the assets of the not-so-wealthy and start massive tax hikes (a la EU) on the middle-class.  Recall the years-long screeching about our healthcare costs by the progressives (and local leftwing loonies).  With their claims of our high 12-16% of GDP current annual healthcare costs, they compare this to the 6-8% costs tallied by the EU nationalized healthcare countries (dubiously comparing apples and oranges).

Now consider that the US annual GDP is a bit north of $20T; that’s, say, $210T over ten years.  The Pocahontas Plan will then mandate an over 50% increase (up to 25% of GDP) in our nation’s healthcare costs for openers, about which we have heard nothing but the sound of silence from our crack journalists.  And if you add up all the other increased costs of social programs that Warren has planned for us, you’ll see that our fundamentally transformed government will be the two-thirds participating gorilla in the nation’s economy – these levels are reached by communists and dictatorships, and will require astronomical tax rates to fund from America’s then inevitably tanking future economy.  The socialist elites will count on the nation’s carefully nurtured dumbth (see also below) to assure that none of the (middle class) sheeple will notice.

“We have gone straight past ‘new math’ and right to ‘woke math’.”  This latest program of socialist acculturation has started in Seattle, and soon promises to come to a leftwing unionized public school near you.  The main claim of the woke educators, who back this new turn to nurture the nation’s dumbth through the creation of new millions of innumerates, is that “Western mathematics, as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence (!!??), has been used to disenfranchise people and communities of color.”  The new curriculum promises not only to leave the so-exposed young with little actual knowledge of how to do math, it will also serve to “radicalize young people with tales of oppression and groom them to be future social justice warriors themselves” as they learn “how math dictates economic oppression”.  (Consider this in light of our country's current standing in math education and proficiency, and the damage already experienced from Common Core math.)

Such assaults on our society’s abilities to transmit knowledge and think critically are part and parcel of the promised fundamental transformation of America into a compliant herd that will have no alternative than to accept the dicta of a tyrannical and technologically savvy Leviathan.  For they will have no skills which they have learned to be able to earn.  Such people will not even be able to think of revolution, let alone have the capacity to plan a successful revolt.  The road to the new dark age is being paved bit by piece as we are focused on every issue being cast in terms of ethnic identities, each illustrated as a tragic victim of western civilization. (more here)

According to my lights, these are the kind of world-class lies against which the Left’s trumpeted “lies” of Trump’s foot-in-the-mouth bombast and bravura cannot hold a candle.

Sacramento Owns the Blackouts

“Can 40 million suffer third-world electric reliability without a political upheaval?” asks Holman Jenkins, 29oct19 WSJ

George Rebane

Northern Californians have now suffered multiple power blackouts in recent weeks and we are told by many that from here on this may become the new norm for our state – in other words, prepare your life to adopt the daily routines of third world countries where electric power is a sometime thing.  As opposed to all the now usual causes for these outages, ranging from climate change to a rapacious PG&E, I’d like to focus here on these blackouts as political events, and examine the new norm of power outages from that perspective.

Scattershots – 23oct19 (updated 26oct19)

George Rebane

Gov Newsom is outraged about the price of gasoline in California.  He doesn’t understand why current prices in the state are well into the $4/gal range.  In the best wisdom he and his can muster, they all accuse the oil companies for price fixing as the answer – another swig from the ‘capitalism is bad’ bottle satisfies everyone in Sacramento.  None of those dumb schiffs have a clue about CA’s draconian fuel regulations, about our having to make our own gasoline from the one or two refineries that the econuts have not yet purged from the state with the most cars in the nation, about the cap-and-trade (2013) and other anti-CO2 programs we have going in addition to raising gas taxes again in 2018.  We are paying $1.50 more than the country’s median price per gallon.  Now the butt stupid Dems led by Newsom are going to “protect the public” by demanding that the state’s Energy Commission start an investigation on the matter, in addition to promising to launch legal actions against gasoline producers, distributors, and retailers.  (more here)

