Rebane's Ruminations

Alabama Abortion Law

George Rebane

OK, here’s the drill.  The Left opposes the recent Alabama law that is being replicated in its essential elements by a growing number of heartland states.  The crux of the opposition is preserving the mental health of the mother, not her physiological health or other factors about which most on both sides agree.  (And as a corollary, saving society from the maturing of a rejected child.)  She simply doesn’t think it would be all that satisfying, for a number of reasons, to raise the little darling – besides, at best it was probably a ‘Oops!’ to begin with.  So, with the partial information she has during her pregnancy while baby is growing inside her, she should have the right to decide that it should be killed.

And make no mistake, that is the fundamental argument of the pro-abortion proponents who use the ‘mother’s health’ and ‘mother’s right to choose’ smokescreen.  So OK, let’s go with that.  While the baby is pre-partum, the mother knows little or nothing about the potential of that baby to bring her happiness and grow up to lead a productive life that contributes to society.  The pro-abortionists are militating for her right to make the life or death choice in ignorance.  Any reasonable person would agree that her choice would be more informed and, in short, better for all if she made it knowing more about the child.

So why not increase her legal prerogatives to preserve her QoL and mental health in general, by allowing her to make the decision based on more complete information about the little tyke.  Let’s give all women the option of terminating the development (life) of their child after they have seen how the little darlins are really turning out.  Why not extend the pro-choice period they demand to include, say, the first couple or three post-partum years of the kid’s life?  The mother would have a hell of a lot more information about how her offspring is going to turn out, and the kind of kink it will put in her lifestyle if she kept the kid.  After all, it’s all about empowering women and extending the mother’s right to choose so she can make a more informed decision.  And the final solution for the rejected kid will be the same, we kill it - now as then, we can make it so the kid will never know what hit him.

In the end, if it’s all legal, no one will make a fuss, and in fact, no one will even have to know if one day mom is no longer pushing a perambulator around the shopping mall.  If anyone asks, she just tells them that she exercised her woman’s right to choose, just as if she had decided early on to get rid of the bump in her belly.  Everyone will understand that a law extending womens’ rights in this fashion makes all the sense in the world, since it gives them a greater latitude to decide with much more information than just blindly condemning to death a child whom she has yet to meet and get to know.  So, let’s get with the program.

‘Religious Freedom in Islam’

George Rebane

That’s the title of the new book by political science professor Daniel Philpott of Notre Dame.  It appears to be another anxious attempt at understanding and reconciling global Islam.  The book has an excellent review by Thomas Howard (history professor at Valparaiso University) in the 14may19 WSJ (here). Philpott divides the non-Islamic world into “Islamoskeptics”, holding that Islam is incompatible with religious freedom, and “Islamopluralists”, who accept the “religion of peace” teaching from the Mecca (v the Medina) Quran.

Philpott tries to give us the correct perspective on Muslim-majority countries by dividing them into three categories – “religiously free” (e.g. Lebanon, Kosovo), “secularly repressive” (e.g. Egypt, Turkey), and “religiously repressive” (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia).  Philpott agrees that the third confirms the West’s worst fears about Islam, but argues (as if it mattered) that the second kind is actually an import from the West, with its teaching that “the state must manage, control, and contain religion in order to make way for modern civilization.”

According to the author, the problem is that the secularly repressive countries spawn most of the Islamist terror that afflicts the world.  Somehow, here he overlooks the major (dominant?) contributions of Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia (homeland of almost all the 9/11 terrorists).  And the so-called peaceful and devout Muslims in the religiously free countries “have concluded that secularism (in its various guises) is to be eschewed as a Trojan horse sent by the West.”  In other words, the West as a whole remains the enemy of Islam, and not only Islamism (the terror spawning kind).

Nowhere does Philpott cover the much-feared and scripturally taught practice of taqiya (q.v., dissembling to promote Islam), or the caliphate as Islam’s endgame.  Most Islamoskeptics and all Islamophobes are sensitive to the global practice of terror killings by Islamists, and also their ongoing practice of green-on-green (and blue) killings, primarily in lands actively resisting Islamist factions such as ISIS, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, … .  Non-Muslims, especially westerners, have a hard time reconciling such ubiquitous and longstanding practice of the ‘murder of the innocents’ with any other belief system save those who follow Allah.

Nevertheless, Philpott’s essay concludes that our Constitution, and especially its First Amendment, provides a global template for protecting religious freedom rights (an unexamined goal of Islamic religionists) that will attract our Muslim brethren to exercise their “capacity to embrace a shift in thought.”  Again, here it is proper to insert from what-to-what, which apparently Philpott avoids in order to also avoid sounding, what, paternalistically neo-colonial?

I count myself definitely as an Islamoskeptic with periodic lapses into Islamophobia (fear of attempts to bring about a sharia-dominated caliphate).  My main concern is the absence of wholesale condemnation by the expatriate Islamic communities of individual acts of Islamist terror.  These Muslims, at best, only murmur a quiet, quick, and qualified disapproval, and when polled, turn in some very scary aggregate sentiments.  (e.g. results from Pew Research)  And the behavior of immigrant Muslims, in countries with insular communities abandoned by indigenous law enforcement agencies, speaks for itself, especially when considered in light of politically correct self-censorship by the media in reporting goings on and statistics that describe such cultural enclaves.

In the final analysis, our need to publish such apologetics in the west as Professor Philpott’s Religious Freedom in Islam (2019) speaks volumes about the real collision between the followers of the Prophet and the rest of us.  In many ways this work sounds like another careful walk whistling past the graveyard of the thousands who have been killed in the name of Allah.

Like likes Likes - once more (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

Dr Mark Moffett of Harvard and the National Museum of Natural History writes ‘The Social Secret That Humans Share With Ants’ (and other social critters), an essay derived from his The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall (2018).  Therein his main thesis is “building giant communities of strangers requires ‘markers’ that let members know who does and doesn’t belong.”  The essay goes on to concur and confirm the oft-repeated Rebane Doctrine tenet that people like to live and work among people who share their mores, values, …, in short, their culture to the maximum extent possible.  For such communal environments promote trust and rapid socialization, foster specialization, and in general provide the benefits that derive from being able to reliably predict each other’s communal behaviors.  (photo philched phrom article)

Moffett’s article is carefully wordsmithed for this day and age, wherein he comes as close as possible to calling a spade a spade without offering an obvious invite to the inevitable opprobrium from the Left should he speak too plainly.  The destruction of America’s common culture, that has been so successful in forging ‘E pluribus unum’, is the seminal objective, bar none, of our indigenous Left.  Achieving this, drives derivative objectives like transforming our public educational system into a giant package of progressive propaganda that today has combined product, distribution, and audience into one compact and unassailable institution.

Moffett points out that durable societies began long ago “when our ancestors began to signal who belonged through the use of what I call ‘markers’, signs that for many societies came to include gestures, rituals, styles of dress and dialects. Bound together by markers, even the simplest hunter-gatherer societies of the past achieved populations of a thousand or more.”  With his markers, Moffett then two-steps around the unifying idea of a common culture without connecting them to such a culture in our modern world of politically corrected multi-cultural societies.  Pointing to the utility – past and present – of a mono-cultural society today is strictly verboten.

Nevertheless, his dance steps convey a clear message to the careful reader in which he points out how even slight deviations from culture-specific markers “induced anxiety because the conduct of (such individual) couldn’t be predicted.”  And Dr Moffett’s insightful essay concludes with the non-controversial coda – “Then as now, markers have been a way for humans to maintain order and boundaries even in the midst of rapid social change and growth.”  Whew!

As a recent milestone on the multi-kulti highway, one that illustrates the destruction of a stanchion of our common culture - especially when easily related to western cultures – we have Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel).  He is the latest to get a revisionist history written about him.  It turns out that not only was Geisel a “racist”, misogynist, and xx-phobic of everything you can imagine, but even his published “illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”  This man became a beloved icon of America’s common culture which the socialist cum communist Left must now obliterate in every remaining corner in which it is still allowed to draw a breath.  The whole story is told in Becoming Dr Seuss (2019) by Brian Jay Jones which is reviewed here by Meghan Gurdon.

And we all should know the ‘blessings’ bestowed by multi-cultural societies living cheek-by-jowl under repressive regimes that use corrupt and militant justice systems to enforce stacks of laws and regulations, prescribing mandated common behaviors, under each of which inevitably lies the gun.

[13may19 update]  Author and political theorist Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner and the American Enterprise Institute gives us an added perspective on tribalism and its antitheses in today’s public forums (here).  He reviews how de Toqueville and Russel Kirk “saw that a nation’s strength lay in our hodgepodge of ‘little platoons’”, and that “we are a nation of people with multiple overlapping identities.  We have our Americanness as one identity, but that is tied up with a diversity that includes our particular geographic identity, our particular vocation, our particular faith, and yes, our particular ethnicity.”  Carney concludes that “real love for posterity is inextricably tied to a loving, familiar embrace of the past, and of a tribe.”

Ruminations – 30apr19 (updated 3may19)

George Rebane

Pluralism is always favored by immigrant minorities who in their native countries will countenance none of it.

“All power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” – Mao Zedong.  Our Left creates, supports, and inflames divisive (identity) cultures that produce high gun murder rates in order to promote ever stricter gun controls that will ultimately lead to confiscation, and remove, once and for all, a free people’s ability to rebel against the comprehensive command and control autocracy they promise to install.  All power to the state!

