Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 20sep21 (updated 23sep21)

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be – starting with the lawyers and enactors. Lao-Tzu (as embellished by Rebane)

George Rebane

The wisdom of Lao-Tzu was brought to my attention again by a friend and reader.  Jeff Thomas, a true conservetarian, wrote ‘The First Libertarian?’, an important little essay on governance – its ills and desiderata.  In it he distilled some more useful aphorism from the great sage.

Those in power are meddlesome.

The greater the restrictions and prohibitions, the more people are impoverished.

The more advanced the weapons of the state, the darker the nation … thus the virtuous attend to contracts, while those without virtue collect taxes.

Act before things exist, manage them before there’s disorder

Trickle down taxes is a specialty of the Democratic Party which it sells gift-wrapped in a couple of its perennial Big Lies – raising taxes does not impact economic behavior (the Laffer curve doesn’t work), and corporate taxes lower the tax burden on the working class.  They correctly assess their constituents as being too ignorant to questions such lies, but they know both of them to be false.  For example, Kennedy lowered taxes in xx to stimulate the economy.  And corporations pay no taxes but pass that cost on to their customers in the form of higher prices, which quietly impacts most the poorest in the land.  And a tax not even the Democrats want to talk about is inflation – always government induced (more here and here).  The worker bees’ bigger paychecks don’t give them any more buying power, but do promote them into higher tax brackets (plus higher sales taxes) which surreptitiously increase their overall tax rates.  But our leftwing elites have no worries about pushback from their Democrat voters, people who are totally oblivious to such economic factors, and continue to believe that their political leaders are making corporations and the rich pay their ‘fair share’.

[21sep21 update]  Sorry ass Biden.  I have been aware of presidential doings since ol' Harry was in office, and want to enter into the RR record that I have never seen such a terminally sorry ass elected President of the United States of America as Bumblebrain Biden.  This idiot has done everything wrong that he could possibly do, as he continues to work on bringing about even bigger disasters for the country.  The list of his failures gets rehashed regularly in these pages, and I’m sure that at some future date I’ll compile another list of them myself.  Right now the bigger problem for our republic is that a huge share of our voting age citizens have shown themselves to be simply too dumb to maintain the blessed land we inherited.  Ben Franklin’s admonition – “… a republic, if you can keep it” – has come true as ever more of our freedoms are stripped away daily.  Nay, not stripped, we have now been reduced to compliant serfs who willingly give away our freedoms – no stripping required.  And many of us even sing hosannas to the munificent wisdom of our socialist overlords so long as the checks keep arriving.  They are buying our freedoms with our own money, and welcoming in millions more aliens, cum tomorrow's Democrats, who will guarantee our descent to tyranny.

[22sep21 update]  Bumblebrain’s poll numbers are tanking and Republicans are happy dancing in the streets about next year’s election.  That election is more than several political eternities in the future, and the not-too-bright electorate has a short memory.  By next Fall things could easily be turned 180, especially if the Dems can pass more social legislation to increase the number and size of checks to the takers, while crowing that their massive tax increases will make the ‘rich’ makers and corporations pay their “fair share”.  (Over 60% of US households pay no capital gains or federal income taxes.)  Their constituents are dim enough to lap up all that kool-aid, especially if Republicans don’t have the balls to call it like it is – loudly and often - singing castrato doesn't cut it.

[23sep21 update]  Biden denounces and repudiates capitalism and the US economic system.  Bumblebrain made it clear in his speech last Thursday that, contrary to his professions of being a capitalist and not a socialist, he is indeed most strongly a socialist and not a capitalist.  As Daniel Henninger underlines in the 23sep21 WSJ, “At no point in that speech did he acknowledge the private sector contributed anything positive to the life of Americans.”  His work on $3.5T Democrat debacle, that is supposed to be the hallmark of his administration, has been assessed by the US Chamber of Commerce as being an “existential risk” to the US economy.  Astute readers know that the USCC is far from being a rightwing propaganda organ.  If Bumblebrain knows anything, it is that he has only a short time to put some mark, any mark, on his reputation and legacy.  And so far everything he touched has turned to s#!t, so with what’s left of his cognitive abilities, he now thinks that locking America onto the path of irretrievable socialism is the only thing he can pull off with the Democratic Party that has already declared itself ‘all in’ for that fundamental transformation.

On Our Road to Serfdom – 10sep21

George Rebane

We Americans have been on the road to serfdom since the launch of President Johnson’s Great Society programs in the late 1960s.  Our progress toward an authoritarian social order was an almost imperceptible creep during the early years starting in the 1970s.  With the passing of the decades, our loss of freedoms has now become a gallop, especially highlighted by the state diktats, we quietly succumbed to during the Covid pandemic.  Specifically, I’m really talking about the battering suffered by the Bastiat Triangle of Rights (q.v.) – Liberty, Security, and Property.  These rights form the seminal legal structure upon which ALL other rights are based and secured; none can be weakened without a concomitant weakening of the other two, and, of course, the weakening of the rights deriving from these.

A beguiling danger on the road to serfdom is that its many disarming byways and slowly enlarging chuck holes are not readily noticed by travelers being drawn by descriptions of the promised land at its terminus.  By the time the journey becomes so difficult that even the lightest thinkers notice, it is too late to turn around and go back.  In America, our socialist elites have successfully brought a compliant and undereducated electorate to such a milestone on the road to serfdom and totalitarianism.

Noted Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, along with Milton Friedman of the ‘Chicago school’, each warned us of the ultimate disaster that would result from an embrace of collectivist governance based on central planning and control by elites.  The disasters of practiced fascism and communism highlight pre-woke and pre-CRT history books.  That both arose from initial adoption of various forms of Marxian socialism is today clouded by the Left’s resurgence and its citation of the Scandinavian experience.  Nowhere is mentioned Scandinavia’s actual unsustainable experience with socialism, along with their ongoing attempts to retreat from their extreme flirtations during the 1960s and 70s.

The US, on the other hand, is rushing toward a neo-Marxian socialist future on a disintegrating chariot pulled by global warming, open borders, and critical theories.  The party in charge of this rush to misery are the Democrats dominated by their left-wing zealots.  A socialist future is now openly presented as the objective of the country’s fundamental transformation.  And the road is already littered with authoritarian mandates that would have gathered our forefathers bearing torches and pitchforks in the public square.  With more of us arriving daily.

This week we heard that CDC has expanded from controlling our rental market to overruling relationships between Americans and their physicians.  As relayed by a reader who went to the local Rite-Aid drugstore to fill an Ivermectin prescription by her doctor, the pharmacist told her that they are rejecting such prescriptions because the CDC has deemed Ivermectin to have suddenly become harmful and not to be used as a C19 therapeutic or prophylactic.  So these unelected, politicized bureaucrats have now injected themselves into our country’s doctor/patient relationship starting with using a demonstrated lamestream hoax to prevent physicians from prescribing lawful medicines to their patients.  And no one has made a peep.  The lamestream has, of course, remained mum, but even the so-called rightwing outlets have yet to pick up on this latest rollback of our freedoms.  We have become so inured to having our rights casually cancelled by any politician or bureaucrat at literally any level of governance.  We are already serfs who comply with our master’s voice.  No second thought is given.  We are even enthusiastic enforcers of such mandates, ready, willing, and able to turn on our neighbor when we see noncompliance.

The Nobelist Hayek was most eloquent and clear in the warnings he issued, beginning with The Road to Serfdom (1944) and continuing throughout his life after he went to the University of Chicago and became part of ‘the Chicago School’ which also included Nobelist Milton Friedman.  A perusal of Serfdom yields some of his more important sentiments about socialism, collectivism, and totalitarianism.