All this to a constant drumbeat from Sacramento that calls for raising fuel prices so as to drive Californians to ditch their gas-powered cars.  The 23oct19 WSJ reports, “The Governor last month ordered revenue to be redirected from the last gas tax hike, which was supposed to fund highway construction, to projects that ‘reverse the trend of increased fuel consumption and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.’  So Californians in the future can look forward to paying more to drive on deteriorating roads as they head to homes without electricity due to blackouts. How long will it take California voters to figure out that these are problems made in Sacramento by politicians?” (emphasis mine)  The Democrats feel sanguine that the answer is ‘never’ since they have assured that teaching the necessary critical thinking skills to their voter base were banished from our schools almost two generations ago.  

‘Apoplectic Democrats’.  A reader and correspondent who long-ago predicted the ‘Advent of Michelle’ (also known as 'The Second Coming') is now chortling in his beer.  The more centrist Dems (yes, there still are some of them remaining on the DNC) are going into panic mode about the make-up of their candidate clown car, and more so because their grass roots constituents have drunk the Kool-Aid about the likely ones from whom they will choose their nominee.  (For confirmation, read the progressive’s comments in these pages.)  So, since Hillary continues to blow her remaining tires, the DNC leaders are casting their eye on the former first lady who has a very recognizable last name.

Yesterday’s NYT and New Yorker had “articles about how centrist and establishment Democrats are apoplectic over what is happening in the Democratic Primaries. (more here)  Biden is fading, mentally and politically. He’s hanging on for dear life to a presumption coming into the primaries that he had what it takes, but he doesn’t. Bernie and Warren are viewed as gateway drugs to general election disaster. (For a brutal takedown of Warren’s electoral chances from a progressive view, read Why Criticize Warren? in Current Affairs.)  The others in the race all have problems, from stone cold boring to non-starters. Kamala Harris is the biggest disappointment, there’s no there there.  And there’s one person they both note who could walk away with the nomination, but doesn’t appear to want it.”  (standing ovation please)  Enter Michelle.

'Gentlemen, start your generators!' is the word from our politically punitive PG&E.  Power shut-offs are scheduled to start this (23oct19) afternoon.

[24oct19 update]  The relentless spread of dumbth in America is picking up speed.  These pages have documented the destruction of our country’s public education in the hands of progressive teachers unions and liberal politicians working hard to maintain their plantations of minority constituents over the last half century.  A just-released poll shows us that the First Amendment and free speech are in the sights of Millennials (“the dumbest generation”), and to a lesser extent supported by GenXers and Baby Boomers. (more here) Nearly 60% of Millennials think that the Constitution “goes too far in allowing hate speech in modern America”.  It should now be amended so that “government should be able to take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false”.  These are people who have passed way beyond the tipping point of being able to sustain our democratic republic.  All this confirms that the latest generations have absolutely no understanding of the concept of free speech, and will gladly vote themselves into tyranny. 

[25oct19 update] To confirm statewide assessments (starting with Gov Newsom) that PG&E management continues to be incompetent and corrupt, we read the report of the San Diego power company (SDG&E) that years ago anticipated the potential damage to their infrastructure from weather and fire.  They responded by burying major transmission lines, and reconfigured their distribution network into smaller clusters that could be more surgically shutdown should the need arise.  PGE, on the other hand, neglected all of this, paid their execs handsomely, successfully lobbied politicians and the PUC to turn a blind eye to their malfeasance, and is now forced to execute consumer shutdowns over large areas in which only a minuscule part experiences ‘high’ winds, the overwhelming remainder experiencing dead calm to light airs.  Meanwhile, we in the foothills await yer another blackout starting tomorrow.

‘Democrats good, Republicans bad’ – Propaganda Central

'As government expands, liberty shrinks!'

George Rebane

Our intrepid columnist George Boardman in the 21oct19 Union laid out (here) a carefully concocted list of stats.