Left-leaning author (Balkanized America) and journalist Colin Woodward in his ‘Welcome (Back) to the Divided States of America’ – “One would think our continent’s famed mobility — and the transportation and communications technology that facilitates it — would dissolve differences between these regional cultures. Paradoxically, it appears to be reinforcing it. As journalist Bill Bishop and sociologist Robert Cushing revealed in The Big Sort, for decades now, Americans who are relocating choose to move to communities where people share their values and worldview. As a result, the proportion of voters living in counties that consistently give landslide wins report — more than a 20 percent margin of victory — to one party increased from 26.8 percent in 1976 to 48.3 percent in 2004. The volume of people is significant and has benefited the GOP, with a net 13 million people moving from Democratic to Republican landslide counties between 1990 and 2006 alone. In doing so, they’re often moving between regional cultures as well and increasing the differences between them.” (emphasis mine) 

The widespread recognition of this important dynamic in American demographics illustrates, by contrast, the profound ignorance of local grassroots leftwingers here and across the nation.  An expanded analysis in ‘The Real Issue that Divides Us’ also illustrated how profoundly ignorant the grassroots Left is of anything beyond the simplistic slogans they receive from their national thought leaders.

Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization: A History (2017) is one of the books I’m now in the middle of that is turning out to be quite an education.  Those interested in energy issues should get this material under their belt.  “Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of forty books, including Energy and Civilization, published by the MIT Press. In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2013 Bill Gates wrote on his website that “there is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.”  More on him to come.

People who move for ideological comfort have more radical views than those at their destination.  This works for both ends of the ideological spectrum.  Locally here in Nevada County we have seen the influx in recent years of liberals with markedly more radical beliefs – i.e. ‘San Francisco values’ - than the liberals who lived here compatibly with the more conservative indigenous folks. (more here)

The 30apr19 Union (here) celebrates the formation of yet another organization to shield, succor, and provide a “safe space” for illegal aliens from US law enforcement authorities.  The Sierra College’s new Undocumented Student Center is intended to fill this “need” as identified by local progressives in this sanctuary state.  One wonders if there are other areas where violating US laws can be equally supported so visibly while thwarting law enforcement authorities in carrying out their duties.  Perhaps setting up organizations that enable individuals with a wider range of capabilities and means to avoid the legal formalities and performance requirements in place, so that more people can enjoy well-paying sub-rosa careers as lawyers, physicians, various contractors, … ?

Fascism, in popular use by progressives today, is becoming more and more convoluted in how their meaning of it departs from the ideology’s origin and correct usage in former times.  For a brief history of fascism, please review ‘Fascism – what it is and isn’t’.  For the Left fascism is today’s catch-all label for any and all on the Right who oppose their form of socialism cum communism.  However, for them to apply that label requires the promulgation of a polyglot of historical and factual lies.  One of the latest leftwing pundits to arise in the last year is Umair Haque who writes on Medium, the new online outlet for millennial minds.  Mr Haque’s prominent misunderstanding of fascism is fully displayed in his ‘Are Americans (Really) So Dumb They Don’t Know Fascism When They See It?’  Judge for yourself.

[1may19 update]  “TRUMP WILL MEET WITH TOP ADVISERS TO DISCUSS PLANS TO CHALLENGE CLIMATE CHANGE REPORTS” Democrats, of course, are screaming bloody murder opposing an open debate about climate change that features scores of prominent scientists who are skeptics.  Such a public conversation would give visible lie to the hysteria mongers who have long claimed that only ignorant knuckledragger “deniers” have problems with the cited science behind proclamations of imminent global catastrophe. (more here)

Speaking of leftwing liars and fake news.  The NYT and WaPo have been pushing the story that Mueller wrote Barr criticizing him about the latter’s 24mar19 4-pager to Congress; that the Barr’s letter misrepresented the findings of Mueller’s report.  Well, those sacks of s#!t are at it again with their blatant brown journalism (that’s a notch below yellow).  You can read Mueller’s 27mar19 letter here.  What I found a bit disturbing was that when Barr offered Mueller the chance to review his 4-pager, Mueller demurred.  Nevertheless, after getting Mueller’s letter, Barr called Mueller during which telecon Mueller said that Barr’s 4-pager contained nothing that was inaccurate or misleading.  Apparently, Mueller’s bitch was with the media’s characterization (i.e. spin) of the 18apr19 release of his redacted report along with Barr’s 4-pager.

[2may19 update]  Rebane Doctrine immigration policy for the record.  Genevieve Wood of the Heritage Foundation presents a summary of a correct US immigration policy in this short video.  I have been promoting these principles/requirements for years.

Elizabeth Warren's 'Marshall Plan for America'.  Here on Medium we have a communist hyper-ventilating on the "brilliant" proposals of proto-communist Warren.  It's worth a read as a reality calibration on what many of today's Millennials have been taught to believe as we head into 2020.  Seatbelts please.

‘Medicare for All’ is NOT Medicare at all as the Dems, led by Bernie Sanders, would like you to not notice.  When it comes to major league lying, Trump is a piker and the Left have always been the champions.  Today the Dems’ 20+ presidential candidates are each vying for the top spot as they deliver their stump speeches.  Dr Robert Pozen of MIT’s Sloan School of Management lays out the proposition that “Democrats mislead voters by appropriating the name of a popular program they actually seek to abolish.” (more here)

[3may19 update]  Help!  A very interesting problem I'm working on runs into a fairly straightforward looking definite integral (shown below, a and b are constants) for which I need the closed-form analytical solution.  Everywhere I've looked - Wofram Alpha, Matlab Symbolic Toolbox, CRC Math Formulas (33rd ed) - I draw a blank.  Now I'm rummaging around with pencil and paper trying to noodle the anti-derivative(s) by hand; so far no joy.  So I'm appealing to any of RR's technical readers who may be able to shed some light on this particular worm standing at attention. 

Scattershots – 24apr19 (updated 25apr19)

George Rebane

We’ve all seen countless thrillers from Hollywood in which the plot line has a department or agency of Big Government that has gone rogue, and threatens to bring down the country or even the world.  And against great odds our hero/heroine manages to overcome them and triumph.  These movies are made by leftwingers who obviously cannot connect the dots, why?  Because they are inadvertently creating propaganda denying the very things they believe in and promote – namely, very large, powerful, and ethical governments.  The conflict between a moral and principled small guy against the uncaring and corrupt leviathan is a rightwing narrative.  How come these mavens of public communications seem to miss the obvious, and show up at events raising funds for ever bigger government programs and government roles in our lives?  Any answers out there?  (Maybe they know their grass roots constituents who buy the tickets aren't smart enough to catch on.)

Democrat presidential hopefuls are lining up to participate in Fox News townhalls.  They do this while they denigrate that network for being the embodiment of journalistic corruption and fakery.  Of course, we know why they are waiting their turn to be in front of FN audiences – because that’s where the viewers are that they must reach if they are to have a chance.  By all published numbers, FN and FB essentially rule the roost of broadcast TV, garnering not only the conservatives, but more importantly, attracting the middle-road viewers who know the kind of pabulum that is served up by Teams Maddow, Matthews, and Cooper.  But the DNC still will not trust Fox to host a debate between their presidential hopefuls.  Those events cannot afford to have questions asked by anyone outside of the reliably tethered lamestream.

[25apr19 update]  Union columnist Terry McLaughlin lists the litany of new taxes that the state’s Democrats are proposing in her 25apr19 ‘Who will fill California’s coffers without the 1 percent?’.  One of the more egregious taxes that is guaranteed to shift the ongoing exodus into high gear is the 40% death tax on the so-called minds of our progressive legislators.  Apparently they, along with the voters who sent them to Sacramento, don’t know that almost half of CA’s income taxes are paid by the 1%, and that 40% of the state’s residents don’t pay any income tax at all.  We are here talking about absolute stupidity, not to be confused with ignorance.  The latter can be corrected by education, the former cannot since it is cooked into your DNA.

Apropos the above, journalism, like the teaching profession, no longer (if ever) attracts the brightest bulbs on the tree.  All the media are still aspirating about the Mueller report contents viz Russia “attacking” our voting process.  Depending on their political leanings, each outlet emphasizes by implication (i.e. choice wordsmithing) whether these attacks had any influence on capturing the votes, securing the vote data, counting the votes, and/or tallying and reporting the results.  Of course, there is no evidence that Russia’s attacks had any influence whatsoever on the election, and Mueller said so.  But in their palaver, the dimwit talking heads (including on FN) don’t discriminate between ‘attack’ and ‘influence’ – one being the attempt, the other the achievement.  Dumbth now prevails.

Saint Thomas of Friedman, working the Lord’s vineyards at the NYT, has had another epiphany – border walls work.  Given the rabid objections to improving border security that he and his flock have made over the years, this revelation gives evidence that divine intervention is real and continues to work even in post-biblical times.  Now the task remains in how to turn their massive titanic of a narrative on this issue so that 1) it doesn’t acknowledge the prescient wisdom of our president, and 2) delivers this new missive to the alt-Left core and its national tendrils in a manner that communicates the saint’s primacy and the president’s silence on the matter.  It’s a challenging task, but not one beyond the kind they have handily managed before.

