Rebane's Ruminations

‘I want Trump to die’ addended

George Rebane

[Apologies for the late posting of this promised follow-on commentary.]

Thoughtful comments from readers expanded the scope of my 4oct20 ‘I want Trump to die’ commentary to encompass social behaviors that may or not be acceptable and/or legal under our current form of governance.  And this includes a wide variety of people’s aspirations for regicide and its modern versions that include the leaders of more representative and therefore more liberal governments.  More specifically, comments from progressive readers such as Steven Frisch who strongly asserts, “I have stated here on many occasions that I do not believe that political violence is justified in American society. I have also stated on many occasions that I believe that some of the rhetoric used on this page, and the tacit acceptance of the threat of, or insinuation of, political violence is philosophically un-American and un-patriotic.”

As a conservetarian, I take great issue with such a belief while acknowledging that it is held by most, but not all, liberals and progressives in America.  The new neo-Marxist wing of the Democratic Party has no such inhibitions against political violence.  In fact, in the written manifestos on their websites, neo-Marxist organizations such as BLM, proudly declare their support of, and even the necessity for such violence to topple corrupt and unjust political orders.  They back this up with their actions in the streets and voluminous statements to the press justifying politically motivated riots.

In these pages over the years I have often argued that in a liberal and free country, the citizens’ right and ability to violently oppose their government should always be recognized, celebrated, maintained, and not be insidiously abridged by government.  Although and without contradiction, if such a purposely violent cohort does arise, the non-violent citizens opposing that cohort have every right to petition and support their government in opposing such violence with all the force provided it by established laws.  In short, a free people are free only to the extent that they retain their ability to successfully resist their government in order to be able to fundamentally transform it through reform or revolution.

We understand these truths from the historical fact that America was born through political violence, and that the subsequent exercise of political violence has served to preserve the Union many times since.  To now declare that political violence has suddenly become “un-American and un-patriotic” as a basic right of a free people, provided for in our Constitution, is both preposterous and ignorant of the fundamental principles and means of our country’s founding and maintenance.

Here I once more expand on the rationale for these beliefs in ‘Versions of Fundamental Transformations’ which you can download here -  Download VersFundTransforms.  Long time readers are aware of the bases for these beliefs from the collected tenets of my credo and related commentaries over the years – see also the Bastiat Triangle, a Conservetarian Credo, and the Rebane Doctrine category of this blog.

‘I want Trump to die’

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Da Shadow do!

George Rebane

That wish by the president’s opponents and enemies has been reported numerous times since he tested positive for Covid-19 and was admitted to Walter Reed.  Many commentators, led by Tucker Carlson of FN, immediately reacted to such remarks with condemnation, citing moral strictures and other value statements, supposedly both communal and personal.  The bottom line was that all such wishes were evil in and of themselves, and most likely those who expressed them were also evil persons.

However, there is another perspective to be had on such statements from the Left.  A correspondent and RR reader questioned the automatic attribution of ‘evil’ to both the wish itself, and more strongly to the wishers.  The argument offered is based on how a nation’s military is motivated and trained to kill when its members carry out the legitimate orders of its government.  In the combat arms branch of every military service, the fighter is motivated to kill by being told that the enemy wishes to destroy his country and everything that is dear to him should that enemy prevail.  Therefore, to prevent this, the fighter is taught to fight and kill the designated enemy.  And during this process there is no moral deficit that is attached to such killings.  On the contrary, this kind of killing is celebrated, and the bravest and most successful killers are recognized, congratulated, often decorated, and always appreciated for carrying out a task of great and unquestioned benefit to the fighter’s society – nation, way of life, culture, … - in short, the fighter is a defender of all that is good, and a patriot of high order.

Upon deeper examination, the rationale for such justified killings and sentiments that promote your enemy’s death is that the enemy’s survival endangers the survival of things that you value (starting with your own life), hold dear, and the succor of the environment in which you and yours want to live.  When your hopes or actions are motivated by such beliefs, then such hopes and actions are not attributed to be evil.

Now stepping back to a peacetime political environment; if a group of people sharing an ideology and worldview which holds that the ascendancy/survival of a politician will result in a disaster for their country and its citizens, a disaster that will give rise to uncounted subsequent deaths of innocents through tyrannical and/or negligent public policies, then is it evil to hope for the early and imminent demise of the so-identified dastardly political leader?  From that group’s perspective such a hope is socially just and a responsible sentiment.  For all of them see a benefit to the nation’s common good were that politician to die.

A counter argument might be that only governments can be morally justified in wanting, preparing for, and carrying out the death(s) of its enemies (individuals, armies, cities).  But such sentiments, let alone acts, are denied, nay proscribed, to smaller groups or to individuals no matter their strong beliefs about dire consequences.  Killings by appropriately sized collectives are then seen to rise unblemished above the moral boundaries that contain and restrict lesser cohorts and individuals.

So what are we to make of those who wish President Trump dead?

Ruminations – 20sep20 (updated 24sep20)

George Rebane

‘Why the Abraham Accords Happened’ is another reason so many Americans focus on President Trump’s walk and not his talk, and another reason they (I included) will vote for his second term.  I cannot believe the incompetence, let alone the socialist cynicism, that will descend on the White House and country if the Harris/Biden administration is installed.

[21sep20 update]  Here are some (non-exhaustive) bullet points that summarize why I favor the re-election of President Trump –

1. Experienced and accomplished businessman who understands the role and function of the private sector v the government in a nation’s economy.
2. Demonstrated accomplishments in revamping America’s foreign policy in international relations and trade.
3. Demonstrated accomplishments in growing America’s economy, managing the C19 pandemic, and has plans for more of the same.
4. Understands the role of a strong military in maintaining America’s hegemony.
5. Understands the role of secure borders in maintaining America’s sovereignty.
6. First president in generations to help blacks start shedding their plantation mentality.
7. Understands the correct way to maintain energy independence and integrate green energy into our economy.
8. Speaks his mind directly to the public without embellishments, but with some unfortunate braggadocio which detracts from his more substantive message and methods.
9. Understands and opposes the evils of collectivist governance and the history of collectivist governments.
10. Is a demonstrated constitutionalist, understands and opposes the Left’s efforts to fundamentally transform America into a socialist cum communist state.

Here are some (non-exhaustive) bullet points that summarize why I oppose the election of former VP Biden –

1. A dismally unaccomplished political hack with almost half-century of undistinguished service in Congress – no one has served longer and done less.
2. A record of uniformly wrong calls on foreign policy issues and decisions.
3. Understands nothing demonstrable about the operation of a nation’s economy – an economic imbecile as witnessed by his endorsement of the 2020 Democratic platform.
4. Opposes the maintenance of a strong military in favor of expanding vote-buying social programs.
5. Opposes the maintenance of secure borders and does not understand their function in preserving a nation’s culture, cohesion, and sovereignty.
6. Long history of supporting programs which destroyed black families and shrank their middle class. Intends to maintain and amplify our minorities’ sense of victimhood and dependence on transfer payments – a naturally divisive politician.
7. Has no discernible understanding of science or how it communicates and advances, which includes his support of devastating programs to prematurely mandate the nation’s abandoning fossil fuels and conversion to renewable energy sources.
8. Has a long history of two-faced speech and lying to comply with the political winds du jour from the Left. Is now sufficiently senile (possible dementia?) and in poor health as to make a farce of executing the office of the president – clearly would not complete first term if elected.
9. Strongly supports collectivism in all its forms as confirmed by his embrace of the 2020 Democrat platform (especially the provisions of the Green New Deal).  Strongly supports widening the voting franchise to include incarcerated criminals, non-citizens, and malleably ignorant teenagers.
10. Is a demonstrated constitutional revisionist who believes the Constitution is a ‘living document’ that is badly outdated and in need of major overhaul. Wholeheartedly supports the nation’s fundamental transformation into a socialist state.

[22sep20 update]  Recently read a piece by a retired teacher who lamented the absence of critical thought by our young because of the paucity of their knowledge base, which he charmingly relabeled as “stuff”.  He recounted that as a student he went to school to learn stuff, because in those days teachers taught stuff that was useful and needed for when you grew up.  And when he was a teacher, he taught his students all kinds of stuff that they would need.  But today in our schools teachers no longer know much stuff, and, for mainly political reasons, they most certainly teach very little useful stuff to our kids.  (I like ‘stuff’, and will be using it a lot when talking about knowledge bases and repositiories.)