• Democrat “districts” generate 63% of GDP, while Republican districts manage only 37%.
• Democrat household incomes increased 17%, while Republican HHs only increased 3%.
• Democrat “districts” have greater concentrations (“clusters”) of college degrees.
• Democrat “districts” contain 75% of our professional and digital worker jobs, while Republican districts contain mostly agricultural, mining, and low-skilled manufacturing jobs.

With these in mind, Mr Boardman’s clear message to our light thinkers is that Democrats are the party of goodness and light, containing the smart, wealthy, and productive, while Republicans are the party of the backward, ignorant, poor, and struggling.  The better read who understand the demographics of Democrats' long-controlled urban districts will have none of this.

What this little piece of nascent propaganda omits are data on what kind of people overwhelm Democrat districts, and those who are moving in vs. out.  He says nothing about the millions of our poor, dismally under-educated, criminal, and welfare recipients concentrated in urban areas who provide the sinecures for Democrat politicians.  And Mr Boardman doesn’t tell the reader about where the lion's share of wealth is produced in our service and digital economy, along with the rampant income inequality and humongous transfer payments in these ‘districts’ and ‘regions’ all of which give rise to the skewed statistics to make such selectively massaged messages possible.

‘From Racism to Culturism’ (updated 18oct19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 October 2019.]

For some decades now, ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ have become a cachet in the Left’s narrative about the sins of the Right when other such appellations fail them.  Few people using such pejoratives can give a coherent definition of these terms, nevertheless they continue to serve a useful purpose to invoke the ire of their lightly read constituents.  Longtime listeners to these commentaries who have visited my blog know that I have a long history of being accused by my leftwing readers as a racist, among other unsavory things.

The nuance that such accusers of those like me miss is that I am a culturist, and not a racist.  Instead, as the years-long archive of my writings show, I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.  Western civilization is united by the formidable intersection of western cultures as practiced in the various countries of what today is known as ‘the west’.  And, absent my making any discriminatory remarks about people based on their DNA or gene set, that makes me and others like me culturists and apologists for culturism.

Yuval Harari, in his chapter ‘From Racism to Culturism’, concurs with and expands on this interpretation in his most recent tome, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century (2019).  Yuval Noah Harari is a celebrated socio-historian and author of best-selling books on humanity, its history, worldviews, and future portents.  Perhaps some of you have read his Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind (2014) or Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017). In the following, the quotes I use come from his ‘21 Lessons …’ published earlier this year.

Totalitarian regimes have always sought to fundamentally transform their nations’ cultures when coming to power.  However, such transformations never succeed.  History shows us this most recently in the recoil of such imposed transformations to their native versions in the liberated Balkans and countries conquered by the former USSR.  The existence of a rich tapestry of cultures around the world has served us well, and their measured and unforced evolution will continue to serve mankind in these tumultuous years of technology paced globalization.

Are some cultures better than others?  Cultural relativists say no, but reality says yes. Harari writes “… few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.”  When people judge others of a different culture on the basis of their display of cultural attributes, then that is NOT a racist judgement or racist behavior.  Such assessments are more accurately known as culturist behavior, and the person so disposed is a culturist, not a racist.  A culturist evaluates the relative worth of another culture based on cultural attributes that may be expressed or carried out by anyone of any race, and not on the basis of an individual’s racial make-up.

Traditional racism was firmly grounded in biological theories, in modern times even incorporating DNA and genes as the basis for attributed differences in such things as intelligence and morality.  This has been shown to have little scientific basis.  In Hariri’s words, “Today, in contrast, while many individuals still make such racist assertions, they have lost all of their scientific backing and most of their political respectability—unless they are rephrased in cultural terms. Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.”

For political reasons, today’s progressives reject this understanding of culturism and continue to accuse culturists of being racists in order to serve their emotive narrative targeting the politically unsophisticated.  Describing another nation as a ‘s-hole country’ is definitely not a racist slur, but instead a slur on the country’s culture.  There is nothing inherent in the people of any country, no matter their racial make-up, that prevents them from practicing a more productive and enlightened culture to benefit their citizens.  In sum, “culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and importance of cultural differences.”