• Western democracies, including the UK and the US, have "progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past".  Society has mistakenly tried to ensure continuing prosperity by centralized planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

• Socialism is a hypocritical system, because its professed humanitarian goals can only be put into practice by brutal methods "of which most socialists disapprove". Such centralized systems also require effective propaganda, so that the people come to believe that the state's goals are theirs. As with communism, Hayek argues that the roots of National Socialism lie in socialism.

• Centralized planning is inherently undemocratic, because it requires "that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people".  The power of these minorities to act by taking money or property in pursuit of centralized goals, destroys the Rule of Law and individual freedoms.  Where there is centralized planning, "the individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as ''socialized welfare' or the 'good of the community'".

• Hayek opposed regulations that restrict the freedom to enter a trade, or to buy and sell at any price, or to control quantities. Nevertheless, he acknowledged the utility of regulations that restrict legal methods of production, so long as these are applied equally to everyone and not used as an indirect way of controlling prices or quantities, and without forgetting the cost of such restrictions.

So today we have Biden and his CDC stumbling through one science-free policy after another in their misbegotten efforts to curb Covid.  None of them understand that the disease is now endemic and a permanent part of our health landscape.  We will fight it as we have other infectious diseases, by developing herd immunity through exposure and vaccines, but never by lockdowns and economic destruction.  Ignoring history and science while putting politics first, Team Biden now issues illegal and unconstitutional federal mandates to prescribe everything from masks, to vaccinations, to testing, to social distancing.  And again, we as the serfs we have become do not make a peep in opposition.  Half of us have become so compliant that they rush to denounce their neighbors who don’t toe the (Democratic) party line.

We Live in the Golden Age of Stupidity

Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become. - Jean Cocteau

George Rebane

So argues Lance Morrow, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and former Boston University journalism professor, in the 30aug21 WSJ (here).  Morrow introduces a slightly different aspect of stupidity than the one used in these pages.  (Here ignorance denotes a lack of specific knowledge, and stupid denotes the cognitive inability to process knowledge.  Only the former is correctible.)  Functionally, Morrow’s ‘stupidity’ is the same, but applied wholesale to large masses of people.  He immediately opens with –

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time—one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.

As we have shown for years, the American Left has dedicated itself to 1) creating wholesale ignorance through our public schools, and 2) promoting the stupid in their ranks to enduring positions of power.  The former to create generations of compliant constituents, the latter to generate, promote, and maintain insane and/or dysfunctional public policies in their jurisdictions.  The confluence of both creates the stupidity, as described by Morrow, that ensures the expansion and calcification of monopolistic autocracy in the body politic.  The evidence for this abounds and is available to a shrinking cohort of Americans; to the remainder it is the acceptable norm, socially just, and the ‘American way’.

Until the arrival of mass media (i.e. radio circa 1920) history tells us that we Americans were extremely political animals, participating in extensive discussions of the issues, political corruption, impactive legislation, and election campaigns at all levels.  Newspapers with their editorials and political cartoons (e.g. see Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904) were devoured in detail on Main Street, church suppers, and in Grange meetings.  Everyone had some pertinent knowledge of current events and issues – it was a sought honor to be known as a ‘person of information’. 

Belief has been banished

George Rebane

Equity is the enemy of liberty.

In the days of yore we had a national institution called the Fourth Estate – professional journalism.  It was staffed by reporters taught by their editors to be ‘curious, hard-bitten skeptics’, always seeking alternative sides to what they were being told.  In a recent piece (here) by national columnist Gerard Baker, “The good reporter doubted whatever he was told, even what time it was. He’d weigh competing accounts and explanations and actively seek out alternative versions. Read the bios of great reporters from the past and they’ll be scattered with adjectives like ornery and insubordinate.”

More than ever, today the country is faced with major crises, manufactured and managed in the media – Covid pandemic, open borders, unbounded debt, preventable man-made climate change, catastrophic crime rates, race relations, CRT school curricula, accelerating dumbth of the electorate, rogue ‘deep state’ departments destroying businesses and lives, retreat of US hegemony, and on and on.  In any sense of the word, facts about these are no longer reported.  “‘Reported’ is a misnomer. They aren’t facts; (instead) they are sacred revealed truths, unchallengeable arguments invested with epistemic certainty and moral clarity.”

“Journalism is no longer about trying to tell us what happened; it’s about telling us what we must believe, on pain of moral peril. On every major topic, … every story blares out at us with censorious didacticism, the journalist’s smug disdain for the unbelievers pouring through (their) prose.”  (Full disclosure - as declared here years ago, I am NOT a journalist.)

With journalism in the bag, it didn’t take long for other national institutions to corrupt everything that they were supposed to inform us about.  Everything coming out of our law enforcement agencies, public health institutes, justice departments, the judiciary, legislatures, environmental bureaus, commerce, elected politicians, …, everything they declared, stated, published, etc had a short half-life as truth.  Many of the lies today are so blatant that they scarcely last through the news making interview.

Leaders in this downfall are what we here label as the lamestream media.  These are broadcast, internet, and hardcopy outlets that overwhelmingly toe the Left’s progressive narrative, and serve as the reliable trumpet of the Democratic National Committee and leadership elites.  They package and embellish only the part of the news that serves to cement leftwing talking points du jour.  This is easy to tell from both these pages and simply comparing news items (no matter how reported) from both rightwing and leftwing outlets.  As the liberals here daily confirm, the lamestream covers only a subset of items that are found on rightwing outlets like Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, and associated websites.

(The latest tactic to assure that the future generations of voters are compliant double dummies, anti-education Democrats, led by Oregon governor Kate Brown, who has now surreptitiously signed a law that makes reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates.  One can never have enough uncritical, true-believing constituents.  I expect this initiative to be replicated in other Democrat led states – more here.)

Rightwing outlets, led by Fox, claim to be “fair, balanced, and unafraid” of the censorious Left and their rampant cancel culture.  But unfortunately that also is not true.  There is plenty of evidence that rightwing outlets have a healthy fear of political incorrectness and retribution.  A timely example should suffice to spread the blame.  MyPillow’s Mike Lindell is a longtime staunch Trump supporter, and a leader in the rightwing movement claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.  Lindell is sponsoring a limited attendance 3-day Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls that started today (more here).  Almost every leftwing outlet of any stature has been dunning and denigrating the conference as another rightwing attempt to once more convince the country of the fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election.  Lindell has been a big advertiser on Fox News and also wanted to advertise his symposium on the network.

FN said no, and not only no, but it didn’t even include mention of this otherwise covered conference in its news broadcasts.  For a change, you had to watch CNN and MSNBC to learn of Lindell’s latest effort to keep the election fraud pot boiling.  Not only did FN’s news programs shun Lindell’s gathering, but so also did that king of conservative commentary on Fox, Tucker Carlson, “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.”  Carlson has taken on the Left on some pretty controversial and damning issues.  He advertises himself as being Mr Balls-to-the-floor himself when it comes to reporting what others hide.  But Tucker has been too scared to even mention Lindell or simply report the massive vituperation thrown at him on the lamestream.  This reflects poorly on Carlson and doubly so on his colleague Bret Baier, FN’s lead news anchor on their flagship news program.  I am saddened by all this duck-and-cover fear in a network I used to hold in high esteem.  (We’ll see what Tucker says tonight.)

Gerard Baker concludes his piece with – “The modern journalist is different. His primary ambition is to be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite, happily swaddled in all their shared nostrums. He’s most content when he’s wagging a finger at the selfish fools who continue to doubt climate extremism, express skepticism about vaccines, or deny their innate white sinfulness. … His virtue thus signaled, he luxuriates in the knowledge that he’s on the side of the chosen ones. It’s just a pity it’s no longer journalism.”

So, who are we supposed to believe today?

[Later]  Neither Bret Baier nor Tucker Carlson on Fox News made mention of Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium which continues for two more days.