UV light as a disinfectant.  Given the debate about how Covid spreads through exhaled aerosols, I keep wondering why stores, restaurants, and other closed volume venues don’t install UV lights to reduce the concentration of all kinds of nano- and micro-level critters that can do us harm.

An example of radical leftwing propaganda can always be found on the proto-communist truthout.com.  ‘Trump Fuels March Towards Fascism With “Anarchist Jurisdictions” Edict’ is an example of the typical fare its readers consume on a daily basis.  It’s always worth a read now and then to update yourself on their ideological temperature.  Our leftwing commenters’ contributions read as if they all regularly digest such a ration of rage.

‘The Military's Secret to Fighting COVID-19’  Here’s something to frost your external plumbing.  Check out the stats from the military on how their C19 response policy is working  out.  Out of 1.3M active duty personnel, they have had about 38,500 cases, and (seatbelts please) only ONE death.  You have to digest this with the fact that “the vast majority of those men and women serving in our armed forces are between the ages of 17 and 40”, while, of course, the vast majority of C19 deaths have occurred in the comorbid elderly.  Now what does this little piece, so well covered up by our lamestream, tell us about continuing our current patchwork of restrictive civilian response policies?  (H/T to reader)

[24sep20 update] Florida passes anti-riot and anti-mob law.  Gov Desantis gives an excellent summary of the law in this video.  H/T to the 22sep20 Sandbox commenter who posted this link and asked why no Dem governor is promoting such legislation to bring safe communities back to their state.

Neo-Marxist BLM has blanketed the nation with more lies about the Breonna Taylor’s death at the hands of the Louisville police who did NOT execute a ‘no-knock warrant’, loudly announced their presence, and opened fire after Breonna’s drug-suspect boyfriend shot one of the police.  Sadly, the grand jury returned an indictment against one of the officers for nothing more than poor marksmanship during a tense and chaotic exchange of fire.  Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron explained the facts of the encounter to the nation (here), but that made no never mind to the lied to and organized BLM mobs rioting in various cities across our land – evil afoot.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – RIP

George Rebane

Justice Ginsburg was a great lady and a great jurist.  Her record speaks for itself.  The paeans to her accomplished career have already started, and deservedly so.  As most readers know, I did not share her social and political orientation.  Nevertheless, I can say that she was from the age when Democrats and Republicans still believed whoever the American electorate voted into office, that they were then the legitimate holders of that office and deserved to serve without the other party launching a campaign of subterfuge to sabotage their term and malign their character.

So with 46 days until the election, now starts a whole new political battle over her successor.  The choice and timely empanelment of the new appointee to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat will be a critical requirement, since it is almost certain that SCOTUS will have a hand in determining November’s outcome at more than one level.  And for those rulings we need a full court that cannot be irresolute.

My own preference is that President Trump immediately puts forth an appropriately vetted and qualified conservative jurist, and that Majority Leader McConnell gets the Senate to hold hearings and give its imprimatur to the new justice with all prudent haste.  

Evil – a timely reflection

Do not scorn an evil though small, for it never comes singly, but in battalions, as does joy; good fortune and bad concentrate where they are already thick.  Gracian #254

George Rebane

History records that when Christian knights subdued Jerusalem during the Crusades, they slaughtered most, if not all, of the then resident Muslim population, including women and children.  And we are all witness to the killings of thousands of innocents in the 9/11 attacks by devout Islamist fanatics.  Neither the perpetrators, planners, nor their supporting populations considered these acts as anything other than carrying out the will of God; most certainly neither side considered the massacres to be evil acts.

Yet in the eyes of the targeted populations, these and many more such acts were the very embodiment of unspeakable evil.  And the belief systems that spawned them to be wellsprings of irredeemable evil, that were nevertheless confirmed in their respective canons and credible visions wherein God directed and gave imprimatur to the mass killings.

Countless other such historical narratives can be presented to abet the conclusion that evil is almost entirely in the eyes of the targeted recipients and sympathetic observers.  In a broader sense, we may conclude that evil is really culture dependent and/or culture specific.

Today we see more examples of such relativistic expressions and interpretations of evil.  They continue to be a global phenomenon and an historical constant.  Consulting dictionaries gives us lame meanings that should not inflame any sensibilities, but nevertheless cannot help but corroborate the above interpretation.

From Dictionary.com - Evil (adjective) 1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.  2. harmful; injurious: evil laws.

From the Random House Dictionary of the English Language – Evil (adj) 1. Morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked.  Evil deeds, and evil life.  2. Harmful; injurious.  Evil laws. … 4. Due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character.  An evil reputation.

From the Oxford English Dictionary – Evil (adj)  A. Antithesis of good in all its principal senses.  1. Morally depraved, bad, wicked, vicious.  2. Doing or tending to do harm, hurtful, mischievous, prejudicial.

All the definitions appeal to the violation of morals which are overwhelmingly determined by culture (e.g. cultural mores), and therefore relativistic, in the eye of the beholder, etc.

When we bring this understanding to today’s polarized America, we run head on into the political attribution of evil by our Left.  Democrats are now on a growing public record of defining Trump and all those who support him and his policies as being evil.  That is their core, and to date, only argument as to why the president should not only be denied a second term, but also be prosecuted for crimes claimed and yet to be claimed.  In sum, he is fundamentally evil, and a good person opposes evil with no further argument or evidence needed – the constant chorus of its attribution should be more than enough to indict, convict, and punish.

In the eyes of the Left, we who oppose BLM, Antifa, et al - the new radical organs of the Left and the Democrat Party - are of necessity painted with the same broad brush.  We too are of the deplorably irredeemable cohort of evil people in the land already blemished by indelible racism, prejudice, white privilege, and social injustice to the very marrow of our bones.

This sentiment is not reciprocated per se by the Republican Party.  The country’s political representatives of the Right today are a timid bunch, that has pretty much lost its way and will to fight in the ongoing chaos.  As an institution it doesn’t know whose ass to kick or kiss, a deficit not shared by its audacious and blustering fearless leader who can still be taunted off-message in a heartbeat by any unsubstantiated charge or even a randomly tossed ad hominem.

I, on the other hand, have no such inhibitions, as RR readers with functioning memories will attest.  (e.g. search ‘The Liberal Mind’ category with ‘evil’)  Along with a number of conservative commentators, I long ago concluded that the Democratic Party, as embodied by its leadership, is an evil and anti-American institution.  And I readily acknowledge that my perspective on evil is not some assessment from Mt Olympus, but one that also succumbs to all the culturally adorned attributes outlined above.  Of course, I don’t value all cultures equally, and consider my own to be the custodian of more goodness and light by far than most others on the planet.  I am among those who do not necessarily want to impose their own culture on others, but I will willingly fight to maintain the right to practice it with other like-minded people.

So from that standpoint, the question arises about America's socialist leadership.  Are these Democrats intrinsically evil in that they recognize the harm their public policies will do to America and its people, as they continue to pursue them for their own political and personal benefit?  Or are they true believers, and therefore as tragically ignorant as their grass roots constituents – all those who oppose meritocracy, free enterprise, open markets, minimally regulated capitalism, smaller government, ownership of private property, lower taxes, and abundant liberty to pursue happiness?

In the final analysis we can ask what difference does it make in how we respond to those who seek to diminish our freedoms, fortunes, and futures.  Whether they deprive us individually while they devastate the country with intentions good or ill, either will produce the same end state.  Socialism in America will not stop with the mild-mannered versions in the EU that have been anchored by capitalist America.  When America succumbs to socialism, with no other great nation to anchor us, our nation will inevitably slide into tyranny.  The governance promised by Democrats will be indifferent to their kind of evil - either will equally will herd us into a draconian land in which all will suffer.

Scattershots – 14sep20 (updated 15sep20)

'It's not what you know that worries me, it's what you know that ain't so.'  Variously attributed.

George Rebane

Fake news from National Propaganda Radio.  This morning’s news blithely reported that preparing for his visit to Sacramento today, “President Trump claimed that California’s fires are the result of poor forest management, but numerous studies have shown that they are caused by climate change.” (emphasis mine)  The use of ‘claim’ makes the president’s provably true statement sound tendentious.  And sliding in the connective ‘but’ to denote contradiction with the truth, as “shown” by implied science, completes another hit job on Trump by the socialist media.  These are the real impactive Big Lies that continuously rain on our electorate.

[update] H/T to RR commenter who dug up the well-hidden news that the leftwing eco-nazis have been fighting prudent forest management for years (more here).  Now the lamestream’s silence on this and their continuing to trumpet Trum-caused climate change as the reason for this wildfire season is just evil, and intended evil at that.