Welcome Lonesome Joe Biden into the Democrat presidential cauldron.  Absent any policy ideas that distance him from the looney left-fringe of the party, he will be fighting for the “soul” of America and, with that political cudgel, promises to beat Trump.  He is counting on the part of the electorate not concerned with public policies, but only focusing on the good feelies Joe will emit.  And make no mistake, Joe can do that better than any in the rest of the herd.  If they try to hold age against him (76), they will also have to take on Bernie (77) and Lizzy(69), two powerful mouths that have staked out strong positions in the pack.

The Dems will spend from here to eternity (or Trump’s loss in 2020) doing their best to hassle President Trump.  They know their platform has no chance at all in any government in which they don’t hold all of Congress and the Executive.  My free advice to Trump is to immediately set up a Counter-Strike Agency staffed by about 30 lawyers and analysts experienced in the ways of Washington politics.  CSA’s job is to relieve Trump’s regular WH administrative staff and cabinet departments from dealing with the crap coming from the House Dems.  These people have no other charter than doing deep research on the Dem leadership, generating counters to ongoing attacks, and presenting the president with alternative attacks that he can launch.

The Ugly Fat Kid is meeting with Vladimir in Vladivostok. Interesting that it took so long for this meeting to take place.  But the reason for it is the same as for all the other meetings – the UFK doesn’t want to have his brains blown out by someone from his circle of generals.  So here’s how it should go.  Vladimir: So what can I do for you?  UFK: I’m between a rock and a hard place, I need for you to tell everyone that Russia will guarantee the survival of my regime.  Vladimir: OK, so what do I get?  UFK: Anything you want that doesn’t piss off Xi too much.  Vladimir: Let me think about it and lay it out for Donald.  UFK: Do it.  Vladimir:  OK Don, now that you know what came down with the UFK, what do you think that I should do?  Don: That’s a no-brainer Vlad - guarantee his f*c%ing regime.  Tell him you’ll rain nukes down on my head if I do anything to kick his ass out of there.  We both want the bastard gone and the Korean peninsula under a strong government that is independent of Xi, who we know has eyes on your east Siberian resources.  We’ll do the rest from here with the guys in Seoul.  And we both know that you’re a lying sumbich and I’m a lying sumbich, so the UFK has no recourse when he starts screaming at you to fire the nukes, as you give him a shit-eating grin.  Capice?

Our K-12 education is a national travesty

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 10 April 2019.]

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology tells us that in the next ten years the country will need, at a minimum, about 1M more STEM professionals than we will produce at our current rate.  Today there are already more than 2.4M unfilled STEM jobs.  It has been the innovators and workers in science, technology, engineering, and math who have made possible today’s quality of life, and it is they who will provide us the intellectual assets and infrastructure means to continue generating the wealth that, more than anything, will insure our future.

However, our public education industry is not doing much to support young people going into such careers.  In fact, there is ample evidence that most of our education professionals are fostering a future that will soon relegate the US into second world status on the global stage.  Today only one out of six high school graduates are proficient in STEM subjects and interested in a STEM career.  However, out of this small cohort who then enroll in STEM programs, only 2 out of 5 actually graduate with STEM degrees.  Most of our STEM students drop out because high school did not prepare them properly in science and math.

The cause of such deficits is now visible to all but the politically invested in Common Core, the latest whizbang curriculum to have come out of the mavens of progressive education.  Federally mandated Common Core has turned much of K-12 education on its head, abandoning the teaching methods and means that accelerated post-war America into the world’s technology powerhouse.  Today teachers are taught that they cannot teach science along with reading and arithmetic in the lower grades.  New Common Core compliant approaches like ‘Everyday Math’ forbid memorizing multiplication tables and reject the use of common algorithms for solving problems in favor of new and counter-intuitive ones that are hard to understand.

In short, effective science and math education has become extinct in our union-dominated public schools in which unqualified teachers literally foil millions of kids in their efforts to understand and enjoy science and math.  It is in such schools that kids are made to wade through dysfunctional instruction schemes in the early grades, after which they are not likely to stay interested in the more difficult subjects.  Even as this predictable and visible tragedy unfolds, all the experts continue to noisily pretend they are solving the problem.

Common Core also induces schools to defocus what is left of their STEM curricula by piggybacking various arts subjects, thereby adding the ‘A’ and making STEM into STEAM.  STEAM opens doors to further pedagogical perfidy and silliness by inviting courses like the recently announced “writing program for STEM students” developed by the University of Michigan.  It is clear that, with these professional pinheads from the education schools, anything goes except straight-ahead, proven STEM teaching methods.

Things have gotten so bad that Bill and Melinda Gates have already pulled their support of Common Core, offering a veiled apology for being the early and major supporter of this disastrous approach to K-12 education.  The Federalist reported that “Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K-12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4T in US taxpayer funds (under the Obama administration) towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a ‘pivot’ to another that is not likely to go any better.”

When we step back an take a broader look at what has happened to our ideologically-dominated public education from kindergarten through academe, it appears that things could not have gone more counter to America’s interests to continue as the global leader in technology, commerce, and maintaining the world order.  In sum, to millions of Americans, our education system appears and performs as if it were designed for us either in Beijing or in the Kremlin.

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]  It’s also interesting and relevant to know some stats on how well our government schools are received by Americans.

1. 62% of Americans think education has gotten off on the “wrong track”.
2. 68% of middle-income earners vs 59% of low-income earners hold the ‘wrong track’ sentiment.
3. A plurality (42%) of Americans would choose private schools over public schools in selecting among types of schools. 28% would select a public school, while 11% would select a public charter school, and 10% would rather homeschool their children.
4. A solid majority (59%) favor charter school, and 23% oppose charter schools.
5. A majority of Americans (56%) support school vouchers vs 28% who oppose such vouchers.

Scatteshots – 8apr19 (updated 10apr19)

George Rebane

Union columnist and RR reader George Boardman writes ‘High school cutbacks another consequence of our stagnant economy’ in today’s paper.  There he gets kudos for echoing the commentaries and comments on Nevada County schools and economic development that have long populated these pages over the years.  My preference is that he should have stated his case more strongly – Nevada County’s leftward tack has now baked in its previous on/off promotion of the county’s development in literally all dimensions, save being a welcoming home for progressive causes, non-profits, and ‘San Francisco values’.  The county has been and continues to be enthusiastically anti-development; and it subscribes in spades to Einstein’s dictum of insanity.  Our political leaderships’ latest foray in this direction is opposing the development of housing for our successfully retireds – major cash importers to our community - who want to move from their acreage homes to appropriately high-end, higher density local options that offer more readily accessible conveniences.  It seems that Mr Boardman’s own list to port prevents such a frontal assault on his brethren.  Then again, perhaps next time.

‘The Cultural Revolution comes to North America’ writes Anastasia Lin in the 8apr19 WSJ.  The Left in both the US and Canada has now been launching ‘call-out mobs’ whose “aim (is) not to persuade or debate, but to humiliate the target and intimidate other.”  Their main weapon is to paint their opponents with the broad brush of ad hoc labels whose meanings they either do not know or take to mean whatever they want it to mean as convenient.  Popular terms du jour are ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’.  One of the established intellectual leaders of the local blue mob is Steven Frisch, who has frequented these pages for years, distributing his opprobrium in RR comment streams when he finds anything that is too persuasive of a counter to his progressive mores, values, or narrative in general.  I am his favorite target and recipient of his latest offering a few days ago.  I use it as a concrete example of the cultural revolution Ms Lin describes – as they say, you can’t make this stuff up.

I know you think we are in a new crusade and Islam is going to take over the world; that brown people are a scourge on our country; that anything that addresses environmental or climate benefit is a UN and IPCC conspiracy to control the world; that there is growing threat of communism in the US; that young people are stupid and lazy; that we should be able to have communities where people of like culture live together without having to bothered by outsiders; that you were once wrote a column for a newsletter that featured a cover of the Völkischer Beobachter on their front cover, and I could go on...

 

Reconquista Revisited

George Rebane

Last night on FN, Tucker Carlson interviewed Juan Hernandez, a Mexican government official currently serving as the Guanajuato Secretary of Migration, on Mexico’s policy of permitting central American trans-migration through their country to the US border.  The official pointedly avoided addressing the harm that Mexico’s official behavior does to the United States.  (more here) The part of the interview that was most revealing concerned Reconquista – the return of lands that Mexico lost to the United States in 1848.  In the 20^th century Mexico and pro-Mexican politicians in this country have openly declared that the lands will be returned bloodlessly by immigration and out-breeding our European descended whites.  In recent decades they have added cross-border migration of illegal aliens to their plan to enlarge and spread insular and non-assimilating latino communities in the US.  (Google also Mexifornia and other writings by Victor Davis Hanson.)

Tucker Carlson reminded Mr Hernandez of some of his past statements on the matter.

“We are betting Mexican-Americans will think ‘Mexico first,’ even unto the seventh generation.”

“Mexican immigrants to the United States are going to keep one foot in Mexico. They are not going to assimilate in the sense of not being Mexican.”

“We recognize the Mexican population is 100 million in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States. We are a united nation.”