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

[Addendum]  I revisit this distinction between racism and (my) culturism because now we have the left-of-center Yuval Hariri, an internationally respected scholar and author of relevant essays for the intelligent reader, who also concurs with what I have argued in these pages for many years.  Followers of Rebane Doctrine know my penchant for more precise and operational definitions, and may recall how my understanding of racist and racism was presented in ‘Who is a Racist?’ and ‘Racism and Racists Revisited’.  The caveat in all this is that with respect to the semantic accuracy of the definitions presented, we are technically all racists if we believe that the racial composition of individuals can now be determined from a detailed examination of their DNA.  To the extent we believe that this technology lets us characterize their aggregated physiological attributes, we are all racists.  But, of course, in the socio-political sense, as Hariri corroborates, that is not true.

Power Outage – from a very scary viewpoint

George Rebane

Mr Cedar Moss declared himself to be one of Lenin’s “useful idiots” in this morning’s (14oct19) Union (here).  There the man actually celebrates the recent power outage and looks forward to a time when these become a regular occurrence in our lives.  For him, “there is something about all this that feels very right”, and he admonishes us to just “get used to it folks.”  Why is this man such an ardent connoisseur of third-world living where regular power outages, among other shortages, are a way of life, and a world from which those who can, will risk life and limb to escape?

Well, it seems that he and his believe that we in the developed countries don’t deserve to live in the “high privileged” first-world, and we should instead, through various self-flagellation practices, retreat from being a developed country, and “get at least a tiny glimpse of what so much of the world deals with everyday.”  As part of our absolution, he wants to “experience some inconvenience” on a regular basis, and advises that we “climb off our high-privileged horses and join the rest of the human race” - that “it is time we got over that one.”  In short, it is a social injustice for any culture to strive to be in the vanguard of showing how human lives can be lifted from the miseries of millennia.  The moss-bound Mosses of the world are totally ignorant of how the development of advanced (mostly western) cultures has aided in lifting all of the more backward cultures from their perpetual penury.

But what actually scares me in reading such calcified counsel from progressives like Cedar Moss, exhorting us to return to yesteryear, is that he is just the visible tip of an iceberg, the much bigger mass of which is there and invisible to the rest of us in our daily round.  Mr Moss represents possibly millions of such ignorant Americans whose lasting influence we only witness and subsequently suffer from on election days, when they elect slates of candidates like we have today in Sacramento.  Or worse, the powerful politicians we may get when we consider our futures under policies promised by the likes of AOC, Warren, and Sanders.  It is the Mosses of our country who may well bring about any of these dreadful dystopias.

The Split Pill Problem Solved

George Rebane

RR readers were introduced to the Split Pill Problem (SPP) in a passing Scattershots entry last summer.  The problem involved giving our puppy Puna her pain meds after her second knee repair surgery, and that evoked an interesting problem the solution to which turned out to have several features which generalize to and can illuminate other realworld problems.  Puna’s daily dose from the pill bottle was a half pill.  If I shook out a whole pill, I would split it and give her a half, returning the other half to the bottle.  On a day when a half pill emerged, I would just give the half.

The vet said to do that until the pill bottle was empty.  Given the random way in which whole and half pills emerged, I wondered how soon could I expect to get to a day when only half pills remained in the bottle and I would no longer have to split pills.  The solution turned out to be very interesting, which I have documented in a somewhat whimsical technical note that requires no math beyond grade school arithmetic to understand.  You can access the pdf here – Download TN1910-1_Split Pill Problem Solved

I’ll leave you with a piece of eye candy from the report that illustrates the graphical beauty of the SPP solution where it will be fully explained.  Enjoy.