Revisionist and radical historian Howard Zinn has a direct connection to today’s riots and street protests.  The man wrote an abysmally fake history of America that was immediately embraced by our anti-American Left and ensconced into our K-12 at various levels, in addition to becoming the ground truth of our past in what used to be our institutions of higher learning.  It was he and his academic and political cohorts who have now imbued the minds of half our younger generation in hate for their country, and left the other half confused as to what really describes our past and cultural inheritance.  What we see in the streets confirms that it’s easy to hate the hateful. (more here)

Democrats claim to be better educated than Republicans.  Were that really the case, then why do Democrats and their lamestream lackies continually stream ‘news’ and commentaries that are so anti-scientific, illogical, counter-historical, and just factually incorrect (e.g. tax rates don’t impact economic behavior) to the extent that any mildly educated person would reject them on their face?  The most plausible answer is twofold.  First, Democrats count on their critical contingent of abysmally educated ‘minorities’ (now majorities in many regions) to ignore the details of their messaging, and just consume the summarizing punchlines.  The other even more stark explanation is that their college educated constituents matriculated in majors and courses of study that long ago abandoned scholarship for collectivist ideological indoctrination – in short, these people are dumber coming out than going into such institutions (e.g. see the above Zinn entry).

Politicizing the development and release of C19 vaccines is the new evil that Democrats have spread across the land.  Their claim is that President Trump’s wise and timely policy of rapid and extensive funding of these vaccines through his ‘Warp Speed’ program will somehow yield products that are both ineffective and dangerous.  Democrat luminaries such Kamala Harris, our would-be next president in waiting, have loudly announced that they will not trust any vaccine that is released prior to election day, and recommend that others do the same.  This on its face is a blatant and dangerous Big Lie misrepresentation of the FDA regulated process by which these and other vaccines are developed and released to the public.  Its acceptance by the nation’s light thinkers will inevitably cause additional suffering and death.  President Trump has no impact on the vaccines’ development and release process.  Nor do the vaccines now in development and testing magically acquire benign and useful properties suitable for public consumption once the 3nov20 date is passed.  This is the kind of evil which TDS has spawned for the last four years, and the kind of evil that has always come so naturally to the Left in their ascent to and retention of power.  (see also above entry)

[15sep20 update]  ‘Judge Rules Pennsylvania Governor’s Shutdown Orders Unconstitutional’ reports the Epoch Times.  Hopefully this will be the removal of the key log in the nation’s logjam of shutdowns.  Given the Dems’ hard work in keeping the pre-election economy hobbled, this news will be stifled by the lamestream and protested by the progressives who will cite all kinds of dangers to public health and safety that would follow from this ruling.

Leftwing columnist George Boardman in The Union again brings a smile to our lips with his latest interpretation of the how and why of the nationwide riots (here).  His worldview is simple – Trump started the riots with his racist monologues, and the cities’ mayors didn’t/couldn’t do anything to stop them since Trump kept egging them on as the weeks passed.  Reading Boardman’s account of the summer replicates those found in the pages of outlets such as HuffPost, DailyKos, and truthout.com.  In his favor, he does acknowledge Biden's Bind on whether to condemn the rioters or not – either tactic can get his tit in a wringer with one leftwing faction or the other.

Climate change link to wildfires – there is no evidence of such.  The Democrats keep promoting their latest Big Lie to Americans, telling one and all that the west’s wildfires are due directly to 1) preventable man-made global warming, 2) could have been prevented had we started going green four years ago (Obama got a pass), and 3) will be greatly reduced if California goes through with its draconian climate change policies.  The Democratic Party is still our anti-science party, their protestations notwithstanding.  As far back as their assessment of the primitive nature of blacks and promotion of eugenics, through their active destruction of STEM education, to now ignoring the conclusions of NOAA and the IPCC (more here), the Democrats have been our political party of the intellectually stunted and ideologically blindered.  Both agencies have unequivocally stated that “It is premature to conclude that human activities – and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming – have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.” (NOAA), and cite “the lack of evidence to support claims of increasing frequency or intensity of hurricanes, floods, drought or tornadoes on climate timescales is also supported by the most recent assessments of the IPCC and the broader peer reviewed literature on which the IPCC is based.” (IPCC conclusion reported to Congress).  Yet Gov Newsom, along with other national Dems, continues the drumbeat amplified by their lamestream lackies.  And the nation’s snuffies have no choice but to genuflect and cry, ‘Aahh beliieeeeve!’

‘Critical Ethnic Studies’, say whaat??!!

George Rebane

California’s public education system has been dysfunctional for years, and now in the age of riots and the growing socialist revolution, it is ready to take its final turns around the drain.  You will not read any of this in the lamestream, because the new curriculum to be adopted by Sacramento next spring will put a nice bow on finally acknowledging that unionized state-run public schools will become literally nothing more than finishing schools in Marxist propaganda.  However, our Left considers that the country’s remnants of traditional American thought still number enough to require the adoption of this new brainwashing initiative not be publicized.

Former US Asst SecEd and Independent Institute senior fellow Williamson M. Evers lays the whole thing out in the 28aug20 WSJ – ‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California.  His report goes a long way to answer the perennial question of how our younger generation has turned out in the aggregate to be so uncritical, compliant, and just plain dumb.  And for the country’s hardworking Orwellians, the adoption of this new mandatory curriculum into our high schools promises that for them the best is yet to come.  No student will graduate without having passed this course.  Dr Evers makes the case that “the state’s new curriculum prefers victimization to minority achievement, and Marxism to liberal values.”

Critical ethnic studies is actually making its second appearance at California’s Board of Education.  The “radical and jargon-laced” 2019 version was sent back for a more “toned down” draft.  Well, it didn’t work.  The new and improved 2020 version not only didn’t correct any of the 2019’s “conceptual problems”, but has now been told by our state’s Dept of Education “to resuscitate” the really bad parts cut from the 2019 version.

Among the litany of dreadful stuff that our students will have rammed down their cognitive craws are the newly focused victim “groups that dominate the curriculum … African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians.”  However, “excluded from California’s model curriculum are the white ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles and so forth)”.  The course will actually “boil down to vulgar Marxism, identity politics, and victimology.”  Among the identified bad people in the world will be America’s Irish and Jews; why? because they have “secured white racial privilege.”

As you might expect from such bilge water, “the revised model curriculum in California portrays capitalism as oppressive and gives considerable weight to America’s socialist critics.”  These critics are portrayed as ideologically correct and pure, without a tinge of bad parts like racism or discrimination.  Yet, as Evers reminds us, “history and political science show that the state can be used readily under socialism for racist purposes. Obvious examples include the Soviet Union’s 1948-49 purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, Jews—and its 1951-53 Doctors’ Plot attack on Jewish physicians. Under socialism, a bureaucratic elite controls all job assignments, news media, courts and the secret police. When that elite is envious, insecure or looking for a scapegoat, what chance does an ethnic minority have?”  Other horrific examples are easily obtained from Nazi Germany, Red China, Yugoslavia, Turkey, … .

All this history is omitted, and will neither pollute nor divert our high schoolers.  For our young minds the world out there will be exquisitely formed so that what they are carefully taught will stick when they hit the streets to look for a job, vote, and demonstrate.  They will have all the correct answers they need to understand and interpret what they see and experience.

Dr Evers concludes his essay with –

The proponents of critical ethnic studies are so insulated by Marxism and identity politics that they miss insights from other fields. The new curriculum doesn’t give a balanced picture of America and, in these racially charged times, it could ignite truly ugly disputes. Perhaps worst of all, it gives short shrift to minority achievement and deprives students of the optimistic view of America. Following this curriculum, students would have no basis on which to understand Frederick Douglass’s defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a glorious liberty document” and his celebration of the potential of a country based on natural and inalienable rights.

All this, coming to a California high school near you.  And some still wonder why SNAFU continues so perfectly to describe the state of our state.  Now you need wonder no more.

Civil Authority Unbridled

[Rev Dan Prout is a Nevada County Christian minister of the evangelical persuasion, and a friend.  He sent this thoughtful piece to a circle of his friends and congregants.  It addresses an important viewpoint shared by many concerned Christians in the land, myself included, and a call to stand for what we believe.  I post it as received.  gjr]

Rev. Dan Prout

One of Jesus’ most famous statements is, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.” The verse has been often referenced when talking about separation of Church and State. Jesus was applying a very subtle but important concept regarding societal authority. It is a concept and distinction largely lost in America today.