RR has covered Reconquista in these pages for over a decade, presenting concordant views by other commentators, academics, and politicians expressed through print and the media.  The Left, especially its local light-readers, have vehemently denied that any of this is happening.  Their main argument has been that there is nothing to worry about because all Mexicans – no matter how arrived – will quickly assimilate into ordinary Americans holding the same loyal sentiments with the rest of us.  The visible evidence does not support that argument.  The overwhelming share of American latinos vote with and for the anti-American leftwing, promoting policies and initiatives to diminish the sovereignty of the US.  Today’s initiatives focus on keeping borders porous, amnesty to all illegals, and voting rights for all US residents.

Given the ongoing flow of supporting evidence and the vigorous denials by our Left, it is not unreasonable to conclude that for all intents and purposes, Reconquista has been the national policy of Mexican governments since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on 2 February 1848.  However, never until the globalist tilt of the anti-American Left in recent decades have the Mexicans had a strong ally working in their behalf in the United States.

Two Americas - A National Emergency on Steroids (Addended)

George Rebane

A couple of mornings ago NPR’s Morning Edition reported that the illegal entrant rate across our southern border has exceeded over a million per year, and that the border security and illegal alien handling facilities are overwhelmed.  Overwhelmed, the Border Patrol has now abrogated the role of the US Customs and Border Protection agency in turning the illegals loose into our society with minimal or no ability to track their identity, origin, or intentions.  All we know is that they will quickly disperse and emerge in ‘sanctuary’ communities where all manner of public doles to succor them await.

The national border crisis is daily attested by the reports from the border and testimony from homeland security and border control officials past and present.  Recently they were joined by several Obama era higher-ups including former Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson who testified that there is indeed a border crisis in progress.

In the face of this, the country’s anti-American political faction continues to celebrate, promote, and sustain this deluge of indigents, the human trafficked, criminals, diseased, and economic opportunists that are now pouring across our southern border.  They also communicate their welcoming message in the “shithole countries” of Central America, well-funded messages that induce desperate people and dubious opportunists to undertake the long and dangerous journey north through Mexico.  Our progressives don’t care for the migrants’ welfare or risk involved during the journey.  Their only objective is to maximize the number of illegals who successfully penetrate our border, who then become political fodder within a byzantine and broken immigration system.  Ultimately their presence and large numbers will serve anti-American ends one way or another.

Astoundingly, there are even many pro-American light thinkers who cannot understand the necessity for and cost-effectiveness of an improved and extended physical barrier to span critical sections of the border.  They swallow the argument of the anti-Americans that what we really need is to greatly expand and improve the welcoming facilities to house, feed, care for, and relocate the arriving hordes.  All such responses will do everything to increase the flow and nothing to stem it.  It is the analog of calling for more bailing buckets instead of patching the hole in a sinking boat.  There is no public awareness or discussion of the longer-term impact that these indigents and their now accelerating arrival rates will have on our institutions, economy, and citizens.  The existential goal of the anti-Americans is to simply keep the ingress rate high and increasing.  No one has asked, ‘How and when will this massive migration of illegal aliens stop?’

Responding to the Staid and Fearful

George Rebane

RR readers who comment on these pages have a record of discussing and debating the most critical and germane questions that face our country and society in these times of fracturing polarity (albeit not always in the most churchillian manner).  I am a declared conservetarian (q.v.), and over the years of this weblog I have outlined in detail my credo, my semantics, and my prescriptions for the orderly evolution of America’s governance in this ‘last great century of Man’.  In a recent comment stream, a reader again contends these prescriptions, not on their existential merits, but on their provenance which for him is qualified only to the degree that the proposed be limited to that practiced in the past.  Here I offer a short counter to such constraints and criticism.

The ability to see futures without exemplars from the past is admittedly and obviously a gift not shared by the many.  Most people, perhaps fortunately, can only see the future as reflections in their rearview mirrors – if it isn’t there to be seen, then there’s no such possibility of it yet to come.  Then there are those relatively few who live on the edge of the arts of the possible, and who traffic in ideas and enterprises that have neither been nor yet to be.  Both cohorts of Man serve needed functions which, when tempered, benefit and power the advancement of civilizations.

The former of the staid cohort function as brakes, shock absorbers, and even anchors to dampen, absorb, and integrate the possibly chaotic and non-coherent novelties that those of the latter, living on the bleeding edge, can see, build, and seek to introduce into the established orders.  Fate, the gods, and my parents assigned me to the bleeding edge cohort, of which long ago I became a credentialed, accomplished, privileged, punished, and blessed member.

So, when people of my ilk do their work, it is almost always in the untrammeled domains where few or none have trod, and where reward always lies behind a mountain of risk.  My life’s journey through this terrain is recorded by the scars on my back and the coins in my purse.

So when I have outlined the desiderata of governance from a conservetarian perspective, it is not an exercise of just ‘cut and paste’ of the elsewhere and from the elsewhen.  Seeing something strange and new, the question of the staid always belies their fearful admonition to never go where we have not been.  I neither hail from nor have I lived in such lands.  As a native Estonian, I take pride in the innovations in education, technology, and governance that that little nation has always had the courage to adopt and practice.  As a naturalized American, I continually bless the memory of our Founders’ dedication, intellect, foresight, and courage to bring forth a land then unknown to Man.  All Americans are daily blessed by our Founders not being deterred or stayed in their enterprise by those who asked them for proof of existence and success for such a new country they gathered together to bring into the world.

America’s education - mandated and biased (updated 2mar19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 27 February 2019.]

Many and perhaps most young people today have a very jaundiced view of America, capitalism, Christianity, and western civilization in general.  Instead, all across the country and especially in the academe, they have come to embrace ideas about the benefits of collectivism – especially socialism – and societies that emphasize group identities and a world order in which group membership, especially if in one of the aggrieved groups, is paramount.  Individualism, personal freedom, and entrepreneurships that promise riches are on the wane.  How did we arrive at such a societal junction from which all roads lead to a fundamentally transformed America, one that will share little with what our Founders bequeathed us, and with the system that made us the envy of the world?

Political leaders, from constitutional monarchies to communism, answer that such rapid changes in outlook and attitudes can only come from the educational system governments adopt and impose – as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.  And in the last half century there has been a lot of twig bending going on in America’s schools, and the clear evidence indicates that all the bending has been leftward.  Let’s look at three seemingly disparate facets of such evidence.

Redemption and the Virginia Three

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Mathew 7:3-5

George Rebane

“Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) said Wednesday that he dressed in blackface during college, adding yet another scandal to the tumult that now engulfs the entire executive branch of state government.  Herring, Gov. Ralph Northam and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — the state’s three top Democrats — all face wrenching questions about past behavior that threaten their careers.” reports the Washington Post. (here)

I find it distressing that our public policy, mostly implemented by the progressive Left, does not give any politician or other public figure any slack on what they might or not have done in their dim dark distant past.  This is especially significant in the case of males whose brains, we are told, do not fully mature until their mid-twenties.  Most certainly they (we) still have great dynamism going on in our noodles at around the age of twenty.

But without even accounting for that, don’t we have even a little room for redemption, any notion of remission, and only focus on what may be seen as eternal retribution?  I don’t think any of the above mentioned Democrats, currently being pilloried and asked to mount their political tumbrils, should suffer such a fate.  And that any more than did Justice Kavanaugh and other Republicans before him.  Today all three Virginians are matured and different men than they were in those days of yore (when morals and manners were not yet perfected to today’s pristine standards).  They have performed their public duties admirably as far as anyone can tell, and are now at the prime of their ‘service lives’.  So why sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness, an altar on which daily are offered the professional lives of worthy people, almost all to serve political ends and not to provide any future margin of safety to the public at large from their ongoing ministrations?

Once this persecutorial plague is loosened, where will it stop?  How many public figures, or any of us for that matter, can survive the dredging of such ludicrous liabilities?  Were I king, we would look back only on the recent and relevant parts of a person’s career, and not claim that the divers path each of us took through our youth did then mangle our minds and morals forever.  People do change, and perhaps in this area of public life we should revisit the plaintive questions posed by those oft-quoted philosophers Hillary Clinton and Rodney King.

Scattershots – 9feb19 (updated)

George Rebane

‘How a tiny country bordering Russia became one of the most tech-savvy societies in the world’ reports CNBC on Estonia’s eternal love affair with technology.  As the world’s leading country in its integration of the internet into literally every facet of Estonian life, the implementation of such cooperation between public and private sectors underpins the Rebane Doctrine commentaries on collectivization.  The bottom line has always been that the smaller and more culturally coherent a cooperating cohort, the better can collectivization be implemented in such a society.  While Estonia’s experience and those of other Scandinavian countries sing a siren song to our progressives, what they always overlook are the stark differences between a large, inhomogeneous, and culturally diverse America, and the small, culturally homogeneous countries that dot the globe.  The only way we can even attempt to replicate the idylls of small country harmonies is to create a hierarchy of ever smaller and distributed jurisdictions (as envisioned by our Founders) in our land which then can enjoy the benefits that derive from common cultures.  Sadly, our Left has taken us beyond the tipping point toward big government socialism (centrally controlled cohesion by the gun) and the tyrannies that inevitably lie beyond. (H/T to correspondent)

The current spate of cold winter weather has me tending daylong fires in our big front room fireplace.  Many RR readers know my longtime interest in the care and feeding of wood fires (here is a more complete treatment).  Getting the fire going this morning reminded me of an aspect that I have not emphasized enough – the form of the fire that you should attempt to maintain for the longest time possible.  Most people think that a robustly flaming fire provides the most heat to those sitting in front of the fireplace or around a campfire – wrong.  Bright cheery flames primarily heat the air which then convects vertically upward.  It’s the radiant heat that flows out sideways (and all other directions) that provides the desired warmth from such fires, the rest goes up the chimney.  And that radiant heat comes mainly from the red-hot coals.  So, the ideal fire is one that has finally generated enough coals, both on the coal grate and the sides of still burning wood, to provide a large red radiating area toward you and the room you are sitting in.  At this phase of the fire you want to minimize the burning rate, keep the flames sparse and small, and let the developing coals glow and radiate.  When you finally do have to add another piece of wood or two, try to add it so that large horizontal fire pockets (q.v.) remain visible from which radiation can still escape.  (Using a keeper chain is ideal for structuring such vertically 'open front' fires backed by a yule log.)  Here’s picture I took this morning of the fire having achieved its ideal heating phase.