Scattershots – 11oct19 (updated 13oct19)

George Rebane

Nevada City mayor Reinette Senum calls for the “dismantling” of PG&E during the windless Wednesday night protest in front of city hall.  “During the protest Senum questioned PG&E’s decision to shut off power, saying that although she supports the move in cases of extreme weather, it should proactively turn it back on when that weather doesn’t materialize.”  Whadda concept!  She got a bit lost when she advised us that “anything that we’re dependent on – water, power, banks – should be owned by the public.  PGE is already owned by the public about as much as it can be – public company and public monopoly.  But her and my bottom line is that today’s policy of power outages is not a solution to anything.  And did you notice the full page ad by the PGE workers union in today’s Union?  It basically said ‘don’t blame us for the butt stupid political decisions to turn off the power when dangerous winds don’t materialize.’ (more here)

Stupid people should not use wild rivers for recreation.  One woman who spent a night on a rock in the South Yuba from which she could have easily waded ashore, according to the incident commander, required two helicopters and a rescue team to hike in to get her off the rock.  I hope the Washington fire department at least got some training out of that woman’s idiocy.  The rest of her party were no brighter between the ears.  They drove a two-wheeler off road into the brush to their illegal campsite and got their truck stuck.  That was an extra task for the rescue team in order to get them out of there.

Sen Lizzy Warren continues to promise her intent to “remake capitalism”, and is drawing the support of big corporatists who see her socialism as the easy way for big established companies to use government to stifle competition.  It’s a good bet to make on the coming election – all upside, no downside.  An early action to endear them to a lot of people is their current amicus brief filing to SCOTUS opposing the President’s bid to rescind DACA, and maintain that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act can be used to protect LGBT workers.  None of the worthies running these enterprises remember Lenin’s observation of capitalists ‘who will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.’

Government enforced green policies will grow the economy is the oft-heard progressive refrain on these pages and across the land.  More sober assessments note that, for example, subsidized EVs still make up only 1% of the car market of which 100% of them are sold at a loss to the manufacturers according to the auto industry.  No one here is saying that EVs will not be the desirable mode of personal transport when batteries finally become sufficiently capacious and cheap enough to make such vehicles for a profit that people will buy.  That day is not here yet.

[Later]  Sorry to see FN's gay, progressive afternoon news host Shepard Smith leave the network.  He was one of the major figures in otherwise right-leaning network who was unabashedly leftwing, and thus gave proof that FN was not at all like the lamestream and Dems like to characterize it as the network for xenophobics, homophopics, and neo-Nazis.  Although,  I wish that Smith would have been given an opinion hour to compete with the likes of Hannity and Tucker Carlson, since he almost always slanted his news delivery into an opinion piece more akin to what MSNBC would offer.  Now we have Bret Baier left as the mid-road news stalwart, and Chris Wallace as their liberal senior Sunday pundit doing weekly wrap-ups.

[13oct19 update]  Millennials are fleeing big cities and moving to America’s small towns. (more here)  They’re doing it for all the right reasons, and in many ways imitating Venezuelans fleeing their cities and even their country because of how years of socialism under Chavez and Maduro has brought a once rich land to its knees.  Today one of our most prominent Democrat anti-American congress critters, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has upped here ante to make the United States into a proto-communist country with her new bill ‘A Place to Prosper Act’ (HR4508) which has become the first legislation for her overall ‘Just Society’ program.  The details of this act promise to pauper the country – that is always the way of the Left, their programs promise prosperity and deliver poverty.  Important to note is that Sen Lizzy Warren endorses AOC’s latest insanity.  (more here and here)

‘The Marginal Revolutionaries’

George Rebane

George Melloan, former deputy editor of WSJ’s editorial page and now syndicated columnist, has written an excellent review (here) in the 5oct19 WSJ of The Marginal Revolutionaries – How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (2019) by historian Janek Wasserman.  This is an extensively researched “group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party.”  From Melloan’s review, replete with lavish quotes from the book, it is clear that Wasserman’s work corroborates Der Führer (1944), Konrad Heiden’s first-hand history of the rise of Hitler, and the international and national brands of socialism during the first half of the 20^th century.