It is in our day, today, that we again see civil authority competing for power over everyday life and living. Jesus demonstrated in one sentence that there are two realms of authority simultaneously governing community life. In one statement, he affirmed the legitimate role of civil government while maintaining the religious, moral authority of God and godliness. These twin authorities are to govern in concert, their proper exercise providing a safe and blessed life experience, “that our lives may be quiet and peaceful” as the Apostle Paul put it.

All political issues are based in social issues. All social issues are based in values. All values come from religious precepts. It is, therefore, impossible to separate political matters from faith matters. The laws of a society are based inescapably in moral law. The first written law of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, demonstrates this point. Every one of the Ten – from Worship No Other Gods to Do Not Covet Your Neighbors Goods – establishes boundaries for one’s personal relationships both with God and with one’s neighbors. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and goodness represent the biblical law for our behavior, all standards for our relationships. These qualities are so universally accepted that Paul says there is no law against such things. (Galatians 5:12)

The purpose of Law, as Frederic Bastiat, the French philosopher, points out is not to guarantee justice but rather to prevent injustice. Understanding this reality, the Founders, in developing the U.S. Constitution, worked to bind the reach of government misbehavior by decentralizing powers. They leaned heavily upon the principles of the Bible which call individuals to personally restrain themselves from wrong doing and they expected the generations to follow to do the same. The strength of a nation’s social fabric is directly dependent on the level of individual liberty. Individual liberty is directly dependent on virtuous morality. A nation with liberty unbridled from strong virtue will fail. Daniel Webster wrote in 1823,“If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.” His words spoken nearly 200 years ago have an inescapably prophetic accuracy for our present social and spiritual condition, and, as predicted, we have a government gone astray.

Civil authority must be informed and restrained by moral authority. It is the role of the Church to be bold enough to advise and even correct civil authority when it goes astray. Dr. Martin Luther King rightly observed, “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state. It must be the guide and critic of the state and never its tool.”

The problem today is not that government and its leaders have lost their way; that is to be expected in the absence of vigorous moral argument. Rather, it is the Church, its leaders and its people, which has become complacent and ineffective in providing clear moral guidance in the society. To its great discredit, the Church has expected that civil authority can well function without the tangible presence of moral virtue. To its discredit, the Church has failed to bring preserving, moral salt to society, relegating the nation’s inhabitants to a hopeless life amidst moral and cultural decay.

Let us heed the admonition of Russian historian and philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoken at Harvard University, “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” It is time to stand.

Scattershots – 22jul20

George Rebane

Our indigenous North American natives (aka Indians) may not have politically clean hands after all.  Now that it’s OK to go back in history to any desired time in order to dredge up the iniquities of our forefathers (and mothers), we have discovered that the most recent arrivals before the white man probably were not very nice to the people who were here before them.  “For most of the 20th Century, archaeologists were convinced that big-game hunters known as the Clovis people, identified by the fluted flint spear points they made, were the first Americans, arriving about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. More recent finds from Oregon to Chile, though, showed that other groups had arrived 16,000 years ago or more.”  So is it not now time to start tearing down the history of our redskins, so we can proceed to a clean sweep of all the bad that preceded this fundamentally transformed age of purity in thought and deed? (more here and here)

More later.

This Young Collectivist’s Column is NOT a Caricature

George Rebane

Recent NUHS graduate Michael Sekerak is working hard to reshape our society and community.  He wrote the cri de Coeur ‘Time to elevate those marginalized in our community’ which The Union published in its 8jul20 edition.  What is remarkable about Mr Sekerak’s column is that it so exemplifies the education, indoctrination, and mentality of the youth that our long-politicized and polarized public education system produces.  His column and the way he expresses his deeply felt sentiments would be considered a tongue-in-cheek caricature of current collectivist expression were I or another conservetarian to compose such, and then claim that its prescriptions correctly represent the pap that passes for progressive thought.  Our liberal readers would take me to task for composing such an obviously naïve collection of leftwing talking points, insisting that this would be yet one more ‘racist perspective’ from the Right (what else?), and that their real nostrums for us come from higher, socially just, and more sophisticated sources.

In any event, I present the entirety of Mr Sekerak’s composition below so that our readers can appreciate the product of our public schools.  As matter of fact, Nevada County would be one of the least likely locales in which to find individuals who have been marginalized by our community.  But that, of course, is not the proper woke attitude or outlook – America’s persecuted, denied, and aggrieved are everywhere marbled into our racist and white privileged communities, even unto these remote foothills now filling with liberal nest-soilers from the cities yearning to breathe free.

From the following copy, the casual reader will note that Mr Sekerak’s heartfelt desiderata, when even partially implemented, will further reduce our schools’ academic content and increase its level of dysfunction as an educational institution.  His accusation of our schools’ deficit of woke, and call for additional Newspeak instruction, and claims of “never given the opportunity” to “discuss systemic issues” is, of course, both ignorant and specious in today’s America.  Enjoy.

In light of the recent protests, we must make long-lasting and direct changes that critically challenge how we frame our community and our place in the nation’s history.

The letter below calls upon our local county public high schools to address problems concerning the diversity and cultural acceptance in our education system. We need more than a transient reaction from our schools. Through this petition, we provide a direct means for our local leaders to stand with black, indigenous, people of color (POC), lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQIA+) individuals, and all other marginalized peoples in the Nevada County community and across the country.

We urge Nevada Joint Union High School District to implement policy changes to become intentionally anti-racist and inclusive of the many diverse communities who make up our past, present, and future in all aspects of this county’s educational infrastructure. In your June 9 statement, you made a commitment to “ensure equitable outcomes for all students.” This can be achieved through a number of direct actions:

(1) Redefine the district’s mission, values, and student conduct codes to directly reflect anti-racist and inclusive positions.

(2) Expand the body of anti-racism, racial justice, cultural diversity, and inclusivity literature assigned in the social sciences and humanities curricula.

(3) Create identity-based affinity groups (Black Student Union, Asian Student Alliance, Queer and Questioning Groups, etc.) as a brave space for students to explore their identities.

(4) Re-evaluate the hiring process of administrators, faculty, and staff.

(5) Increase training on implicit bias, equity, inclusion, and restorative justice systems.

(6) Invite diverse speakers and take students on field trips that directly address matters of racial justice, inclusivity, and white privilege in the NJUHSD student body.

If you support this proposal, please sign the petition.  It is time we work together to elevate the voices of our marginalized community It is time we work to educate ourselves and our future generations to stand up against injustices. In order for this to happen we must first address the gaps in our local education system. How can you discuss systemic issues if you are never given the vocabulary to do so? How can you discuss systemic issues if you are never given the opportunity to do so?

Our education system should have provided us with the tools we needed to critically challenge the systems we have in place. And it did not.

Michael Sekerak graduated from Nevada Union High School, Class of 2013.

Cultural cohesion, it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

The country is well along its increasingly insane path to the long sought and much promised fundamental transformation.  As our recent commentaries and many excellent reader contributions in the related comment streams attest, the well-funded madness is growing by the day.  The latest expansions involve initiatives to completely erase and remake America’s history, moving from tearing down our national totems to closing museums which house the artifacts and tell the soon to be forbidden stories of our ‘evil past’.  Our public K-12 schools and academe have long prepared for these events, and produced the millions of mindless moilers now making mayhem in our cities and towns.

What I want to point out here is that in their expanding rage they are co-opting a Rebane Doctrine tenet, namely, society is best organized when people exercise their natural right to live among others who share their values, mores, customs, traditions, language, worldview, …, in short, abide with those who share a common culture.  Expressing the desire to do so is not evil per se, as the Left has been telling us all along.

On this road to revolution the Left is visibly reversing itself, and now not only approves of society living within a cohesive culture, but will define such a command culture for all to accept, with no exceptions.  The specifics of such command cultures have been most evident under communist regimes which force their morally imperative diktats onto the masses under the banners of ‘common good’.  In our major governmental and private institutions, including our post-capitalist corporations, these cultural strictures are already solidly ensconced and perfidiously policed to identify, shun and/or oust the non-conformists and historically tainted.