[update]  George Kennan’s 22feb46 ‘Long Telegram’ to SecState George Marshall is one of the most prescient and useful intra-government communications in US history.  In it Kennan lays out the coming world order and the proper role of the US as hegemon to contain the already obvious post-WW2 spread of communism.  Bottom line, in order to avoid fighting WW3, be prepared to be the white hat global sheriff by always deploying small contingents of troops in critical locations all over the world, and to fight small ‘brushfire wars’ as they become necessary.  And prepare to do that indefinitely – with allies if possible, alone if necessary - as the cost of doing business to prevent the world from falling into a new age of global tyranny.  And with that Kennan nailed the foundation of our foreign policy for the last 70+ years.  I had to post this as the topic of our ongoing foreign policy came up at a recent dinner with friends.  (The original archival copy is here, with a more readable version here.)

Scattershots – 4feb19 (updated 7feb19)

George Rebane

My heart goes out to our cartoonist Bob Crabb in his kerfuffle with a (fellow?) progressive lady who has accused him of dissing the transgender community with one of his offerings. (more here)  I know Bob, and he would be the last on the planet (if not Nevada County) to ever knowingly hurt the feelings of a class of people who are indelibly part and parcel of the same social orientation as is he.  He has now walked into the expanding "minefield" of progressive thought and talk policing, a prominent aspect of revolutionary political correctness that has become so virulent in limiting free speech that it has predictably started eating its own.  Self-consuming politically correct speech became wholesale in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, and served as inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, and, of course, today also for our own resurgent Left.  After such verbal assault, I hope that Bob doesn’t pull in the horns too far on his wit and wisdom.

Take a look at the kinesiology and kinetics of robots as being developed by companies like Boston Dynamics (here).  In these pre-Singularity years this is only one aspect of how human abilities are being matched and superseded by advancing technology.  Such advancement explains the divergence between the price of labor and productivity that still continues to puzzle some and enrage others.  In the US economy, labor and productivity tracked each other almost perfectly until the early 1970s.  At that point productivity maintained its growth trend, but the price of labor almost leveled off and has been increasing at a very modest rate since then.  The 1970 date is significant in that it coincides with the milestone of the introduction of commercially successful minicomputers into our economy – e.g. Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8.  (I immediately bought one for my R&D company, and quickly upgraded it for a PDP-11 when that became available.)  With such computing power available to ‘everyone’, US industry was off to the races, and the increases in productivity were now due mostly to invested capital instead of labor.  Ever since then, labor in the aggregate has strained in the competition to provide value in the workplace.  From my perch, this divergence was easy to predict and has been preached here for years under the larger category of systemic unemployment (see also John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man).

Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has always come across to me and mine as our local good-hearted and well-intentioned walking monument to intellectual innocence.  In his 2feb19 column ‘Will House shirk duty to initiate impeachment?’ he attempts to make another case for ‘indict first, find evidence later’, which is now the established mode of progressive jurisprudence practiced in government, entertainment, and by the leftwing commentariat.

Millennials against capitalism.  Author Malcolm Harris in Vox – ‘Why Millennials are burned out. Capitalism’ - is the latest to write about the millennial generation and their travails in adjusting to earth.  My basketball coach back in Indiana told his charges about how performance and risk fly in tight formation.  His wisdom was corroborated by years at university and later in business where I confirmed that the greatest achievement, and most certainly every human advancement, is always brought about at the ‘edge of the envelope’ where stability is marginal and risk is highest.  This ‘law’ cuts across ALL endeavors, be they in engineering, finance, sports, or the arts.  Most of those who paid attention came to know this through schooling in the academy and/or of the hard knocks variety.  However, it is clear that this is another wisdom of the ages that is absent from today’s snowflake curricula.  Harris, himself a Millennial, explains why Marxism appeals to this generation, and how they see capitalism exploiting labor, just as Herr Karl said it would.

[5feb19 update]  “This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?” Andrew Cuomo.  I love it when every once in a while a progressive experiences a smiphany (a smidgen of epiphany) about the way real humans behave.  We recall that the Left has always maintained that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior, and the Laffer Curve, well, it’s just worth a laugh.  Now with NY’s very high tax rates combined with Trump’s tax cuts, the state’s rich have been doing the Sayonara Samba to greener pastures, leaving the state’s coffers $2.3B in the red.  The Empire State progressives are asking each other ‘Whoulda thought?!’  But my bet is that even with his t!t in a wringer, Cuomo has learned nothing that will stick with him for more than a week.  And, of course, the remainder of the nation’s Left will pay it no mind – the mantra ‘To increase govt revenues, just raise taxes’ is alive and well. (more here)

[7feb19 update]  We’ve all heard that gold is ‘an ancient relic’ from government elites whose job is to convince to value fiat money über alles.  Governments themselves, of course, know better and value gold as the mother’s milk that really nourishes and upholds the function of dollars to drachmas to serve as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value.  This truth was again underlined with Russia’s announcement that recent confirmation of vast amounts of gold under Siberia will make its currency bulletproof against sanctions imposed by the west.  And they are right, it will because everyone really wants to know that those little pieces of paper and computer bits are really backed by something that everyone agrees has value, no matter how ancient.  (more here)

The Olympus of hubris. Former President Obama has continued to take credit for today’s booming economy, you know, the one that took off a bit after President Trump had a go at it (more here).  But on second thought ol’ Barry may have something there.  It took some mighty dedicated mismanagement to keep America’s stellar economy hobbled to less than 2% growth for all those years.  Obama did indeed keep our economic pressure cooker plugged up until someone, anyone, would come along who did not want to fundamentally transform America.  So maybe he can take some credit for finally getting out of the way, and letting good times return again.  (Of course, the Dems have their Plan B – aka the Green New Deal - ready to go to really sink the country.)

Scattershots – 22jan19 (updated 24jan19)

George Rebane

The ignorant-to-evil needle has made a big jump toward evil in the last couple of days with the MAGA hat massacre in DC, and the shaming of Second Lady Mrs Pence.  The Catholic boys in the MAGA hats committed two sins for which the Liberal Lies machine went ballistic – they were Christians and obvious Trump supporters.  That was enough to fabricate a hateful story about their racism against American Indians and disseminate a carefully edited video to lamestream outlets who all joined in the howling for the boys’ scalps.  When the story was quickly discredited, the howlers just moved on to their next coverage of fake news.  The same thing happened with Mrs Pence who was pilloried for being provided Secret Service protection for her engagement as an arts teacher at a (gasp!) Christian grade school.  To the legions of progressive idiots that was evidence of violating the separation of church and state.  And the Left still thinks that the coming Great Divide is only a rightwing myth. 

Nevada County’s Love Walk on MLK day was strictly a one-sided affair.  For the attendees to such events, MLK’s civil rights legacy appears to have been a failure.  People attending are of a like mind that the country now is more racist than ever, and that extraordinary means need be brought to bear to restore Dr King’s dream, and this time we’ll get it right.  To boot, everyone not of this mindset is by definition a racist, and proof that today in America racism rules.  In a previous discussion of the ideological tilt of national holidays, it’s easy to see why MLK day is now firmly a leftwing holiday. (Imagine wearing your MAGA cap on the Love Walk.  To date we have not bothered to get our MAGA caps, but given what the socialist brown shirts have launched in the land, the time has come to get one and wear it.)

Wanna see quantitative economic projections on AOC’s 70% tax rate for the country? Take a look at the misery that such a confiscatory policy would heap on the middle class.  Yes, Virginia, the MIDDLE CLASS, because that’s where socialists have to go after they first cripple the economy with their tax on ‘the rich’.  The next inevitable tax, as government revenues sink, will be on the middle class, why?  Because that’s where the money is, and the poor snuffies voting for socialists haven’t a clue about their own doings in the voting booth.  And how will it be sold?  By turning up the volume on the “ravages of capitalism” narrative, of course.  (more here and here)

Racism and racist, terms progressives use constantly are among the terms no progressive wants to define.  Much to the consternation of our liberal readers, here on RR we are prone to pursue semantics, especially of the operational kind (meaning you can usefully apply them in the realworld).  Illustrating this are a couple of forays into this melee ‘Who is a Racist?’ and ‘Racialism Rising’, and, of course, see the RR Glossary.