(I insert the following thoughts into the record because, as the astute reader has gleaned over the years, I am a student of the Austrian School which most closely represents my desiderata for economic order that is beneficial to a society.  This major segment of my belief system (credo) forms the foundation of my profound differences with and opposition to collectivism and its current resurgent socialist/communist forms in America and the EU.  Some of my previous commentaries on the above can be found here and here, expanded in their comment streams)

The Austrian School was founded by economists Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek who met regularly in a little Vienna coffee house early in the 20^th century.  Their nascent revolution was marginal in the sense that during that same epoch that included the Great War (WW1) more formidable revolutionaries were also plotting and scheming in other Vienna coffee houses.  Communist regulars plotting the Marxist revolution were Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.  Excluded from international socialists to form national socialism were Hitler who met with a variously attended group of the disaffected jobless, and after the war with a rapidly growing cohort of disaffected jobless veterans.  The Nazis and communists fought pitched battles and murdered each other in the night until Hitler’s side won, and the communists went underground in the west while Lenin et al were building the USSR in Russia.  Both forms of socialism would come to kill millions of their own citizens for various reasons that ranged from race to redundancy.

Scattershots – 4oct19 (updated 9oct19)

George Rebane

'My allegation stands true until you prove it false.'  The progressive's approach to debate and judicial process (see also Alinsky and Stalin's show trials).

An anti-American attribute of our Left is their imposition of process over performance in their planning and public policies.  The leftist always seeks to increase government’s scope of control and revenues through legislation/regulation that increases arbitrary requirements and (tax/fee) costs for civil activities, public and private.  This aspect of collectivist ideology is a reliable indicator of the, often hidden, political forces which promote a new law or regulation, i.e. process.  How it affects the performance of individuals or organizations is of secondary importance, or not at all a consideration when corporatists lobby and leftwing politicians legislate.

Gov Newsom’s signing of a new law giving California school districts more power to block charter schools and gratuitously requiring their teachers to become more credentialed (here) is a textbook illustration that supports the above generalized proposition about the Left.  Charter schools across the country have become one of the few remaining bright spots of our public education, and also the bane of leftwing teachers’ unions.  Why?  Because study after study shows that, more often than not, “test scores improve for all students when charters increase their market share.” (more here)  And that’s a no-no for Democrats, especially in dense urban areas like NYC and Boston with large minority populations.  The smarter that minority kids become, the less they tend to accept the ‘benefits’ of staying on the plantation and voting for ever more generous government handouts.

Foreign Influence on the Rise

People are usually willing to accept the verdict of democratic elections only when all parties share the same national loyalties. - Yuval Harari, widely published historian (emphasis mine)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 October 2019.]

Let’s consider what has become an issue of great concern for most Americans and their political leaders – the impact of foreign influence in our elections.  To be sure, since time immemorial, nations, kingdoms, and all manner of jurisdictions have sought to influence the inner workings of each other to their advantage.  America has been no exception.  In modern times with facile mass communications across the globe, such influencing has become an ongoing geo-political game among today’s nations.  (more here and here)

The political analysis journal Foreign Policy tells us (here) that “ever since the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of territorial sovereignty has been central to how most of us think about international politics and foreign policy. Although a huge amount of activity occurs across state borders, one of the chief tasks of any government is to defend the nation’s territory and make sure—to the extent it can—that outsiders are not in position to interfere in harmful ways. But for all the effort and expense devoted to keeping harmful influences out, sometimes countries wind up locking and bolting the windows while leaving the front door wide open.”

In the past the main paths for foreign governments to influence us was through enticing former prominent politicians with paid trips, ‘consulting’ contracts, and generous speaking fees.  Competent public relations firms would be hired to promote a candidate or cause.  There are, of course, platoons of professional lobbyists on K Street, and let’s not forget prominent DC think tanks and media journalists who can be bought and paid for with grants of special and/or exclusive access to the goings on and important people of the foreign power.  Finally, we have to include our universities that can be bought with appropriately fashioned ‘research grants’ to manufacture good reports about their benefactors.

Such well-oiled avenues of foreign influence have been focused on shaping our foreign policy to satisfy the interests of other nations.  We must always remember that the ultimate reason for messing with our elections is to influence our adoption of favorable foreign policies.  An important essay on such matters that reviewed how our own political parties become involved was published in the October 1932 issue of Foreign Affairs.  The procedural principles and political history recounted in ‘Political Factors in American Foreign Policy’ is especially apropos to today’s imbroglios between our political parties lobbing charges and counter charges of conspiratorial foreign influence on each other.