Today a wrong word or an ideological imperfection discovered in your record, no matter its vintage, is more than enough to get you fired, career ruined, or even qualify to be investigated for some bespoke civil or criminal infraction.  In the early days of the revolution, no provision for appealing the verdicts of the righteous mob is made.  Only later, as the revolution matures into the instruments of power will our new masters establish the traditional institutions to isolate and redeem those wearing the indelible mark of the identified deplorables.  We have seen that happen with the Soviet Gulag, the Cambodian and Vietnamese re-education camps, and the wholesale forced labor incarcerations of hundreds of millions carried out by the Chinese communists during their cultural revolutions, and who currently house their culturally incorrigible Uighurs in massive prison complexes. (more here)

My point is that finally the Left has also accepted and declared its mandate for a culturally cohesive society that will be conformed for the common good.  America’s Right has always promoted the existence of divers culturally cohesive communities living in harmony – e.g. the Quakers, Amish, Mormons, … .  The methods we have historically used to separate such communities have not always been civil, and some have had definite racist motivations – e.g. against African-Americans and the Irish.  Nevertheless, the criterion has been maintenance of cultural conformity and not the genocide of the expelled culture.  In the last century we also learned that anyone of any genetic make-up can and has been accepted into any given culture.  In sum, ‘race’, however it’s defined, is no longer a relevant factor for cultural membership.

(In my native land, Estonians were for centuries considered genetically inferior and culturally corrupt in turn by their German, Swedish, and Russian conquerors.  We were treated as slaves and then serfs by our masters who even imposed ‘first night’s rights’ on newly married brides in order to ‘improve the breed’.  It was not until the mid-19^th century that Estonian culture came to be recognized, and was then able to work its way into peerage among established European cultures.)

So where are we on the adoption of culturally coherent communities?  Well, both sides have now declared their in-principle preference for them.  The big difference is that the Right wants Americans to have the ability to establish such communities according to their own desires and in places where similarly minded people can move to join together in various locales/regions across this land.  The Left wants to impose its new one-size-fits-all politically correct culture on everybody in America.  It wants to organize our transformed society on the historically failed models of its collectivist forebears, with the claim that this time we’ll do it right, embodying all the inclusiveness, social justice, and equality that were the watchwords used to sell the great unwashed on previous versions of socialism cum communism cum tyranny.  So once again it has started with ‘we’ll take from the greedy and racist rich and give to those who can’t or won’t’, all that’s required is unquestioning conformity.

And it has already started with Job One – the utter destruction of America as we have known it – now going on in a neighborhood near you.

Letters from the Revolution – 23jun20

George Rebane

It is only the reality of force that makes peaceful diplomacy possible.

As our buildings burn, more black lives end that don’t make no nevermind, as China continues to build its muscle to rule its ‘near abroad’, Germany bitches about America not doing more to defend its carefully cloistered butt, and Democrats are busy readying Bumblebrain for prime time, the nation’s cops continue to compete with our politicians for the Cringe Cup while BLM and Antifa thugs rule our city centers.

The revolution has long left behind its George Floyd Memorial Starting Gate.  From the ongoing body counts and mounting casualties in our cities, you have to be a real idiot to keep believing that all this destruction still has anything to do with regaining civil rights denied.  No siree, all eyes are now on a much bigger prize, one that has been waiting in the wings ever since the Wall came down in 1989 - now we are fully advancing onto the ramparts of socialism.  Just ask Bernie, AOC, Warren, Harris, …, ask any of them.  Ask even the members of Team Nancy who are doing their best to hang on to the tiger they know they are riding.

It is all coming about so quickly, just as we have warned readers for years.  And I don’t claim rocket science for that prognostication, only a little more than a casual reading of history and watching what has been going on since WW2.

To date no one is even attempting to talk them down or demonstrate that our traditional culture has the wherewithal to resist the mobs who demand more today than they did yesterday.  The tagline to this missive is something totally beyond the ken of peaceful progressives who passively consume every bit from the wisdom of the demanding signs.  They have no clue of what they condone.  I’d like to conclude that the conservatives do know what lies at the end of the road now traveled, but they (we) have somehow misplaced their (our) gumption.  I have no idea for what the rest of us are waiting – that somehow it will all quiet down and everyone will again play nice.  Well, they haven’t for years, so Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ has never worked (least of all in his life).

It doesn’t matter whether we attempt negotiations with America’s anti-American thugs, or the Chinese, when your opponent realizes that your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is capitulation, then diplomacy fails.  It was ever thus.  The only thing that makes sense attempting to talk down a crisis is that your opponent knows you have a BATNA with balls.  And even that doesn’t guarantee a peaceful stand-down.  For you negotiators out there, that requires a ZOPA (zone of possible agreement) that has something to offer.  (ZOPA is the set of all deals that are at least as good for each party in a negotiation as their respective BATNAs.)

Rig for ram.

Scattershots – 10jun20 (updated 13jun20)

George Rebane

Beware of people who need outliers to make their point, and then use these to cloud the big picture.

Food prices are soaring even though plants are coming back on line and distribution problems have been solved.  The producers’ argument is that worker safety requires reconfiguration of work spaces and the introduction of new automation.  The real answer is that this opportunity to permanently reduce labor costs can not be wasted.  Stand by for the next surge of systemic unemployment as the C19 pandemic wanes – keep an eye on the workforce participation rate that was already at a low of about 62% before the virus hit; can we return to that level?

‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Cops’ have been pulled by their distributors in fear of knee-bender mobs who have assumed the role of the country’s new thought police.  GWTW’s distributor HBO Max stated, “Gone With the Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”  America is retreating toward the Russia1918 and Germany1934. (more here)

Liberal thought leaders Dr William Galston, Brookings Institute Fellow, and VP-candidate-in-waiting Stacey Abrams base their messages on the beliefs of the ill-informed mass of Americans who hold that George Floyd’s death is a common occurrence at the hands of our police, and that the perennial poverty and crime in black communities are entirely due to Republicans suppressing the black vote over the last half century.  The data record supports none of these assertions.  The glaring bottom line here is that black lives do NOT matter to blacks, nor to their plantation politicians whom they keep in their sinecured offices.  All this mind-boggling mass action is possible with people subjected to utterly failed schools and a perennially propagandizing entertainment and news media. (more here and here)

On violent black deaths, the posterchild statistic is the comparison of the 9 unarmed blacks who died at the hands of police to the 7,400+ blacks who were murdered by fellow blacks. “The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.” (here)

[11jun20 update]  Increasingly Great Divide ducks are lining up.  The leading elements of our Left are taking the initiative with more than just lootings, burnings, and killings of the established order, they have now assumed control of a major city’s central section, declaring it to be a new (communist, socialist?) “autonomous zone” while controlling ingress/egress to their new domain.  About all this the timid leftwing governor of Washington claimed no knowledge.  Meanwhile some are beginning the calculus of a portending civil war (here), and others have decided to take up arms in the defense of their communities against imported Antifa thugs.  An example ignored in the lamestream (and the scared shitless Fox News) is Coeur d’Alene where hundreds of the good citizens of Idaho made their presence known in town, which subsequently saw no violent mob activity. (here and here)   Meanwhile, leftwing sites claim that the Antifa threat was all a hoax.  My 30may20 third question (here) is being answered.

The clamped down minds of lamestream journalism are starting to denounce their own.  Today one wrong slip of the lip, and you’re history.  So discovered the NYT’s editorial page editor, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the editors of Bon Appétit magazine.  The Left is finally in a position to actively start denying 1A rights in the name of suppressing their obscure but ubiquitous definitions of racism. “The issue here is not about the assertion that racism is endemic in the U.S. The issue is the willingness by many to displace the American system of free argument with a system of enforced, coerced opinion and censorship, which forces comparison to the opinion-control mechanisms that existed in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.” (more here)  Samizdat lives. 

[12jun20 update]  Russian collusion is alive and well in the belief and propaganda systems of the Left (witnessed by our leftwinger comments).  To the rest of us it is astounding that the progressives’ hatred of Trump impels them to continue one their most vicious Big Lies, day after day telling the country that Trump did indeed collude with the Russians.  But more importantly, that part and parcel of this collusion enabled the Russians to interfere in the 2016 so successfully that it was the impact of their efforts that sealed the ‘fraudulent election’ in Trump’s favor.  This narrative continues unabated to this day.

Re my C19 response policy.  Readers may be curious as to what my policy would be for public gatherings and general behavior in public forums.  To save my burying it in some comment stream, I’ll put it here for all to see.  I don't support further lockdowns even though we will have succeeding 'waves' of C19 until a reliable vaccine is developed. None has been developed yet for the garden variety flu, and we have succeeding waves of it every fall and winter which cause tens of thousands to die of it. No one has been social distancing, wearing masks, locking down, and turning off the economy for that, at least for a century. Rebane Doctrine calls for the government and healthcare institutions to publish the latest risk data (accounting for demographics, comorbidity, and geography) for C19, flu, ..., and all other contagious diseases, along with what lowers the probability of people getting infected. Then everyone can decide for themselves where to go and which events to attend. Laws should be passed that you get to sue no one if you catch the bug.