[23jan19 update]  RR readers are aware of my longstanding thoughts on unionized public schools.  The recent LA teachers strike underlined all these concerns, and the main concern that union teachers don’t really give a care for the kids as again pointed out by Jason Riley (here) in the 23jan19 WSJ.  “When the United Auto Workers walk off the job, no one pretends the care about car buyers. … Yet striking public school teachers and their union representatives insist they are action behalf of the children.  We’re expected to believe the priorities of education workers are perfectly aligned with those of students.”  The blatant facts about school spending, students’ performance, and aggressive opposition to the spread of non-union, public charter schools tells a completely different story.  “Teachers unions are unions first, not reformers or student advocates.  Their real agenda – their only agenda – is to protect their members by any means possible.  No matter what those picket signs said, the unions weren’t helping students.  They were using them.”

[24jan19 update] “Senate Rejects Two Rival Spending Bills, Extending Shutdown” Can we now finally give up the notion that just because one party or the other has a majority in Congress (specifically the Senate), that it therefore ‘controls’ what that chamber does?  The Founders intended government’s ability to make laws to be a slow, deliberative, if not awkward process, and the Senate’s super-majority rule of 60 votes helps implement this intent.  So let’s pick up a bit on the simplistic arguments in these comment streams about which party ‘controlled’ Congress in what years so as to imply that they could have passed anything they wanted.  Sophomoric!

SecComm Wilbur Ross today picked up on my suggestion that the fed workers running out of cash should just go get a loan to tide them over.  And he was dunned for making such a practical suggestion.  The needy fed workers would not be borrowing more than their take-home pay since that is what they had planned to spend in the first place, and that amount is guaranteed to them after the shutdown ends.  That is about the best collateral, save US Treasuries, that you can give a lender who can even have you sign a paper agreeing that the govt submit the loan amount directly to the lender.  And the lenders can get extra PR brownie points by advertising that these are short-term no interest loans.  What’s not to like?  Yet it was only ol’ Wilbur who finally came up with that while the rest of Washington is just sitting around with their teeth in their mouth.  It’s almost as if both sides wanted the furloughed to go on a publicized fast.  Nah!

Mending Wall (updated 12jan19)

Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

 

[12jan19 gjr update] From some of the comments below it appears that a word of clarification is required, not only about Frost’s poem but also walls, fences, and other things that demark and control access.  Such constructs are nothing more than the existential and visible attributes of contracts that define property rights within a society.  These transmit the unambiguous message that this side belongs to me, and the other side belongs to someone else; and I don’t want someone from the other side coming unbeknownst to me onto my property from where I have constructed my wall/fence or any other kind of barrier.  For access to my property at certain locations I have provided gates, the states of which I can control, and therefore control access to my property.

People who don’t share the value of such rights, and perhaps feel that these delineated things should be owned in common, or at least be shared unhindered, will oppose physical barriers that unambiguously define ownership and provide for non-owner access only at the pleasure of the owner.

Today such values are very much the topic of hot debate between ideologically estranged peoples and nations.  Conservatives and libertarians are very much proponents of property rights and such expression of these rights.  They believe that property (and any asset of value) that is owned by everyone is owned by no one, and treated as such.  (cf. Garrett Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons')  Everywhere that property is ‘owned by the people’, it is actually owned by their government which visibly deports itself as owner.  The definition of ownership is straightforward – you own something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you will.  The thinking person immediately understands that ownership is not a simple ‘you own it, or you don’t’.  Instead, they know that ownership is very much nuanced, and that anything owned can also be taken insidiously and stage wise from the weaker by the stronger.  In the US we have seen such erosion of ownership occur with many things, including real property and firearms.  In an autocracy (which we are fast becoming) such subtle transfers of ownership are replaced by more direct and unambiguous methods.

(In understanding ownership, be careful not to confuse that notion with the responsibility for and/or accountability for the disposition of said property by its de juris owner or any third party.)

Scattershots – 27dec18 (updated 30dec18)

George Rebane

LIBERAL BILLIONAIRE APOLOGIZES FOR FUNDING RUSSIAN BOT ‘FALSE FLAG’  Those fun-loving Democrats just can’t leave well enough alone when the go to work getting out the vote.  In the 2016 national election Crooked Hillary and her DNC had to do some numbers ginning up dirt on the opposition, and even putting down the hammer on one of their own kind who didn’t get the hint that it wasn’t his turn (ever).  But most recently it was “billionaire Reid Hoffman (who) apologized Wednesday for funding an effort to dupe Alabama voters into believing Russian bots were fueling Republican Roy Moore’s failed senatorial bid.”  Yep, you really don’t want to get yourself into the cross-hairs of that bunch.

Truthout.org, the ultra-left (well, actually communist) opinion shaper and progressives’ moral voice, is now calling for acts of sabotage to bring down the Trump administration.  This week the summons went out to Democrat constituencies across the country (‘We Can’t Wait on a Savior to Remove Trump. We Must Resist En Masse’), followed by a specific call directed at government employees for “federal disobedience” and “noncooperation” (‘Federal Disobedience: Why We Must Support Federal Worker Noncooperation’).  It is literally impossible to make this up.  Today’s Left is no different from the Bosheviks of old; when the established (constitutional) order cannot be brought down by their ideas in the public forum, then it must be attacked by all other trans-rational means available.

Most longtime RR readers know that people of the Left get a very one-sided view of the world that is dispensed by their favorite ideological wordsmiths and talking heads.  They stick to their own kind when it comes to forming their picture of the world.  And because of this, our local leftwing contingent continually creates comic relief in these comment streams when they unknowingly show up with their blinders on and claim that RR has a solo hold on ideas that counter their carefully cultivated credos.  When other readers provide links and point out contrary references in my commentaries, that information is simply ignored by our lefties as if it didn’t exist – they just continue their critiques cased in the comfort that not only do these ideas have local provenance, but that they also have limited purview.  Hence, if they can be stamped out here in their cradle, the outside world will not be infected.  BTW, here’s a laundry list of fake news that our progressives swallowed hook, line, and sinker during the past year from their faithful fountains of facts.

That old-time religion in America is on the skids.  We have been pointing out for years how the media and our educational systems have been composing recessionals to Christianity as part of their assault on western culture and civilization.  Every time new stats are collected and composed, the story becomes bleaker for our Judeo-Christian heritage.  The evidence for that is most visible during the year-end holiday season when secular humanity makes its strongest assault on the faith of our fathers.  I was directed to a current compendium on this cultural transformation by Joel Kotkin (‘As the Old Faiths Collapse, the Greens, Social Justice Warriors, and Techno-Futurists Aim to Fill the Void’) by a reader and correspondent.  After giving us the dreary numbers of how our traditional religions are being forsaken by the young moderns, despite heroic efforts by churches and temples to inject socio-political ideology into their liturgies, Kotkin documents the parallel social phenomenon of the Left desperately cobbling together new faiths to serve new gods, so that they will not miss out on that ineffable something that they see gracing the lives of the remaining Christian and Jewish holdouts.  (Here is Truthout's report this.) The real interesting news here is about the outliers of secular humanists’ fabricated faiths.  These involve the new trans-humanist faith(s?), and those churches of god without god.  Kotkin concludes his essay with –

The loss here would not only be for the faithful but the entire society. Religious institutions rooted in the past also serve as ideal transmitters of traditional culture and identity; the new ones see themselves largely as warriors of the future, based on perceived social and scientific truths. Trans-humanists, for their part, seek to reduce reality to data, rejecting much of what makes us different not only from other animals, but machines. … Ultimately, the new religions, seeking to fill the void left behind by traditional faiths, offer little to families in search of moral instruction or guidance for how different kinds of people can get along. They have no answers for addressing the reality that almost all of us alive today, despite the scheming of the trans-humanists, eventually will die. A world without the old faiths may still be spiritually engaged, even hysterically so, but we may lose the lessons of community, sacrifice, discipline and faith that the old religions taught to bind our societies together.

[28dec18 update]  “Climate change has always been the cover story, not the real issue which (is) Agenda 21 Sustainability.” writes a reader and correspondent in this morning’s email.  This year’s IPCC special report SR-15 details the real agenda that was pursued at this year’s international climate change conference in Katowice, Poland. (more here)  The global warming bamboozle continues in full force, but the real objectives for arguably the greatest wholesale fraud ever attempted on the entire world’s population are now leaking out, and there to see for everyone who cares to pay attention.  Unfortunately, humans in the aggregate are not that bright.

‘China Reins In Its Tech Giants’ reports the 28dec18 WSJ.  “The closer scrutiny of tech companies comes as Mr. Xi seeks to restore the Communist Party's pre-eminence as a force in people’s lives and to establish that the Party—and not the private sector—is charting the course for China’s future.”  Communism, like our progressive sector, has always claimed to be society’s most reliable moral compass.  Therefore, kowtowing to the Party, China’s industries like ride-sharing Didi are now hiring thousands of “Communist Party members as role models for customer service.”  For our global competitive position, this is the best news coming out of the Middle Kingdom in years.  (Here our Dems will do their best to emulate China starting 3 January 2019.)

Nokidhungry.org maintains that childhood hunger is prevalent in over ten million American households.  And this goes on under governments that have uncountable programs for helping and feeding even mildly or totally unneedy families and individuals.  Congress just passed an $867B (dreadfully misnamed) ‘farm bill’, of which 85% or $737B goes for food stamps for the poor.  For the hungry households, this computes to over $73K for each household’s annual food budget.  Cut that in half and half again, and you’d still come up with over $18K per year for groceries.  What do each of these messages convey about the extent of children going hungry – ‘In America 1 in 6 kids is starving’, ‘- does not have enough to eat’, ‘- faces hunger’.?  (nokidhungry uses the last one in its ads).  But the real question is, what’s wrong with this picture?  (Extra credit:  What’s the political persuasion of the overwhelming share of bureaucrats who have been running the food stamps program for years?)