The Varieties of Reason in Another Attempt at Discourse

“Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.”  Saul Alinsky in ‘Rules for Radicals’

George Rebane

In the effort to reflect here ‘observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of man’, illuminating the ideas and attitudes of our polarized population is part and parcel of RR posts.  Here we do a little dissection of today’s leftwing vs rightwing thought to illustrate how early 21^st century polarization is progressing.  To wit, we again have on parade in these pages a delicious example of how the liberal mind works – especially in its ability to apply standard garden variety logic to reason.  The comment stream of ‘Ruminations – 26sep19’ is an education in progressive thought and another Exhibit A on the machinations of such minds when they attempt to understand and then address a contended issue.  In this example it all started with commenter J. Barron stating –

It is blatantly obvious that if billionaires can save millions in their taxes from going to the under class, they can invest that money in something else. Jets, hot tubs, young boys . . . it's famously known as trickle up economics. Show us the proof that ain't so. Reagan would not approve.  Posted by: J. Barron | 29 September 2019 at 09:02 PM

To which I made a generic observation on Barron’s attempt to contribute to the resolution of his strong assertion about misspending of tax savings by billionaires.  I observed –

In more tempered and reasonable societies the one making an assertion is required to substantiate it with some supportive evidence. In insane societies it's the asserter who demands that his audience prove his assertion to be false, else it must be taken to be true.  Posted by: George Rebane | 29 September 2019 at 09:53 PM

In such references to ‘insane’ I use the term in its technical sense as in describing approaches and solutions to problems in the fields of mathematics, the sciences, and engineering.  This exchange gave rise to an intense discussion thread into which several additional progressives contributed the fruits of their thought.  The careful reader will immediately note that none of them understood my 953pm, or they thought it better for their case to change the subject.  In either case, my critique of Barron’s 902pm was not only not addressed, but it was duly mischaracterized as something completely unsaid – a common liberal tactic displayed in these pages over the years.

Toward the Singularity via super-intelligence

George Rebane

Knowing my relationship with Dr Judea Pearl, fellow blogger Russ Steele sent me a link to a recent interview (here) on AI with Judea.  Longtime RR readers recall pieces citing my friend, colleague, and mentor Judea Pearl as the inventor of Bayes and causal nets, and one of the true pioneers of AI and winner of the Turing Award (here and here).  I was privileged to be one of his very small group of doctoral students contributing to his research and the writing of his landmark Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (1988) introducing Bayes nets for which I was able to contribute my research in machine learning that wound up in what is known as the Rebane-Pearl algorithm (here and here).

Early on (late 1980s) our little group began to understand that the alternative ‘causal net’ that was also used in the literature for Bayes nets may not be appropriate.  To be frank, we were somewhat guilty of introducing that appellation ourselves before we recognized that our enthusiastic reach exceeded our grasp of causality as provided by our research.  In our paper on the Rebane-Pearl algorithm I introduced the concept of a ‘causal basin’ and showed (in my hand-drawn figure which somehow made it into the paper and Judea’s book) how the algo could take a dataset and divide it into several causal basins.  I recall having long discussions with Judea on the relationship of probabilistic inference and ‘true causality’ as we humans ascribe to the goings on in our environment.

A decade earlier Judea and I spent time during our family social get-togethers ensconcing ourselves with a bottle of wine to speculate on the future of intelligent machines and what computational, perceptual, and cognitive requirements they would need to achieve peerage with humans.  Over such discussions it became clear to both of us that machines would have to include the ability to handle the subjunctive and counter-factual ‘thoughts’, in addition being able to reason probabilistically a la Bayes nets.  It was Judea who came upon the idea that causality was a distinct cognitive beast that could not be tamed and understood through mere extensions of Bayes nets – a whole new calculus would be required.