Critical Race Theory – a personal assessment

“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”  Stephen Decatur

"... the ultimate purpose of  public education is to subsume the individual's will into the general will."  American Marxist (2021)

George Rebane

CRT is now blowing across the land, starting with our K-12 public schools and continuing on through our public and private institutions to its unbelievable terminus – our military.  Everything in between from corporations to governments at all levels have been infected by a new belief system that sees and describes America at every turn as a deeply flawed nation – to many of us as the world’s most reprehensible country.

CRT is being implanted and implemented in many of its variants.  Not one of them need to check every box in the list of its attributes.  And to the lightly-read with no critical thinking skills, this variability in its applications allows them to deny that CRT is rampant in the land.  These light thinkers are all children of the Left whose leaders and media outlets represent CRT as a culmination of correct insight into the nation’s history.

These insights all center around America as the world’s focused vortex of white supremacy that has kept people of color enslaved in various forms unto this day since it all began for them in 1619.  Our evil and/or ignorant half does not recognize America as the generations-long most desired destination for people of all colors.  They simply ignore the multi-generational mass ingress of immigrants and illegal aliens, and continue, louder than ever, their narrative and pedagogy of a reprobate America.

In these pages we posted many commentaries and comment streams that examine the impact and realities of CRT as it seeps through the most intimate inroads of our society’s public and private lives. (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) The Left has now successfully submerged even the most balanced criticisms of CRT.  To be caught criticizing, automatically pins the racist label on all who so dare.  This is now so strongly enforced in every level of media and politics that private individuals no longer dare speak their thoughts in normal conversations when they are out and about.  The result is, of course, an ever-widening of the already irredeemable chasm that separates us.

I focus on the damage that is done to our children when they are indoctrinated in public schools with the variants of CRT.  The most visible damage is to the students’ political values with which they matriculate, and then go on to interpret and accept the worldview fed to them daily by our lamestream media.  Absent in their acquired skillsets is critical thinking – the state of the country and world is summarized for them by a set of 17 (don’t hold me to this number) collectivist cum Marxist shibboleths, endlessly repeated and accredited by their political, entertainment, and sports celebrities.

The point here is that this growing cohort of citizenry sees very little about America that should be conserved, for them it is all bad and requires a fundamental transformation to make it right.  That is what CRT-based history has done and continues to do to our citizenry.  It removes the love of country and makes toxic its symbols, traditions, established curricula, and even our everyday language.  All of these are to be replaced by new norms of social justice, equity, and anti-western values.  Never mind that these notions remain undefined.  Without critical thought to light the way, the missing definitions never enter the mind - high-sounding labels suffice to inspire action.

So, call these CRT variants what you will, the bottom line is that people emerge from their indoctrination sessions with a jaundiced eye toward everything traditionally American.  They see little to preserve, and believe that in the transformed brave new world they will be better off in every dimension of human existence.  Most even believe that all this can be achieved with ever less intrusive governments as even neo-Marxist teach the ultimate perfection of Man and the final evaporation of governance.  None are aware of how many eggs had to be cracked in the attempts to make such omelets in the past.

According to my lights, an accurate history of America can and should be taught to our kids.  But it needs to be taught in such a way that on balance, even when recognizing our barnacles, they emerge seeing our country as being an historically exceptional social order.  One that has achieved for its citizens, and the world at large, an enormously increased quality of life, as it continues to be the destination of choice for not only the downtrodden, but also its industrious builders.

‘CRT’s Attempt to Reframe Our Country’s Founding’

[Apologies for the belated posting of this third in the series of columns Ms McLaughlin which appeared in the 14jul21 issue of The Union.  The previous two can be found here and here.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has argued that critical race theory is “another right-wing conspiracy theory” that was “totally made up.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said that critical race theory is being “manufactured” by the right. Yet, over the July 4 weekend, the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, announced plans to teach critical race theory in all 50 states and more than 14,000 school districts. The National Education Association believes it is real, and they would be right.

One of the narratives being incorporated into critical race theory curriculum is the 1619 Project originally published in 2019 by The New York Times as stories, poems, and essays about racism and slavery. Twenty Africans, believed to be the first enslaved Africans in British North America, arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619. The 1619 Project suggests that this was the moment of America’s “true founding.”

Written by journalists and opinion writers, not historians, the project attempts to reframe our country’s founding around the concepts of racism and slavery.

Within days of its launch in August 2019, a number of notable historians pointed out numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements in a letter to The New York Times. They included professors Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon Wood of Brown University.

They disputed many of the statements presented as facts in the 1619 Project, not the least of which was an essay promoting the idea that the American Revolution was motivated by a desire to preserve slavery.

Northwestern University History Professor Leslie Harris, an expert on African American life and slavery in the pre-Civil War era, was the first historian to levy criticism who had actually supported the project and participated in it as a fact-checker.

During the publication process, she was presented with the assertion that “one critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

Harris vigorously disputed this claim, explaining that while slavery was an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the colonies went to war. Yet that claim remains in the published account.

According to Harris, colonists had no need to secede to protect slavery, as slavery faced no immediate threat from Great Britain. The opposite was true, Harris argued, as the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American colonies. It led most of the 13 colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. Thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies, and the ideals gaining force during the Revolutionary era also inspired many Northern states to pass laws gradually ending slavery.

These laws did not provide immediate emancipation, nor did they promise racial equality or full citizenship, but Professor Harris asserted that black activism during the Revolutionary War and the following era of emancipation led to the end of slavery much earlier than prescribed within those laws. Slaves often negotiated with their owners to purchase their freedom, or simply ran away in the confused aftermath of the war, and most Northern slave owners granted freedom to their slaves in advance of the time mandated by law.

Despite the many leading scholars who have discredited and criticized the project since its publication as historically inaccurate and ideologically driven, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary architect of the 1619 Project, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay introducing it.

The editorial staff of the New York Post, which had run multiple articles challenging the 1619 Project’s facts and arguments, wrote: “Too bad the Pulitzer committee now thinks that facts are irrelevant to journalism.” Most recently, Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater. (She turned it down in favor of a position at Howard University.)

African-American history and slavery is a critical theme in America’s story, but we can recognize the impact of race without denying the roles of other influences or erasing or denigrating the contributions of early American settlers and our founding fathers, as critical race theory attempts to do.

A dozen Civil War professors and scholars have stated that they are “troubled that these materials are now … the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of The New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights.”

Professor Gordon Wood, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for history for a book on the American Revolution, wrote, “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution. … I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. … We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.”

Despite its demonstrable flaws and distortions, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum approved by the California Department of Education this year draws significantly upon the 1619 Project to validate what The Wall Street Journal calls the curriculum’s “radical indoctrination.”

The Great Divide – an updated review (updated 20jul21)

George Rebane

This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’.  The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’.  I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country.  And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine.  I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.

The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen.  Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border.  Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”

Equity Denies Reality (Addended)

George Rebane

[This piece was rejected by The Union as unfit for their readers.  I must admit that I was surprised at that response, and the reasons given by publisher Don Rogers.  I will have more to say later about my new understanding of the newspaper’s ideological coloring and journalistic demeanor.  The following is an addended version of what was submitted.]

Our public policies, including those now seeking equity, have denied reality for decades, so argues nationally prominent, quantitative sociologist and political scientist Charles Murray in Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021).  In his latest scholarly researched and richly referenced book, Dr Murray brings to light data that government collected and our media muffled on the intellectual metrics that characterize race in America.  As with his past dissertations (e.g. Bell Curve, Coming Apart), his politically and profusely incorrect Facing Reality is destined for the same opprobrium from progressives that graced his previous volumes.  However, his presentation of information and socially impactive conclusions are supported by databases assembled over the decades by our Dept of Education, FBI, and various accredited testing services.