[30dec18 update]  I was graced by Union columnist George Boardman to appear in his tomorrow's (31dec18) offering.  He quoted from the addendum to my 3jan18 KVMR commentary - "I believe the present state of affairs in the world order are the result of the spontaneously coordinated efforts of fundamental Islam and western socialism’s striving to meet Agenda21 objectives."  I invite readers to reread the complete addendum.

‘Do We Need Our Country Anymore?’

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 December 2018.]

Dr Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, asks that question in the latest (Dec 2018) issue of the Imprimis.  The answer that our public schools have been teaching for the last half century is NO.  As Arnn points out, “World leaders are now accustomed to call for the subordination of the nation for the good of the globe.”  All in preparation for “the peoples of the world (to) enter a new age of global peace, prosperity, and cooperation.”

The latest to call for the abandonment of sovereign nation-states was French president Macron on the 100^th anniversary of the WW1 armistice.  The embrace of nationalism, he argued, is the cause of wars.  And the solution is to rid ourselves of nationalism, which he defines as a people’s desire to put the interests of their nation first and foremost to a degree that ignores all transnational cooperation with other nations.  On a roll, the French leader went on to claim that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism.”  In other words, if you’re a patriot, you will work to subsume your country into a larger world order, or in essence, to make it disappear.

Macron called for world leaders to “take the UN’s oath to place peace higher than anything.”  To which Dr Arnn then asks, “Higher than freedom?  Higher than justice?  Higher than the lives of our children?”

Churchill maintained that, since time immemorial, “the central principle of civilization is the subordination of the ruling authority to the settled customs of the people, and to their will as expressed through (a) constitution.”  That says civilization is constituted by populations of people with shared customs under a constitutional umbrella that explicitly spells out the communal processes and procedures they agree practice in order to form a mutually sustained society.

And for any population this can only take place under a government that has “received the broad assent of large majorities” of its citizens.  Such broad assent can only occur among a population with broadly shared values, mores, and customs.  Then other people, whose values etc differ, will also want to join with their like-minded brethren; and when they do, another political unit is born, identifying itself as a kingdom or nation distinct from all the others.

A civilized people united under a foundational document or constitution enjoys a government that settles affairs by talking things out.  The alternative is a government by force, one which rules over a fragmented and fearful population not permitted or able to talk things out.  A government that uses force to keep the peace in such a population is known as a tyranny.

There is zero chance that all the world’s peoples under a global government will be of a sufficiently like-mind on any given social issue.  Under such a behemoth government, one that preserves itself through the most sophisticated and efficacious technologies, where then can smaller groups of the like-minded go, save to the re-education camps or worse that Leviathan has prepared for such anti-social miscreants?

The clear alternative to such a future is the maintenance of a world order of sovereign nation-states comprised of peoples capable of giving broad assent for common solutions to shared problems.  With this understanding, today’s real question becomes, ‘Is America any longer such a country?’

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  And in this holiday season Jo Ann and I wish you and our entire KVMR family a healthy and productive new year.  Thank you for listening. 

Scattershots – 27nov18 (updated 28nov18)

George Rebane

Climate Hysteria Continues.  Along with many other analysts, Steve Koonin in the 26nov18 WSJ reports (here) that “Headlines warned of economic doom after the U.S. government released its fourth National Climate Assessment last week. Yet a close reading of the report shows that the overall economic impact of human-caused climate change is expected to be quite small.”  The report has more holes in it than swiss cheese, but it is the latest blast to continue political pressure on the ignorant and poorly read to start ‘doing something’ to materially hobble the US economy in order to ‘prevent a climate catastrophe’.  None of it holds water, and as Koonin points out, a closer reading debunks its main alarums.  Here assemble government agencies that in their best days cannot reliably predict next week’s weather or next quarter’s GDP, all pretending to tell us what the world will be like 75 years from now.  The report’s survival in the public forum does not reflect well on our collective intelligence.

Presumption of innocence is one of the seminal starting points of any adjudication of guilt in enlightened western societies, and has been so for a couple of centuries now.  Not so according to a Mr Pete Williams as he pits his logic against the recent Kavanaugh hearings.  His letter in the 26nov18 Union (here) argues “the presumption of innocence applies in criminal cases, not civil law suits or administrative matters such as applications for security clearances, job interviews, or hearings to gather information on prospective appointees, like Kavanaugh. The theory behind the presumption of innocence applying only to criminal cases is that it is better that a guilty person escape conviction than for an innocent prison(sic) to be sent to prison. The Supreme Court hearings are not a criminal proceeding — and thus the presumption of innocence was not applicable to the Kavanaugh hearings.”  This terminally progressive gentleman reveals what will be the demeanor of their star chamber courts when the socialists cum communists finally achieve their primacy in the halls of our government (e.g. Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s).  What the gentleman totally misses is the significant nuance that the receipt of a security clearance or similar benefice (e.g. corporate job) is not a constitutional right, it is a privilege to be properly granted by the government charged with the nation’s security.  Its refusal does not destroy the applicant.  However, in cases – administrative, civil, congressional, etc – where a nominee’s reputation, ability to continue his career, and to care for his family is put on the line, all western civilized cultures have tacitly accepted the premise that the burden to prove condemning accusations rests on the accuser, and not their defense on the gratuitously accused.  This distinction is totally lost on our Left, hence RR and other voices consider these lopsided sentiments to be a danger to the very foundations of our way of life – but apparently not of theirs.

[28nov18 update] As the last echoes of the election die down, we should always be reminded of the words of Josif Vissarionovich Stalin - "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

Lost Words from Our Childhood

Russ Steele

I belong to an eclectic writers group that often shares items they have discovered in the world of words. Below is the latest contribution and it brought back a lot of memories for Ellen and me. We shared with friends, and George encouraged me to post on RR. If you are not over 65 some of these words may need explanation, ask your grandmother or grandfather.

Mergatroyd!… Do you remember that word? Would you believe the spell-checker did not recognize the word Mergatroyd? Heavens to Mergatroyd!

The other day a not so elderly (I say 75) lady said something to her son about driving a Jalopy; and he looked at her quizzically and said "What the heck is a Jalopy?" He never heard of the word jalopy!! She knew she was old..... But not that old.

Well, I hope you are Hunky Dory after you read this and chuckle.

About a month ago, I illuminated some old expressions that have become obsolete because of the inexorable march of technology.

These phrases included: Don't touch that dial, Carbon copy, You sound like a broken record, and Hung out to dry.

Back in the olden days we had a lot of moxie. We'd put on our best bib and tucker, to straighten up and fly right.

Heavens to Betsy! Gee whillikers! Jumping Jehoshaphat! Holy moley!

We were in like Flynn and living the life of Riley; and even a regular guy couldn't accuse us of being a knucklehead, a nincompoop or a pill. Not for all the tea in China!

Back in the olden days, life used to be swell, but when's the last time anything was swell? Swell has gone the way of beehives, pageboys and the D.A.; of spats, knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, saddle shoes, and pedal pushers.

Oh, my aching back! Kilroy was here, but he isn't anymore.

We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap, and before we can say, “Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle!” Or, “This is a fine kettle of fish!” We discover that the words we grew up with, the words that seemed omnipresent, as oxygen, have vanished with scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our keyboards.

Poof, go the words of our youth, the words we've left behind.  We blink, and they're gone. Where have all those great phrases gone? 

Long gone: Pshaw, The milkman did it. Hey! It's your nickel. Don't forget to pull the chain. Knee high to a grasshopper. Well, Fiddlesticks! Going like sixty. I'll see you in the funny papers. Don't take any wooden nickels. Wake up and smell the roses.

It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter has liver pills. This can be disturbing stuff! (Carter's Little Liver Pills are gone too!)

We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeable times. For a child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age. We at the other end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there are words that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted their hour upon the earthly stage and now are heard no more, except in our collective memory.  It's one of the greatest advantages of aging.

Leaves us to wonder where Superman will find a phone booth...

See ya later, alligator! Okidoki

WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE FABULOUS 50'S...NO ONE WILL EVER HAVE THAT OPPORTUNITY AGAIN...WE WERE GIVEN ONE OF OUR MOST PRECIOUS GIFTS: LIVING IN THE PEACEFUL AND COMFORTABLE TIMES, CREATED FOR US BY THE “GREATEST GENERATION!”

I hope you found a memory of two to enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving 2018

George Rebane

Jo Ann and I wish all our RR friends and readers a very happy Thanksgiving.

PS. I've long been puzzled by how individual secular humanists think about and celebrate this day as they observe it with family and friends.  Since giving thanks is a show of gratitude for having received something - mostly unbidden and/or undeserved - to whom do such people show gratitude and for what?

Nationalism cum Patriotism

'Nationalism unites; tribalism divides.'

George Rebane

The concept and notion of nationalism is now thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued across western countries.  The gist of the conversation or debate over nationalism is that it has been incorporated into the Left’s trans-national narrative as something that today portends giving rise to the more sinister angels of our collective nature.  To be more precise, leftwing politicians here and in Europe have unleashed the message that nationalism implies ‘white nationalism’ which implies ‘ethnic exclusion’ which represents the strong form of ‘racism’.  The lamestream media's daily outpouring makes all this very explicit, and it is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the leftwing grassroots.  An example of this reveals itself in recent comment streams found in these pages.