[13jun20 update]  Both the Right and Left understand that a robust free press is required to maintain a liberal democracy.  The Left opposes a free press and promotes the censorship of ideas they don’t favor.  What does that say about the Left’s real intentions to maintain a liberal democracy?  The Left promotes the Big Lie that the killing of George Floyd and other black males is a common police activity and not a rare outlier (see above).  Is there anything Trump does that anywhere near approaches that for dividing the country?

Hurricane George Floyd

“In October 1913, the Bolsheviks were a small radical Russian faction. No reasonable person would have predicted that within a mere four years they would take over the country.” Y.N. Harari, Sapiens (2014).

George Rebane

The on-camera, tragic and unjustified killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman has unleashed a social storm across America that is unprecedented and potentially ruinous to our constitutional republic.  Anti-American coalitions have united to sanctify a habitual criminal and elevate him to a unique martyrdom for the purpose of disrupting our established, albeit imperfect, yet overwhelmingly beneficial social order that is the envy of the world.  All of these cohorts – ranging from Antifa to the Democrat Party - see today’s nationwide protests and riots as an opportunity to create the chaos from which each has the possibility to bring about their own version of a fundamentally transformed United States.

President Barack Obama started stacking the dominoes with his view of an irretrievably flawed America that needed to be fundamentally transformed into a socialist democracy that would function under a revised, reinterpreted, or totally rewritten constitution.  Today we are witness to the other dominoes all waiting in a row – rotten cities, uncontrolled homelessness, “mismanaged” pandemic, crippled economy, historically high unemployment, politically-biased media, dismally uninformed and innumerate electorate, advance of disruptive technologies, dysfunctional public schools, distrust of businesses and enterprise, rejection of capitalism and markets, looming systemic unemployment, firmly ensconced victimhood of minorities, socially polarized nation, unpopular President with maladroit communication skills, corrupt and timid justice system, Democrat plurality fomenting socialism, lame Republican Party sans backbone, … .

All of these self-inflicted and manufactured flaws today stand in a row ready to be tipped by the riot-prone protests perfidiously promoted by the several political factions sharing various shades of collectivist ideologies in their agendas for a brave new global order.  And the question now is whether that serendipitous video, seen around the world, of the police murdering George Floyd was the flapping of the butterfly wings that has now set in motion a storm the final impact of which no one knows.

From my readings of history, I am reminded of what the previous year’s events gave rise to in the Russia of 1918 and the Germany of 1934.  Today WSJ columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes (here) –

Indiscriminate property damage and looting descended on some 140 cities across the U.S. in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd while in police custody. Business owners, workers and customers in minority neighborhoods were hard hit. And in the years to come they will pay the steepest price for the unchecked violence done by rampaging mobs claiming to represent them.

To be clear, the near universal outrage over the video of Floyd’s death, expressed by an overwhelmingly nonviolent majority of demonstrators, is the lawful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble. This is central to what it means to be an American and to reaching peace and reconciliation.

Violence is another matter entirely. There is evidence that it has been instigated by organized militants trained to leap into action when opportunities present themselves. While they don’t represent the majority of protesters, they use them as shields. What is more, their brutal aggression is politically effective and only mildly condemned. One reason, I would venture, is that they are the mailed fist of a broader movement that has infected academia, the media, popular culture and politics with the notion that Western traditions are oppressive and should be destroyed. … The bad news is that the drip-drip-drip of an intellectual narrative aimed at destroying Western values and publicly shaming anyone who resists the ideological corrosion is here to stay.

I join with those who do not accept the glorification of George Floyd nor the assessments of the street wisdom and fomenting politicians about the irredeemable state of our Union.  From our media we are awash with deceitful propaganda that frames events into formats not supported by any collected data.  In other words, the numbers in the public record (discussed many times in these pages) don’t support the misappropriated emotions of the protesters, politicians, and even police who seek indemnification and redemption for professed sins with every opportunity to ‘take the knee’.  My sentiments about the happenings during the last two weeks are best expressed through the words of Candace Owens in a Facebook video (on Powerline here) now seen by tens of millions.  No one stands taller than this woman against the current tide of insanity.

Riot Reflections – 1jun20 (updated)

‪"Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians."‬ Thomas Sowell (and an oft-cited tenet of Rebane Doctrine)

George Rebane

Well, given what we see in the streets, we can safely conclude that the pandemic lockdowns are over, and all business are open except those that have been boarded up or burned down.

Starting with local police departments, all fielded LE units/agencies are now conducting defensive operations to preserve themselves.  They are no longer out there to protect persons or property.  The compelling explanation for this kind of CYA behavior is that they don’t see support from their political leaders, the law-abiding public, and most certainly not from the protesters and rioters.  Law enforcement today stands politically abandoned.  They are indicted by a long history of law enforcement ‘mistakes’ that recently have culminated in the outrageous public murder (execution?) of George Floyd, a black petty criminal, by the Minneapolis police, and the killing of Breonna Taylor, an innocent black woman gunned down in her own home by Louisville Metro Police mistakenly raiding her house in the middle of the night.  Both should be seen as preventable crimes by institutions that have lost sight of their reason for being.

No one has really determined the make-up of the legitimate protesters in the streets, nor if they are the same ones who turn into destructive rioters after the peaceful phase of their demonstrations are concluded.  Does the non-violent cohort then go home to be replaced by the violent ones who mostly conduct themselves as Antifa members?  (To my knowledge, Antifa is still a distributed national protest movement that shares literature, values, dress, street tactics, …, but having no common leadership, managed funding, or central control.)  From the reports from the media and police on the scene, the non-violent protesters appear to morph into violent rioters at some point, mostly after the sun goes down.  Today the violent are all masked (perhaps because of the pandemic) and therefore act with impunity because their anonymity is secure.  In the meantime, the cities’ progressive political leaders are desperately looking for the illusive out-of-town white supremacists who are really the instigators of looting and burning.

Today’s street conflicts are also culturally confused and confusing.  There is no common social contract in evidence among the street borne polyglot.  Everyone is doing their own thing, milling from here to there or just idly standing by and watching the show.  Some have come with prepared signs with the usual slogans demanding justice and change.  But when interviewed, no one has a clue as to what exactly needs to be done to bring about the change and the new age of justice.  Moreover, no one even thinks that there need be some deeper thought behind the demands on the displayed placards – their histrionics are sufficient unto themselves.

If really pressed for specifics, black leadership in the media can drill down no deeper than spout the Democratic Party talking points – ‘Shut down white supremacy and white privilege.’  This is the closest that any leftwinger can come to specifying what needs to be done to bring about the “change” that the protesters are demanding.  What white supremacy should be shut down how?  Which white privileges should be legislated into criminality?  And their political party and political leadership are equally clueless as to what specific and feasible programs should be implemented across the land to prevent future Floyds and Taylors being killed at the hands of various law enforcement agencies.

In the meantime, there is political hay to be made in this election year that has already given our Left so much ammo against President Trump and the Republicans.  For a party without a single viable idea of how to better respond to the virus, let alone how to revive the economy, all they have to offer is solution-free partisan vituperation to convince their constituents and light-thinking lackies that a new glorious age will spontaneously start if we can only get Trump out of the White House, Republicans out of Congress, and pack SCOTUS with an enlarged bench of progressive justices.  The rest will miraculously take care of itself under a distended government that will redistribute the country’s wealth, hire more of the unemployable incompetents, pay everyone regardless, and become the major player in our economy – i.e. socialism on steroids.

When the dust settles, what will the gutless politicians do with police departments that are becoming more insular and frustrated as they are charged with keeping the peace in public environments ever more conflicted in values, mores, attitudes, perceived pasts, fearful futures, …, all existing under a shroud of confusing, contradictory, unknown, and variously interpreted and randomly enforced laws, regulations, and codes that become more impenetrable by the day?  The cop on the beat can no longer reliably predict anyone’s behavior, and must therefore become a programmed automaton who survives his shift by avoiding conflicts and strife whenever possible, and when not, then apply one-size-fits-all rules in the most self-defensive and often ruthless manner possible.

[update]  We just finished watching the evening news that covered the ongoing demonstrations from several big cities across the country.  The President made a ‘law and order’ speech in which he separated those lawful protesters from the thugs, looters, arsonists, and now killers on our streets.  We hear people of all ranks, starting with the Floyd family, calling for the violence to stop, that such behavior is not serving the memory of their murdered son George, nor anything good that hopefully would come out of this after the dust settles.  The politicians calling for calm and calling out the rioters are all from the Right.  The only political leader voices from the Left are using this ongoing national tragedy to attack the administration, and to further divide us and convince all that there is no hope of unity in the future.  They realize more than any of us that those on the streets are their imperturbable constituents, loyal voters, and their very political lifeblood – they can do no wrong.