What motivated Murray to produce this illuminating work is today’s broadly held contention that America’s fundamental creed is in peril.  The creed is from our Declaration of Independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”  And the danger to our way of life comes from a total misapprehension of how our multi-racial culture is viewed through the perspectives of cognitive capability and criminality, and how this gives rise to today’s misguided, and even insane public policies through which government misinforms, mis-enables, and misdirects Americans as we seek our places in the sun.

The long-taught but erroneous common wisdom is that cognitive capabilities are equally distributed across races.  Using census data Murray presents his analysis of our four main racial groups and percentages making up our 330M population.  Murray labels these European (60%), Latin (17.9%), African (12.8%), Asian (5.7%), Other (3.6%).  Volumes of data over the years demonstrate that in the aggregate these groups have measurably different distributions of closely correlating scores in IQ, SAT, ACT, and other skill-based tests which have been meticulously controlled to eliminate the usual sources of non-racial bias.  To illustrate this broad-based reality, Murray presents the proxy IQ distributions which are annotated in the nearby figure.

The racial distributions are the familiar ‘bell curves’, the size (area under the curve) of each being proportional to its population.  As usual, the data has been adjusted (normed) so that the country’s overall average IQ = 100, with a 15-point standard deviation.  The average IQs for each racial group are indicated in the figure.  At this point we remind ourselves that such basic measures of cognitive ability are embedded characteristics of people and not subject to rapid change through education and/or training.  The importance of such measures are that they reliably predict aggregate abilities to acquire and apply different levels of skill sets.

Scattershots – 4jul21 (updated 9jul21)

George Rebane

There are no more paladins living among us.  When some public atrocity is being committed, like someone or two having the crap kicked out of them on a sidewalk, or a Molotov cocktail thrown through a store window, or a brutal execution of someone sitting in a car, then all the gathered onlookers are concerned about is that they get a good video of the goings on, no matter how long the goings on are ongoing.  Concern for the immediate wellbeing of our fellow man, no matter how unjustly he is being treated, is no longer of any concern to anyone.  Where are the CCWs when we need them?  After all, they are issued specifically for use in case of incipient murder or mayhem.  But we can rejoice, the videos ultimately appear on various social media channels.  (Example @208pm on the last Sandbox)

[5jul21 update]  The XL Pipeline people are suing our federal government for $15B damages.  It is a proper suit since the Biden administration, in launching one of its earliest disasters for the country, abrogated its contract with the builder after it had most of the pipeline completed.  Bumblebrain’s compliance to his rabid anti-American Left terminated the country's energy independence, put the world’s oil prices back in the hands of OPEC et al, and resulted in the spiking of gasoline prices across the land as a major contributor to the resurgence of inflation.  The latter being a hit to the wallets of all Americans, hurting most the poor and the middle class.  The Dems only hope for 2022 is that most of our electorate will remain sufficiently numb between the ears so that they cannot ferret out the source of their pain.

The dismantling of Hong Kong by the CCP remains an unreported mystery to the global news machinery.  No one has yet to report that it is in Beijing’s interest to destroy HK as a leading global financial center in the shadow of which Shanghai, mainland’s own financial center, has been forced to compete.  HK has been the port of call for international monies seeking investments in the mainland, Taiwan, and all of south Asia.  This felicitous situation has buttressed Taiwan and highlighted the business efficiencies practiced in an economically free environment with that practiced under strict CCP control.  To Beijing, and its compliant allies in Singapore, HK has been an irritating sore that needed to be excised.  Today things are getting so bad that major US tech companies are threatening to leave the city to save their staffs from trumped-up criminal charges (more here).  But no one is connecting the dots on HK’s ultimate fate as becoming just another seaport to serve China’s southern Guangdong province and its industrial capital Guangzhou.

Our Sacramento stupidos have suddenly realized that the state’s ongoing rape of its power generating infrastructure will leave us short of electricity as we proceed into a hot summer.  The Epoch Times reports (here) the CA Energy Commission and its PUC have asked the CA Independent System Operator to contract for more energy in the coming months.  There is no guarantee that such energy supplies will be available from other states similarly afflicted.  In their letter they lied that the need arises in spite of “California using all available tools to increase electricity reliability this summer,”  In reality, they abandoned the available and reliable tools of safe nuclear and clean natural gas power plants for a poorly conceived, inadequate, and premature green energy strategy that will guarantee power shortfalls in California for years to come.  Our state’s political monopoly has literally shit in the old well before the new one was dug (from an old Estonian proverb).  In sum, the politically incorrect but reliable Plan A has been abandoned, and there is no Plan B.  (H/T to reader)

[8jul21 update] Worthless Degrees.  Here’s a common story from the 8jul21 WSJ.  “Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.  Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.  The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data.”  For the arithmetically curious $30K/yr = $15/hr – the intended national minimum wage.  In Nevada County today an apprentice electrician with no experience and without even a high school diploma can get a job for $15-18/hr.

Classroom video monitoring.  The teachers’ unions are dead set against any video recordings of classroom instruction and goings on.  They claim it violates the students’ rights to privacy.  There is no such right to privacy for students in a public school classroom.  For generations parents and other interested parties have always been welcome observers in America’s classrooms.  With today’s technology it would be an easy matter to put streaming/stored classroom videos online so that parents could log in to see what little Johnny/Sally was being taught and assigned as homework.  My wife Jo Ann was a regular fixture in our kids’ grade school classrooms.  But not today, and the reason is clear.  The crap that marginally competent teachers put out under today’s closely guarded cloud of pedagogy would at a minimum disappoint and, most likely, enrage parents.  And this is doubly so as Critical Race Theory has started tainting all manner of K-12 subjects in our unionized public schools.

[9jul21 update]  ‘CDC Recommends Schools Open Fully Immediately, Says Vaccinated Teachers And Students Don’t Need Masks’  This has been true for over six months.  It is the work of the evil party and Team Biden that has prevented our children from resuming their education, and school attendance which never needed to be interrupted last year.  All this has accomplished is to make more reliable Democrat voters, which, of course, was the purpose of the school shutdowns in the first place.

The Ubiquity of Bias

George Rebane

I am a biased ideologue (q.v.).  My biases, along with their reasoned bases, have been spelled out in detail on these pages for well over a decade.  No other blog I’m aware of has so meticulously presented its host’s credo and glossary of vocabulary relevant to the topics covered.

Having again made that statement, I go on to the more universal contention that there are no unbiased presentations of facts or fiction by Man, especially when it comes to matters of human affairs.  We all have a specific world view, a specific way we receive and incorporate new evidence into that world view, a unique set of desiderata for almost all aspects of human striving, and, of course, our own way of communicating and convincing others of the correctness of our particular perspectives.

People who claim to be innocent or cleansed of bias, and therefore present views which they claim are in some sense ‘ex cathedra’, are charlatans, deluded, or both.  This assessment applies especially to those self-proclaimed middle-roaders who profess to clothe their preferences in various forms of authoritative infallibility.  Even in science and every other STEM field we find biased presentations and ongoing debates as to where resides truth, goodness, and light.  The most visible charlatans here are those who seek to buttress their biases with claims of non-existent ‘settled science’.

From this, I and others like me conclude that bias in human affairs is ubiquitous – it was ever thus.

Therefore, the best that disputants in a debate can do is present their case in the context of their respective utilities (definitions of ‘good’), and the reasoned bases which support their propositions.  Wise debaters know beforehand that even with the best intentions and transparent interchanges, all disputes cannot be successfully resolved.  In the art of negotiation, participants are advised to approach all such contentious proceedings with a firm handle on their own BATNAs (best alternative to negotiated agreement).