French president Macron did no one a favor by lecturing Trump that “nationalism is counter to patriotism” while defining his understanding of neither term (more here).  Such simple and unexamined semantic conquests continue to be the modus operandi of how language is co-opted into politically correct newspeak.  In more measured moments each of us can look up the pre-progressive definition of nationalism to find it means –

"Nationalism is a political, social, and economic system characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty (self-governance) over the homeland." (Wikipedia)

Nationalism is “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.” (Merriam-Webster)

Nationalism, “the strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.” (dictionary.com)

From these, and other such definitions, we see a common thread in an operational sense.  Nationalism is simply the ideological tenet that describes a nationalist as one who puts the interests of his own nation first when contending, comparing, or competing with other nations.  As such, there is nothing pejorative about any of these semantic variants.  And anyone of any color, religion, ethnicity, etc can join with others similarly distinguishable as a fellow nationalist to promote the sovereignty of a given nation-state.  (Sen Marco Rubio also expands on this here.)

Patriotism is nothing more or less that the expression of national pride within “the ideology of love and devotion to a homeland, and a sense of alliance with other citizens who share the same values.” (Wikipedia)  In other words patriotism is the display, exercise, and/or implementation of nationalism - i.e. patriotism is the practice and maintenance of nationalism.

Things get dicier when we start adding modifiers to create ‘white nationalism’ and ‘black nationalism’.  A white nationalist is not simply a nationalist of the Caucasian variety.  No, no, no.  The progressive definition of white nationalist has overt racial overtones such as white supremacy AND white separatism (two semantically orthogonal notions).  Today being called a white nationalist clearly assigns you to the deplorably racist neo-Nazi camp without any chance of redemption or opportunity to explain yourself using more precise language.

A black nationalist is not so encumbered, and enjoys a very asymmetrical definition.  “Black nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism in the United States which seeks to promote, develop and maintain a black national identity for people of black ancestry.” (Wikipedia)  Nation of Islam and Black Power are functional expressions of such black nationalism.  Any such reciprocal notions of promoting, developing, or maintaining a white national identity for people of white ancestry is strictly forbidden.  Moreover, evincing any efforts in those directions will get you placed on several lists of suspect and bad people that are maintained by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  And should such leanings be known in your workplace, you likely will soon be unemployed.

For the record, there is no evidence that nationalist Republicans, Libertarians, conservetarians, conservatives, or Tea Party members embrace additional attributes of nationalism than those included in the above definitions.  However, this conclusion does not fit the narrative of the Left, ranging from so-called moderate Democrats to their most fringe socialist cum communist cadres.  The America of the non-Left is, has always been, and will remain an evil nation-state.  And of this, our children must continue to be carefully taught in union dominated public schools and academe.

Scattershots – 29oct18 (updated 31oct18)

George Rebane

Growing numbers of liberals now embrace the notion that voting for a living can be more lucrative than working for a living.

Hallelujah!  Our distinguished liberal columnist and RR reader George Boardman comes out strong for the educated voter.  In today’s (29oct18) Union he writes, “If you haven't yet taken the time to familiarize yourself with the issues and candidates, if your vote is based on emotion, or prejudice, or party affiliation, what your neighbor says, or that you had a fight with one of the candidates in the third grade, do your country a favor and throw out that mail-in ballot. An uninformed vote is much more dangerous than not voting at all.” (emphasis mine)  That, of course, has been a major conservetarian tenet of these pages for years (most recently here), and I welcome him as a fellow promoter of the educated vote.  However, now Mr Boardman should prepare himself to be pilloried by the local panel of progressive pinheads who believe and preach that encouraging voter education is akin to proposing the return to the Jim Crow voter policies of the post-bellum South.

The Pittsburg massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue is the latest installment of the ongoing tragedy of our times that should remind us of the nature of these kind of deranged and lunatic killers.  They should not be confused with the several flavors of organized terror such as sponsored by the various Islamist groups.  These desperate lone wolves seek to put meaning into their pitifully empty lives, and are terminally ignorant to boot.  They have no idea that their killings promote exactly the opposite effect than that which their fevered little minds conceived.  Today the killer’s “All Jews must die!” has redoubled the pride that Jews have in their faith and the strength they draw from it.  And it has also brought the rest of us closer to the Jewish community, and more determined than ever to fight the age-old scourge of antisemitism as the poster child of faith-targeted persecution.

[Later]  While the Democrats and their lamestream lackeys are busy tying the massacre to our president, even the rabbi of The Tree of Life and the Israeli ambassador join in praising President Trump in his strong condemnation of the massacre and its antisemitic character.  Neither of them blame the the president for contributing to this tragedy.  Any bets on how this exculpatory news is covered in the lamestream which has already fulminated about the 'Trump connection'? (more here and here)

A reliable sign of a corrupt and/or out of control government is when it increases taxes for 1) no other reason (benefit to the public) than that it can, and/or 2) because it must do so in order to pay for under-budgeted existing but politically critical promised programs that no longer are sustainable (if they ever were from the start).  Of the first, the latest is Britain’s planned ‘digital tax’ – an additional tax on technology companies that deliver online services (e.g. social media, ecommerce, …) and yet another on the consumers using such services.  These are taxes that do nothing to improve or make such services more facile – it is just the next taking, because it can take.  (more here)  For an example of the second type we have Lawrence W. Reed, professor of economics and president of the Foundation for Economic Education, who draws a startling parallel in ‘Are We Rome?’ of today's America with the downfall of Rome, a nation which first declined from a republic to an autocracy that then bought its degenerating survival through public welfare programs which first destroyed its economy and then its means to defend itself.   

[31oct18 update]  I took to task Susan Rogers, liberal editorial board member of The Union, in my 18oct18 post.  In there I highlighted one of her more regrettable ‘Hits’ in which she opined that “any patriotic citizen should not have a problem with the concept of urging all eligible voters to vote.” (emphasis mine).  Today, after an apparent mini-epiphany, the lady shows us one of her (probably many) redeeming sides by a penning a course-reversal column – ‘Vote Smart or Vote Stupid’ - that advocates for the educated voter.  While she has yet to draw the proper conclusion about what an uneducated voter should do – as long proposed by your commentator and now joined by Union’s George Boardman (see above) – Ms Rogers does provide the reader with ample specific citations where the responsible and concerned voter may get needed information before marking hiser (my own contribution to gender-free pronouns) ballot.

Ruminations – 21sep18 (updated 26sep18)

George Rebane

Fall equinox (22sep18, 1845PDT) observance preparations should be completed in time by the devout and/or deluded for tomorrow evening’s passage of the sun directly overhead (somewhere) at the equator on its journey south for our fall and winter seasons.  (This is a public service announcement.)

Scattershots – 14sep18 (updated 16sep18)

George Rebane

Judge Ken Starr, special prosecutor of Clintons fame, is pushing his new book Contempt that details the in and outs of the Clinton investigations.  On FN last night he made the surprise announcement that he and his team almost indicted Crooked Hillary who was questioned by Starr for all her dirty doings and wasn’t able to help matters by telling her interrogators over 300 times that she had forgotten all about the salient goings on in her shady past.  We know that she gathered strength from Starr’s ethical conduct – he knew she was crooked, but by his high standards for evidence that was lacking, he did not go forward with the indictment.  Meanwhile, Hillary went on to embellish her reputation as a bad ass bitch who was not and still is not accountable to anyone.

Sen Feinstein has been sitting on a letter she received last July that supposedly has the telling dirt on Judge Kavanaugh.  The anonymous letter is rumored to detail something from Kavanaugh’s high school years that would torpedo his SCOTUS nomination.  California’s scumbag senator has been sitting on this apparently nothing-burger deciding to threaten to reveal it now that everything else the Dems have tried has not worked.  So she kept this scurrilous script for a last minute desperation Hail Mary lob into the gears of the Senate, stating that she has given it to the FBI, and all things on the Kavanaugh confirmation should grind to a halt until the FBI completes its hoped for investigation.  This is how scumbags operate.

Puerto Rico has been the closest thing to a shithole country that the United States has had the pleasure of dealing with since the Spanish-American War.  Its culture is distinctly Latin, with all that this unfortunate baggage entails.  For generations its population, US citizens all, have had one of two objectives – make it on the island’s take in corruption, or make it to the US.  Nobody there considers the island and its established power structure as anything fixable.  But still, our progressive elites today are convincing their light-thinking lackeys that PR’s problems started with Trump not giving enough federal aid after Hurricane Maria devastated the island – that is blatant BS.  Sixty years ago it was already a place to leave as Leonard Bernstein made clear in his West Side Story.

[16sep18 update]  The lyrics to 'America' that I originally posted here from a website turned out to be considerably abbreviated.  As a commenter pointed out, a critical phrase was omitted.  Upon further research, there were even more phrases left out.  It turns out that there were at least two versions of lyrics to this and other WSS songs.  Anyway, I have deleted the incomplete version and give you a link to a site that seems to have the complete versions from both the Broadway show and the 1961 film.  The message re Puerto Rico remains unchanged.  (Enjoy the video here.)