If a progressive wanted to counter any of this shameful behavior by their political leaders, one need only ask, ‘Where are the Pelosis, Schumers, Obamas, Bidens, Jacksons, Sharptons… with their messages of peace and calm, calling for the protesters to abide by the law and rioters to stand down?’  The only words from their and their lamestream lackies’ mouths do nothing but throw fuel on a raging partisan fire, and give their imprimaturs to the lawlessness on the streets by pledging their solidarities from which are absent any condemnation of the riotous mobs.  Even the word ‘riot’ is not in their vocabulary when they occasionally stray from lauding the “just protests” on our cities’ streets.  In Democrats’ eyes, it is all one homogeneous nationwide protest against Republican racism and social injustice.  For them this indeed is one helluva crisis not to let go waste.

Riot Reflections - 30may20 (updated)

George Rebane

The videod murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police gave rise to justified public protests that quickly turned into destructive and violent riots which have little to do with the death of Mr Floyd, and instead have again revealed that we Americans are no longer ‘one people’ who can be called to ‘come together’.

Law enforcement agencies of all stripes provide daily demonstrations that they are an institution unto themselves, there to overwhelmingly look after their own interests and provide little or no security for those who pay them to preserve society and civilization.  As clearly admitted by the Minneapolis police chief who publicly stated the reason his officers are standing back, standing down, and hightailing it from rioters is that he does not want to put them in harm’s way in situations that could turn dangerous.  Think about that.  What if firemen would only fight unrisky fires?  What if the FBI adopted a similar policy, no field operations in which their agents were put at risk?  What if the Secret Service would protect the President only to the extent that it would not be dangerous to them?  What if our military didn’t want to commit troops into situations in which casualties would result?

So the police et al, those who do attend the riots now taking place in cities across the land, simply gather in solid self-defensive phalanxes to watch the rioting mob loot and burn.  Over the lamestream media we are informed in an ongoing stream of commentary that these are not riots (a word absent in lamestream reports) led by criminal thugs, but simply justified “protests” attended by “protesters”.  The rest of us are told by our politicians that any criminality that is evident is justified, and that we must simply let it play out.  Actually, its more than that as FN’s Tucker Carlson explained in a landmark monologue last night – ‘Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we're told crimes of the mob are our fault’.

Local business owners who witness their life’s work and savings go up in flames are seen pleading with the mob to no avail.  Some are again taking up arms to defend their lives and livelihoods, and most cynically, the police are arresting those who dare shoot (at) rioters inside their premises in acts of arson and looting.

No doubt one can draw a connection between the lengthy pandemic lockdowns and the number of urban dwellers eager to get out of their houses and small apartments to protest undeniable injustices at the hands of law enforcement and our entire ‘justice system’.  But in doing so, they do underline that we are not one people as former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile asserts in her ‘We are one people’.  The rioters are not people who built this country, as they claim, and are therefore entitled to ‘burn it down’.  These are people who have their very own and distinct social contract with the institutions of our government – contrary to their protestations, they have rights and privileges, demonstrated daily, that people like me and mine wouldn’t dream of having in a civilized society.

Here’s an interesting question – what would the police do if law abiding folks of all colors showed up armed in downtowns to protect and defend the properties and property owners against the rioting mobs?

And here’s an even more interesting question – what would local governments and law enforcement agencies do if the streets were filled with peaceful protesters of all colors who looked like you and me?

And finally – what if all those law-abiding peaceful protesters against LE injustice showed up also demonstrating why Americans are unique with their constitutional 2A rights?

[update] A reader sent me a link to a Powerline article on the Twin Cities riots.  It appears that both Democrat Mayors Jacob Frey and Melvin Carter are doing their best to dodge any and all responsibility for what's going down in their mismanaged metropolises, even to the anticipated desperate accusation that the riots are being instigated by out-of-state "white supremacists".  How do self-respecting Democrats elect such misfits to office?  (more here and here)

‘Seize the Moment’

George Rebane

So exhorts The Economist (here), Britain’s famous weekly ‘newspaper’ since 1843 that has metamorphosed over the years into a leftwing trumpet with an international audience.  The lead editorial in its 23may20 issue counsels countries, especially the US, to use the coronavirus pandemic to include in their government aid machinations additional laws, regulations, codes, restrictions, taxes, fees, fines, … to advance the global socialist agenda while their citizens are focused on maintaining health and hearth.

The number one supernumerary policy having nothing to do with the pandemic relief involves climate change legislation and subsidies.  They are more open than Team Pelosi about not wasting this crisis – “The covid-19 crisis reveals how hard it will be to tackle climate change – and creates a unique chance to do so.”  Specific recommendations focus on first instigating new “carbon pricing”, their code for passing massive new carbon taxes which “schemes” they claim will “use the power of the market to incentivise consumers and firms to cut their emissions, thus ensuring that the shift from carbon happens in the most efficient way possible.”

Anyone with even a smidgen of capitalism in their veins knows that such government dictates have nothing to do with “the power of the market”.  In enforcing the use of uneconomical alternative energy sources with the government gun simply mangles the markets beyond recognition, and in its wake leaves an economy mired in ‘mother-may-I’ mandates that will impede economic recovery wherever it seeks purchase to climb out of its current hole.

Socialists use their gross misunderstanding (or cynical ignoring) of the ‘Broken Windows Fallacy’ (here) first illuminated by Frederic Bastiat a little after The Economist was launched.  In his ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen’ Bastiat introduces us to the important economic concepts of “crowding out” which denies the existence of “idle resources”, and the little recognized distinction between wealth and employment.  The parable has a hooligan break a baker’s window which act is ameliorated, actually even celebrated, by onlookers as being beneficial to the economy in that it now will create extra business for the glazier when the baker spends to replace his broken window (that which is seen).  However, this creates no new wealth or work since the baker had other uses for the money he lost, uses that would have expanded his business creating more wealth and other income for his suppliers (that which is not seen).

Socialist economists like Paul Krugman agree with the crowd in the fable, and in their ideologically-blindered, profound ignorance don’t recognize that “if that which is not seen is taken into consideration, because it is a negative fact, as well as that which is seen, because it is a positive fact, it will be understood that neither industry in general, nor the sum total of national labor, is affected, whether windows are broken or not.”  And so it will go with the funding and created jobs of climate change to replace existing, cheap energy sources, with manmade make-work before the market is ready to accept them.  We will never know what other unseen advances and social benefits we will deny ourselves by implementing such still uncompetitive ‘sustainable energy sources’ through the seen artifices like punitive carbon taxing.

Which now brings us to the more fundamental crisis that pre-dates the pandemic – why our country is terminally polarized and “why we hate each other”.  The real answer to those questions is more often than not papered over by various kinds of feel-good pabulum.  An example is the op-ed ‘Why We Hate Each Other’ by Scottie Hart in the 28may20 Union.  She cites “solid research” by sociologists that point the finger at our loneliness being caused by modern technology-induced isolation.  Put simply, our online virtual relationships are not cutting it.  “A wide array of prominent health organizations now recognize deep, pervasive loneliness as a major public health issue, eroding our lives and often prematurely ending them. … Even before COVID-19, long-term trends have changed, and will continue to change our lives. As we negotiate the enormous shift from an industrial, manufacturing world to a near-virtual, technological world, it is no wonder we feel disoriented and vulnerable.”

Ms Hart is a self-avowed, good-hearted liberal who totally misses the deeper schism between us.  The country now is home to two cohorts of citizens with profoundly different beliefs about what constitutes a beneficial and preferred socio-economic structure for maximizing our quality of life.  Those of the various flavors of the collectivist Left see an ever-encompassing growing government that will ultimately provide succor, sufficiency, equality, and social justice to all its citizens through central planning and control, a social structure in which citizens will gladly trade their liberties and freedom for promised risk-free living where the meritocratic competition between the competent and incompetent will be banished forever.  This course has been successfully pursued now for over fifty years, and there is no indication that it will do anything but accelerate.

The various flavors of the conservetarian Right see the Left’s pursuits as leading to an enforced egalitarian amalgam ruled over by a corrupt elite that wields all power.  Given all the diverse human frailties, the Right recognizes that life does contain more than a modicum of risk for any individual in their pursuit of happiness.  But that risk is worth taking within a society that recognizes and promotes individual initiative and enterprise, with all the necessary freedoms and liberties, under a social contract based on laws under which we are all treated equally.  And yes, the outcomes there will be unequal where those who can and do will naturally want to provide for those who can’t or won’t in order to maintain the social order.