In our country’s gathering socio-political storm, ongoing debates, accusations, and indictments between the polarized sides are seen at all levels, from the national to the thousands of towns and villages across the land.  As detailed on these pages, the manner in which these contentions are conducted is highly asymmetrical – the Right always willing to spell out the America they want, with the Left keeping secret the details of their vision of a fundamentally transformed country.

From the Left’s published proposals and ensconced public policies, the Right cannot help but conclude that their desire is for a socialist (anti-capitalist) state under a much enlarged and intrusive government that controls almost every aspect of Americans’ lives, livelihoods, thoughts, and speech.  And the Left’s leadership continues to broadcast its vision of those on the Right as being racist, white supremacists who desire to return the country to Jim Crow days with an economy dominated by large oligopolies that pollute the environment and beggar their workers.  They present no evidence beyond repeated allegations to support their case.

[Addendum]  In discussions and debates with my leftwing counterparts in private communications and on this public forum, I often have my supportive citations of verifiable facts rejected on the basis of their having been presented by sources considered hopelessly biased, unreliable, and therefore rejected on their face.  Their opposition is seldom a substantive refutation of the message, it’s always based on the received credentials of the messenger.  The obvious reason for this gambit is that they have no substantive refutation of what has been cited, and therefore must needs be reduced to denigrating the source with claims that all of its output are widely known and acknowledged falsehoods – neither being the case.

A second gambit of the leftists is to require the rejected citation to be additionally buttressed by sources they consider unbiased and reliable.  It never occurs to them to simply go to their own sources and delineate the specific error(s) that were contained in the originally presented citation.  That may also be a too generous conclusion.  The reason they exercise either of these gambits is that they know the original citation to have presented the truth, and all that now remains for them is to deny, delay, and/or deflect the subsequent course of the exchange.  For the Left, countering citations with an equivalent depth of evidence seems to be terra incognita.

‘Parents wary of critical race theory’

[This is the second in a three-part series of articles on CRT by Ms McLaughlin.  The first was posted here on 16 June 2021.  This column appeared here in the 1jul21 edition of The Union.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

California residents may be familiar with euphemisms for critical race theory, such as “ethnic studies,” “educational equity” and “culturally responsive teaching,” but may not understand the philosophical premise, which is to divide all people into oppressors and oppressed.

My last column sought to describe examples of critical race theory curriculum our children may be exposed to, but parents who are speaking up all around the country tell the more authoritative story from their firsthand experience.

‘For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes …’

[I was gratified to receive this book report from a dear and very astute friend who now lives in Florida.  For years he was a prominent developer and successful businessman in Nevada County.  A Stanford engineering graduate, he too joined the California exodus as our monopolist one-party socialist revolution became too much to bear.  By permission his email is posted here with minor edits for clarity.  gjr]

Tony Medler

Just finished For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization (1993, 1999), and still believe it should be required reading for politicians and students.  A couple of observations:

It is so obvious that so many empires, countries and civilizations encountered the same issues caused by the conflicts between monetary “needs” and resources. Almost all gave way to excesses that resulted in loss of vigor or rebellion. Our country is well down the road, losing competitiveness and leading to, I believe, eventual rebellion.

Charles Adams writes a wonderful history of taxation and the mechanisms that cause it promote energy within a system or create adversity toward business and prosperity. He is somewhat weak on how to correct or preclude the problems. History indicates that it is extremely difficult to fix the problem. Obvious solutions usually involve separation of spending control from taxing power.

I believe that there is a root cause that precludes any of these attempts at control. Our founders were aware of the problem and envisioned a legislature that was composed of citizens who would serve, not be subject to rules except those applicable to everyone, serve for limited periods, and then return to the general citizenry. We have evolved from that concept to having professional politicians who forget that it isn’t “we and they” but rather us. You can’t have equitable and fair taxation and spending unless the electoral system delivers properly motivated persons, and I think most would agree that our (accurate) view currently of politicians places them either slightly above or below lawyers as entities that are somehow needed but not admired.

How different could it be if we had a system where our legislators had in mind only the national good and not special interests, and worked only to provide those services most narrowly defined in the Constitution? A less inclusive set of services would also reduce the size of the self-serving bureaucracies. Place limitations on terms and preclude multiple services such as going from mayor to senator to president.

Somehow, we must get motivated, educated people to serve. Probably wouldn’t hurt to try to attract more business people into service. Most current politicians have little or no business experience and can’t properly relate to business issues. This hurts all of us.

Not optimistic that anything will change as we are well down what has previously proven to be a one-way road.  Thanks for suggesting the read.

America the Unnatural

George Rebane

[This essay kicks off Independence Day week at Casa Rebane.  Jo Ann and I installed our annual display of bunting and a large Old Glory on our porch railing, which always brings good words from our neighbors.  Perhaps you too would consider giving more than a nod to a tradition that has bound us over the centuries.

18sep21 update - an edited version of this essay was published in the 18sep21 print edition of The Union, and the submitted version was also posted in the newspaper's online edition (here).]

America is an exceptional country and an historical social experiment in more ways than I can count.  It is also an ongoing test of how humans can live and profit by behaving unnaturally toward each other.  That is by becoming sanguine in the practice of unnatural behaviors which go against the millions of years of evolution through which our progenitors and species survived.

Anthropologists and paleo-sociologists have long known and written about how primitive societies formed, fought, and sometimes flourished.  The pervasive watchword among all critters, including hominids, has been ‘Stick to your own kind’ (as even Maria was advised in ‘West Side Story’).  The fundamental behavior that supported survival and progeny was to be with and trust only those whose behavior you could reliably predict.  To this day, we distance ourselves (including denying their access to us) from people in our midst whose behavior we cannot predict.  This is the very natural ‘hardwired instinct’ with which all critters of some intelligence that includes us are born.  Even infants begin expressing it at a very early age.

The Evil Party Marches On (updated 4jun21)

George Rebane

You can fool some people most of the time; you can fool most people some of the time; and today you can also fool most of the people most of the time.

As ensconced in communist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the new Democratic Party has thoroughly embraced its dictum ‘Accuse others of what you are guilty.’  Nowhere has this been more profoundly demonstrated than over the last decade as the Democrats have started their short march to socialism.  The notion of socialism was anathema in post-war American politics as demonstrated by almost daily reports of ruinous suppression of all human rights and freedoms that our Cold War enemies were imposing on their citizens.  Now, going on three generations of the Left’s dominance in public classrooms, the nature of socialism has been obfuscated in the American mind so that at least half of our citizens view it as another viable form of governance that we should perhaps try.

All this has been built on a complex façade of lies designed to install a political monopoly based on constantly customized collective ideologies du jour from the Democrat Party that cascade through the various channels of the now propagandized lamestream media.  A partial list of these very large, significant, and nationally consequential lies includes –

1. Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election;
2. Democrats are not taking America into socialism cum Marxism;
3. C19 from a Wuhan virology lab has been a baseless rightwing conspiracy;
4. HCQ and IVT are not useful for fighting C19;
5. Today China is not America’s mortal enemy;
6. Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon;
7. Our Mexican border is closed and secure;
8. There is no human crisis at our southern border;
9. Raising taxes and regulations does not impact economic behavior;
10. The 6jan21 Capitol invasion was a planned insurrection to topple government;
11. BLM is a protest movement and not a Marxist political organization;
12. America continues plagued by systemic racism; no progress made since 1964;
13. America’s Left and its corporatist allies have not rolled back 1A rights and practiced cancel culture;
14. The systematic destruction of black families and perpetuation of urban ghettos is the Republicans’ fault;
15. Rolling back 2A rights from law abiding citizens will eliminate ‘gun violence’ such as ghetto murders and mass shootings;
16. Police have been purposefully murdering blacks;
17. America’s colleges don’t have racist admissions policies and welcome free speech;
18. The biggest existential threat to America is climate change;
19. There is a scientific consensus that preventable manmade global warming is occurring;
20. The great American experiment was founded on the racist principle, promotion, and practice of slavery; today Critical Race Theory correctly teaches that America is still a racist country, and its teaching is not anti-American propaganda.

And finally, perhaps the biggest, most damaging, and enduring lie is that the solution to the all of humanity’s problems requires our embrace of collectivist governance at its most comprehensive scale possible.  There, the admitted goal is achieving a Marxist-Leninist society populated by the “communist Man”, at which time government will naturally dissolve as the then altruistic humanity marches joyously into a future of eternal peace and plenty.  (A similar list is always invited from our left-leaning readers.)

Memorial Day – 31 May 2021

George Rebane

Most but not all died to save America from a calamitous tyranny; many have also died for America to remain as the world’s white hat hegemon.  On this day we gratefully remember and honor them all.

‘The Soul of Black Conservatism’

George Rebane

Scholar and commentator Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute has written a biography of economist Thomas Sowell, one of the country’s most celebrated conservative academics and intellectuals.  Progressives accuse Sowell’s perspectives on race in America as “going against the grain of fellow African-Americans.”  That on its face is wrong, as Riley points out in Sowell’s own words during a Charlie Rose interview - “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.” (more here)

A main thesis of Sowellian thought on race is that successful racial/ethnic groups in America have assumed their places in our pluralistic society by relying on their own resources and means, and not waiting for the dominant culture to provide them special dispensations to smooth the ‘E pluribus unum’ road to assimilated equality.  “If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes of self-reliance”.

Sowell has also maintained that “government has a role to play in social mobility, albeit a limited one, and incentives matter”, but he remains worried about “handouts that ask little or nothing of the recipient, and thus risk creating dependency”.  Thanks to the Democrats’ imbued plantation mentality on the nation’s blacks, that kind of dependency has now been created and etched in stone as the foundational principle of modern black politics – white supremacists have taken the blacks’ share of the common weal, and through the practice of ‘systemic racism’ deny blacks the ability to garner their fair share of the nation’s riches.  Hence, America must be fundamentally transformed so that a more comprehensive and encompassing government can then use its gun to force an equitable redistribution.  The Left teaches that is the only way to achieve social justice in the land.

As a concluding thought, Rebane Doctrine holds that to the extent that systemic racism can be shown to exist in America, it is practiced and maintained by the country’s elitist Left (both black and white) with the unwitting support of their purposely under-educated legions of urban African-Americans.  Our main street whites have long been indifferent to the racial make-up of their neighbors, team mates, fellow workers, and even spouses.  Nowhere has this been more demonstrated than in our post-war military.  A litmus test for the end of such racism will be a time when we no longer require organizations, institutions, and agencies to have race-specific names, race-based memberships, and that provide race-based dispensations.

Scattershots – 24may21 (updated 31may21)

If "being shot is a risk police officers take with the job", then isn't being shot a risk criminals take when breaking the law?

George Rebane

Tomorrow our Left will celebrate the life of George Floyd on the anniversary of his death last year in the custody of the Minneapolis police.  The ‘celebration’ itself is a specious undertaking of political propaganda at its most blunt delivery while cloaked in the highest level of obfuscation for the nation’s hoi polloi.  Mr Floyd was a career petty criminal and drug addict, in and out of jails, who devoted his life to victimizing fellow blacks.  His unfortunate death at the hands of white police officers set in motion a perfect storm that has been used by Democrats, cum socialists and communists, to convince the country’s lightly read that America remains a deeply racist country with persecuted minorities, especially our African-Americans, whose lot has not improved since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Huckster Al Sharpton will feature prominently in the coming kabuki, as will President Biden’s White House meeting with the Floyd family to assure all the country’s blacks it is America’s racist Right that has deprived them of their ‘fair share’, and has kept them suffering on the plantation all these decades.

Victor Davis Hanson (here) and Bret Weinstein (here) whose essays have both hit it “outta da park” according to a longtime commenter, who again joins with RR’s cohort of other astute commenters who regularly bring to our readers’ attention significant commentaries that reveal and characterize these historic times, during which our country is rent and the world order is changing.  These pages have featured both writers over the years, and again their recent contributions do not disappoint.

All the news youse can use

George Rebane

Ever try to find a coherent set of TV program ratings on the web?  I just tried to do it again, after avoiding the frustration for a number of years.  My sweetie-pie and I were having one of our breakfast conversations when the topic turned to a news article that cited how informed Americans were about our country’s basic facts/numbers.  The 18may21article from Rasmussen Reports (cited by a reader), headlined ‘Conservative Viewers Are Better Informed About Important Topics’, got us thinking about the information sources regularly accessed by our mostly uninformed neighbors across the land.

So, we wondered how many people got their daily news from where.  And that again turned out to be a no easy task to google.  After some considerable surfing of various web sites I was able to assemble the following somewhat coherent table drawn mostly (entirely?) from Nielsen ratings.  I look at these numbers as being a snapshot of a noisy time series of viewers of the six major cable and mainstream television news outlets.

Looking at the above numbers, let’s assume that another 50% of our news consuming countrymen (which definitely includes women and others of all kinds of sexual orientations and configurations) get their news from other TV, print, and online outlets, in more or less the same liberal v conservative proportions.  That brings our total of, shall we say, ‘informed cohort’ to about 40 million.  Say, that this cohort is drawn from those aged 20-84 potential news consumers (and voters?) who currently total about 230M out of a population of 331M.  This number ties nicely to the total number of potential voters in the country, of whom only 55-60% or 127-138M actually, on average, turn out to vote.  (2020 was an extraordinary year in which almost 67% of eligible voters voted.)

From the above table we note that between 1 of 7 and 1 of 8 voters get their information from what can be labeled as conservative or rightwing sources.  The remainder get theirs from robustly liberal or leftwing sources (in these pages charitably labeled the lamestream media).  This provides conservatives a core of about 31M informed voters.  Through daily contacts with neighbors, it is these right-leaning Americans who convince the remainder to bring in the remaining Republican votes during elections.

Here you can see what kind of an uphill battle this disorganized core of conservatives have in order to take their message to the news-oblivious masses so that election outcomes are as tight as we have witnessed.  This ideological war is made even more one-sided when you consider the progressive propaganda that is constantly purveyed through academe, institutions, entertainment, and now also corporatist sectors.  Into today’s maelstrom of Marxist thought and values, the Republican party barely responds as it is outgunned in the public square by Democrats who effectively control the majority of the non-news voting community.

In a country of wimps and wooses

George Rebane

We’ve been on travel over the last couple of weeks, doing a ‘southeast’ tour that started in Washington DC and worked its way down the coast to Miami, and then up the gulf coast visiting friends along the way.  We are currently in New Orleans and will finish in Houston after seeing our niece and her family in San Antonio (another set of California expatriates).  There is a lot to report on what we’ve seen in all the states we’ve been in, especially as it comes to how the country continues its pandemic response.  The bottom line of all that we’ve witnessed is that 1) there is no consistency in what people are doing and 2) the state-to-state public policies.  How/when/where people wear masks and socially distance varies all over the place.  No one seems to be sure of anything, except that they must comply to whatever insane diktats of their governor or mayor they believe to be in effect.  I am sad to report that in the large we Americans are a bunch of subservient wimps and wooses demonstrating over-abundant cautious behaviors - timid, compliant, and confused - that were more appropriate to serfs than a population of informed and independent minded citizens of a free country.  That kind of responses the Left appears to have successfully beaten out of us – ‘I don’t know why I’m doing it other than following orders.’  

Neil Patel of the Daily Caller is one of several national journalists who observes the same degradation of our citizens, and in his ‘Masks In Cars — What’s Behind America’s COVID-19 Insanity?’ writes –

If you wanted to teach a class on how to cause confusion and distrust, you would follow the U.S. government’s coronavirus playbook. A lot has been written about the historically low levels of trust Americans have in their leaders and institutions. There’s been less analysis on what happens when a government has no faith in its own citizens. We are seeing the results today. From the start of the pandemic, health authorities have chosen gamesmanship over honesty. This has resulted in muddled and inconsistent messaging from national leaders. The end result is a broken country of citizens at one another’s throats. Mask fights, deboarding flights and, of course, the crazy people driving around alone in their cars with masks on all stem, at least in part, from a government that refused to treat Americans like adults who could handle the truth.

Critical Race Theory and the March of Marxism

[CRT is the most putrid piece of anti-American pedagogy to infect our institutions in at least the last 100 years.  Thanks to the Democratic Party, it is now rampant as it metastasizes the minds of our lightly read neighbors, products of schools that for years have focused their students on America’s sins.  Today CRT is being rapidly incorporated into California’s public schools, government agencies, and politically compliant corporatist enterprises.  Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo recently gave a speech at Hillsdale College on ‘Critical Race Theory: What it Is and How to Fight It’ which was published in the March 2021 Imprimis.  It is the most cogent, clear, and concise description of CRT and its current spread across our land.  It is reprinted here by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  gjr]

Christopher F. Rufo

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

Quo tendimus? (updated 20apr21)

George Rebane

[My ‘Farewell Unity’ commentary was also published in the 3apr21 Union (here). Its lengthy comment stream made clear again that most liberals had trouble understanding my proposition for finding common ground.  Nevertheless, the piece has since then garnered considerable interest.  This week the newspaper printed on separate days not one, not two, but three op-ed columns by liberals delivering most revealing critiques of the future Americas desired by both sides – ‘Path to unity in America’(13apr21) by Elliot Schneiderman, ‘A point of near unity’(15apr21) by Paul Hauck, and ‘Finding Unity in America’(16apr21) by Nory Fussel.  When “retired scientist” Schneiderman took me to task, I responded with the piece below, prematurely, it turned out, since I was not aware of the subsequent op-eds by Hauck and Fussel.  I address the latter two in the addendum to this post.  Perhaps all this interest provides hope that the conversation toward unity, which I outline below, will start here or elsewhere.  20apr21 update - an edited form of this commentary was published here in the 20apr21 Union.  More here.]

I was halfway heartened to read ‘left-leaning neighbor’ Elliot Schneiderman’s 12apr21 ‘Path to unity in America’ response to my 3ap21 ‘Farewell Unity’ column.  It appears both of us support a future America that is persistently hailed by our Right, and seldom if ever described by our Left.  In fact, Elliot takes exception to the neo-Marxist future that I describe, and the one to which the current administration and the Democrat leadership publicly subscribe.  These disparate visions of America are well documented by the commentariats of both sides.  Elliot writes -

George quite wrongly states that “our neighbors on the left work feverishly for” this Marxist global government world view. I’m on our country’s left and will have none of it, I don’t personally know a single American that would ascribe (sic) to it, and I am convinced that the vast majority of our country’s left do not ascribe (sic) to it.

This remarkable view from the Left is easily explained by the recorded half-century decline of our progressive schools that have assiduously omitted any mention of such historic realities.  And it is easily confirmed through conversations with a sampling of your left-leaning neighbors, especially the ones cited by Elliot.

He is Risen!

George Rebane

Hearing that strong assertion, the Christian answers joyfully, ‘He is risen indeed!’

For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all Creation.

This has now become RR's annual message celebrating Easter.

Scattershots – 2mar21 (updated 5mar21)

George Rebane

Those who judge the past in terms of the here and now are doing a great disservice through their ignorance of the then and there.

The Left’s promotion of America’s new cancel culture is in full swing.  We now have full scale censoring of politically incorrect content on our mass media – broadcast, internet, print, entertainment, … .  This incorporates the modern version of book burning.  The latest volumes to be ‘digitally burned’ and no longer available from major outlets include Justice Clarence Thomas’s ‘Created Equal’ video and , and now Dr Seuss.  Dr Seuss has been an icon of Americana and children’s literature for a couple of generations now.  Even an annual children’s reading day (2 March) was ensconced to recognize the birthday of Theodor Seuss ‘Ted’ Geisel (1904-1991).  But today our commissars of correct culture have deemed many of his works to racist and contain “crude and offensive stereotypes in several drawings of blacks and Asian-Americans.”  But those well-read in the country’s leftward lurch will recognize that such book burnings are nothing more than pages out of Stalin’s and Hitler’s playbooks to erase the old culture in order to make room for instilling their brave new world.  It was ever thus. (more here)

Common culture counts.  That has been a fundamental tenet of RR, and is now being adopted by many other national voices to counter the Left’s all-out assault on America’s traditional culture.  Six former US education secretaries co-authored ‘America Needs History and Civics Education to Promote Unity’ (2mar21 WSJ).  In there they cogently argue for a national education plan “to help teachers instill an understanding that is complete and honest but not cynical.”  The 6jan21 frustration that was expressed by Americans on the Mall and in the Capitol is a harbinger that the country’s political leaders, those who truly want to promote unity, should take careful note of and respond with appropriate legislation and regulatory relief for our public schools.  It’s a tall order the chances of success for which are not high given the entrenched collectivists in politics and the teachers unions.  Nevertheless, the authors cite the ‘Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy’, the culmination of a 19-month project by 300+ “scholars, educators, practitioners, and students from diverse backgrounds.” (more here) In sum, a minimally common culture for a constitutional democracy “requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively, as well as the knowledge and skills to act for the common good.”  The Roadmap provides the guidance for the several states to develop curricula that can provide such an understanding.

Joe Biden puts all his credibility chips on a Big Lie, and takes a page of bombast from Trump’s playbook.  He and Team Biden, echoed in the lamestream, now trumpet the claim that he is the nation’s savior from Covid-19.  Specifically, “he is staking his legacy on the lie that the pandemic was out of control until the day of his inauguration.”  And a more comprehensive segue to the old days of ‘journalism’ was made possible by the former president’s CPAC speech.  The hiatus is over, we can now stop having to explain (or avoid) Biden, and shift back to coverage of Trump topics that fit like an old shoe.  Gerard Baker says it best (here) –

The return to the limelight of a certain former president has triggered an unfortunate but probably inevitable relapse for the Trump addicts of our news-gathering class.  They’d gone cold turkey for a whole month and there were tentative, encouraging signs that the cure might be taking. Deprived of their favorite drug, some were gingerly discovering other, more wholesome pursuits: tackling the mountain of evidence that Andrew Cuomo might be a mendacious, incompetent, bullying sex pest; investigating the slight but tantalizing possibility that not all of America’s social and economic woes can be attributed to white supremacy; slowly weaning themselves off the urge to ask penetrating questions of the White House about Joe Biden’s rescue dog.

What must ol’ Bumblebrain do now to get back into an adult-level news cycle?  After all, he’s still the president.  Isn’t he?

[4mar21 update]  A CPAC puzzle?  A straw poll was taken at the recent CPAC conference at which many Republican luminaries – including former President Trump – spoke.  The poll indicated that 68% wanted to see Trump run for president in 2024, and only 55% wanted to see him nominated for the office.  This conservetarian doesn’t understand how the excess of the 68% would have him become a Republican candidate in 2024 without first being nominated – especially after he made clear that he would not support or start a third party.  From my perch it looks like a collective brain fart.  Other solutions most welcome.

The Capitol Fortress.  Thousands of troops remain guarding our razor wire wrapped Capitol.  Why?  The Dems insist on fake intelligence reports of another imminent attempt at a rightwing ‘insurrection’ (when there never was one in the first place).  The disorganized and frustrated mob that charged the Capitol on 6 January had no idea what they were doing or were supposed to do.  They got in only because the on-duty Capitol police were incompetent in every aspect of operational planning and execution, or ordered to allow a politically useful penetration of the building.  And the mob had nothing to do with the deaths that day, that was another fabrication by the Dems and their lamestream media.  So, the whole thing today was a set-up for the Dems kabuki security theater to defend against a supposed repeat today of 6jan21.  This attack was supposed to occur according to some unknown advisory from an unknown agency in our intelligence community – perhaps the FBI.  In spite of today’s nothing burger, the military will continue to occupy DD for another two months – to defend against some unknown threat - at which time another fake intelligence advisory will launch the next phase of political histrionics to keep the public apprised of their assigned place under the heel of the state.

[5mar21 update]  ‘A Compromise on Creationism’ – in this little 5mar21 WSJ essay (here) physician/scientist Dr Joshua Swamidass calls for reaccreditation of colleges that teach creationism as long as they also permit discussion of and courses in evolution, along with some other provisions about the transfer of creationism course credits.  (He misses the reciprocal call for accredited secular colleges to also welcome speakers who counter theistically progressive narratives.) What again astounded me was the citing of a 2019 Gallup poll that “showed that 40% of American adults ‘ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.’” (more here)  Interesting to note is that 40% with college degrees believe that the evolution of Man was guided by God, which indicates a belief in Intelligent Design (here, here, and here) that for obvious reasons is purposely confused with and perfidiously equated to Creationism by our secular humanists.  My own concern is that these ‘strictly creationists’ reject most of what science teaches about how we and universe function, knowledge that is also the basis for the politics of public policies.  How do these religionists vote?

$15/hr Dumbth on the March

You always get less of what you tax more.  Eternal Truth #461

George Rebane

For some years now RR has chronicled and mourned America’s decline in intellectual resources and critical thinking skills.  This national dash to dumbth continues (nay, accelerates) as a purposeful process by progressives who have carefully husbanded public education at ALL levels for the last half century to achieve today’s new lows in pedagogy.  Various writers and academics have observed this process for some decades now – Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) are some earlier works that come to mind.

Most recently we have a comprehensive essay – ‘The Decline of Intelligence in the West’ - by educational theorist and literary critic David Solway that cites the work of many psychologists and cognitive scientists who have documented our “plummet in cognitive abilities” over the course of these years.  These assessments come from a broad range of socio-political ideologues – e.g. Gruber’s on-target assertions on “the stupidity of the American voter” that would help pass Obamacare as his next step toward socialism.

Consideration of this descent is not an idle undertaking for those who want to sustain America’s achievements and support its continuing ascent in the 21^st century as the world’s ‘shining city on a hill’.  Denying the data, as Solway points out, hastens our decline, and serves the aims of globalists yearning for a post-national America.  Science historian Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture (2000) observes that “a society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.”  This truth is embraced by autocratic elites everywhere, and our cynical central planners daily devise and implement stratagems to keep America maximally dysfunctional, knowing how that concentrates power in government.  Our Founders’ realization of this was summarized in Jefferson’s immortal ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

Today we see an example of such a stratagem about to be run by the American voter one more time – the next rise in federally mandated wage controls in the imposition of the $15/hr minimum wage.  Without going through the catalog of damages this will do to the poorest already in and those seeking to enter our workforce, I want to point out that almost no one in the country knows how and when America came to accept a minimum wage.  That is one of the many parts of our history that has been wiped from our schools’ curricula in their dispensation of dumbth.

Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recounts (here) the “racially discriminatory roots” of America’s minimum wage laws born in the 1930s, and of today’s Pelosi-led progressive prevarications designed to bamboozle the ignorant and free into supporting the Dems’ $15 vote buying scheme.  For openers, the minimum wage does NOT provide the breadth of economic benefit to the claimed target populations of women and the poor.  But it will kill more jobs (1.4M according to the CBO) and remove another tranche of entry-level rungs of the economic ladder from those who need it the most.

But the most politically damaging part of the governments’ minimum wages is the history of their introduction and implementation.  As Riley recounts, minimum wages were introduced to the country’s North in the attempt to stem the migration of blacks from the economically bleak agricultural South.  The North’s black-excluding unions lobbied Congress where compliant “lawmakers complained openly about the ‘superabundance’ and ‘large aggregation of Negro labor’, and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.”  They knew that “low-income minorities stand to lose the most from lifting the wage floor because they are overrepresented among less-skilled and less-experienced workers.”  And Team Pelosi, with Bumblebrain in the wheelhouse now, have not forgotten the benefits of that policy tool.

Perhaps most damning of today’s progressive narrative would be to recall JFK’s attempt in the Senate to protect New England industry by promoting minimum wages that would price blacks out of the low end of the labor markets.  There in 1957 the young senator and soon our future president lectured a NAACP official, stating, “Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete, … and when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”

We conclude with an apropos picture of America’s dumbth on the march.  This is the Democrats’ siren song to their incomprehensively loyal African-American constituencies with carefully cultured deficits in history and economics.

Dark Days Diary – 28jan21 (updated 30jan21)

George Rebane

Quietech in Grass Valley is a very capable local computer service store owned and run by Melissa Hannebrink.  The Rebanes have been satisfied customers since Melissa’s retired father established the business.  This morning Melissa sent her customers an email that begins with, “I am writing you today with a very heavy heart. As I have shared with some of you, here at Quietech we have endured daily abuse over the past 10 months. By enforcing basic COVID guidelines, there are some who feel their rights are being infringed upon. In addition, we have some who walk through our doors and are so disappointed to find that they aren’t next in line, or that they can’t have their device fixed on-the-spot, that they have full-blown tantrums. These unfulfillable expectations, in addition to the pressures of COVID, seem to be creating the perfect storm for abuse, shockingly even from some of our longest-standing clients. This morning, we had an incident that went too far. We decided to temporarily close to regroup, although the last thing we want is to close our doors and stop helping those in our community who need us.”  As the country sinks into its woke-powered autocracy, we will be reminded more frequently than ever that a gossamer thin veil separates civilization from barbarians at the gate.

Welcome to the After-Trump Era.  Victor Davis Hanson explains the matter to us in his latest commentary.  There he points out, “During the Trump Age, the president was supposedly responsible for every death from COVID-19. Now, the media report that career scientists and health administrators in the federal government, especially at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were largely to blame for past slow testing, and were tardy and lax in apprising the nation of the infectious threat. … In the new age, expect the media and government to suddenly resent any pushback against a sitting president. Questions about the Biden family’s past multimillion-dollar influence-peddling overseas or Biden’s cognitive ability can no longer be asked. … None will compare the recurring violence of Antifa or Black Lives Matter to that of Islamic terrorists. None will compare Biden, who dismissed Antifa as a mere “idea,” to Mussolini or the Nazis. Any retired officer who smears the president, we will be reminded, would violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. … The media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, top retired military brass, corporate America, universities, and professional sports are all recalibrating the truth for our Year One. … In about a month, they will have it down. And soon, we won’t even be able to tell the old reality from the new.”

[29jan21 update] Danny Pearl’s killer is set free by Pakistani courts (more here and here).  Pearl, WSJ’s South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002.  Danny’s parents, who have been fighting the Pakistani justice system for almost twenty years, stated “Today’s decision is a complete travesty of justice” that “puts in danger journalists everywhere, we urge the U.S. government to take all necessary actions under the law to correct this injustice.”  RR has covered this Islamist travesty in previous posts here and here.

[30jan21 update]  Ms Hannebrink has surprisingly taken exception to my above Quietech entry.  Her remarks with my reply may be found @1058am in the comment stream.  I find it remarkable that she seems to think that I ascribed a political leaning to her remarks, especially when I explicitly declined to do so.