Such views are intrinsically incompatible within one sovereign nation-state, and that is why we are polarized and, as the Ms Harts among us observe, that we ‘hate each other’.  Today we are two incompatible countries trying to live within a single border under an increasingly dysfunctional state.

Memorial Day – 25 May 2020

George Rebane

On this Memorial Day we reflect on the words of General Jack Keane (Ret) about those who risked all - "None of them wanted to die, certainly. What's different about them is that they were willing to and they were willing to put at risk everything that they care about, you know, having a long life, having friends in your life, being a parent, having love in your life to love and to be loved, … People said, 'Why would they do that?' I've been around these troops forever and I think the answer is, it's pretty simple. ... It's out of a very simple yet profound sense of duty. And it's also because they do it for one another. And I think that's true honor. And we can never, ever take that devotion for granted."  (H/T to RR commenter)

Some flavors of mindlessness (updated 25may20)

George Rebane

In the mindless department, we start with a letter from a Skip Pollard in the 22may20 Union that takes to task the 6may20 column by Terry McLaughlin where she substantiates the thesis -  

“No one could have predicted with certainty a viral pandemic arising in 2020, and no human being could have been entirely prepared in the moment to make the perfect decisions that would best preserve life and livelihoods.” – and substantiates it with a timeline of C19 pronouncements and assessments made by various agents worldwide.  That assessment didn’t sit well with the TDS crowd who still proclaim to their followers that Trump’s "mismanagement of the pandemic" has caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths.  But here is the example of the “omission” cited by Pollard to make his case that McLaughlin “cherry picked” the C19 timeline –

April 23: President Trump says, “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.”

Now what in hell does that perfectly good observation and question asked by the president have to do with the timeline of policy pronouncements on the pandemic’s progress assembled by McLaughlin; logically it can’t even be shoehorned into a timeline of similar events.  But to TDS sufferers like Skip Pollard, this liberal logic makes all the sense in the world.  The mentality of such people is literally unfathomable to the unafflicted, and explains a forte why communication with them is futile.  Perhaps one of our liberal readers can help Mr Pollard by citing a substantive omission from Ms McLaughlin’s column.

Long before I warned you of Dr Fauci, President Eisenhower did.  In the same farewell speech in which he called for vigilance of the doings of the country’s “military-industrial complex”, Ike also warned us that scientists dependent on government contracts and grants might cripple scientific breakthroughs. Specifically, he said “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”  And all this because “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”  Yes, if you follow the money, then scientific consensus becomes the order of the day, and those innumerates innocent of science will not be the wiser, as they continue their habituated genuflections before anything proclaimed as ‘scientific’.  In Ike’s words, “partly because of the huge costs involved (in scientific research), a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”  So, today Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the “scientific-technological elites” that Eisenhower warned against. (more here)

Others have echoed and expanded on this new secular religion of science.  Author Tom Bethell in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Science tells us -

Government funding has… promoted the idea that a theory can be regarded as true if it enjoys enough support. … Consensus discourages dissent, however. It is the enemy of science, just as it is the triumph of politics. A theory accepted by 99 percent of scientists may be wrong. Committees at the National Institutes of Health that decide which projects shall be funded are inevitably run by scientists who are at peace with the dominant theory."

Here we note that 99% of scientists accepted ALL theories that were subsequently toppled by new discoveries during the age when science was still “an open platform”.  A fundamental truth that you can bank today is that “when any single source of funding dominates, science will almost certainly become the handmaiden of politics.”  And we have seen that happen countless times during the last half century, most recently in the politically stifled science that promotes preventable man-made global warming.

As one of today’s ‘scientific-technological elites’, Dr Fauci’s words are to be taken as unquestioned gospel about the recent coronavirus disease and the nation’s response to the pandemic.  We do so at our peril. 

[update]  ‘America is Reopening for Summer and Tensions are High’ in the 22may20 WSJ reports that “Tensions are intensifying between those celebrating the end of shutdowns and those fearful of the virus’s re-emergence, between those driven by economic desperation and those eager to resume a semblance of normalcy. As restrictions eventually fall in large cities including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, those dichotomies are likely to become more acute.”  What I find puzzling is the report of tensions between those wanting the lockdowns to remain and those who don’t.  What’s the big deal?  Anyone is free to quarantine themselves to their hearts content.  And if the rest of your neighbors risk themselves and contribute to economic recovery, then those who remain hunkered down will receive even more and better services from those who don’t.  Everyone gets to exercise their own risk tolerance, and the only ones with noses out of joint are them that demands a ‘one size fits all’ America.

[25may20 update] As we pointed out almost two months ago, the C19 quarantines would soon cause more corollary mortality and morbidity than any reasonable estimate of health benefits (including number of deaths) from the pandemic.  Now we are beginning to see reports coming in telling of people dying at home from chronic and topical (including psychological) maladies that would have been addressed through normal visits and access to the medical industry.  One recent article reports ‘California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns’ (H/T to reader).  Add these to the butt-stupid policies like Gov Cuomo’s sentence of almost certain death to those New Yorkers he condemned to be transferred to 24/7 care facilities, and then round out what our dreadfully incompetent governments have inflicted on us in their power panic to appear to ‘do something’ that looks to most like we’re fighting the virus.  In the final analysis the fault of it all belongs on us mal-educated citizens who shrink from every politically identified risk, and demand that government immediately leaps in to keep us safe, no matter the cost in dollars or liberties.  With the passing years, fewer of us remain who still understand that growth of government power is a one-way ratchet toward revolution.  For the rest, the state is ever the benevolent Big Brother.

Fair, Balanced, and Scared Sh!+less (updated 25may20)

George Rebane

‘Fair, balanced, and unafraid’ has been the smug, self-preening tagline for Fox News, most prominently used by Bret Baier as the sign-off to his daily flagship Special Report program.  Perhaps that was once true, but during the last couple of years FN has changed by markedly migrating toward the lamestream media.  While still covering news items totally absent or buried on leftwing outlets, the network bends over backward to feature as many progressive guests and commentators as possible on every issue of current interest.  Today it is literally impossible for a middle-road viewer to determine the ideological bent of most of FN’s programming during the 24-hour cycle.  The only exceptions to this are perhaps Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.  These, however, are balanced with other FN stars such as Chris Wallace with a marked and longstanding tilt to port.

The biggest change is that the palpable lies and propaganda narratives of leftwing guests and interviewees are no longer challenged for their verity.  These days the leftwinger can tell an obvious whopper, and the FN host will go on to the next question or subject without so much as lifting an eyebrow.   Led by Baier and Martha McCallum, the remaining daytime FN personalities do everything they can to avoid controversy on the air, and therefore leave its viewers to sort things out as they witness equal time and voice given to leftwing opinions and interpretations that not only go unchallenged, but are presented as having equal weight with any and all opposing opinions and interpretations.  Is it really fair to present obvious falsehoods without so-much as giving the audience some factual context within which to interpret such assertions?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking FN to limit featuring its parade of leftwingers making news and shaping opinions.  But I am asking all so-called journalists to have the guts, then and there, to call out the obvious lies and baseless opinions of their guests, be they from the Right or Left.  (As RR’s polarized commenters have been doing for years.) And here’s the critical question every media interviewer should have the timely wits and courage to ask their guests each time they land a load of crap onto the airwaves –

‘Your viewpoint is fairly controversial, where can our viewers go to see the evidence that made you say that?’

Timidly scurrying on to the next question or topic doesn’t cut it for the claim of being ‘Fair, balanced, and unafraid.’  Time to reinstall that backbone.

[25may20 update] 'The ‘Liberal Leaning’ Media Has Passed Its Tipping Point’, so confirms Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News.  This is the belated point that many on the national scene are finally beginning to recognize.  A phenomenon that became apparent to many of us at the grassroots level years ago (RR stands on its 14-year record).  No one well-read on the socio-politics of America for the last 50 years believes that the country’s Fourth Estate will ever regain its credibility - journalists are all biased ideologues lying to their audiences about being 'fair and balanced'.  All we are now doing is the Great Divide two-step that is becoming more pronounced with every passing month.  Any semblance of a middle ground disappeared years ago.  Look at the 14-year record of RR comment streams, which confirm an unpretentious, simple yet significant reflection of Main Street America’s understanding, beliefs, and sentiments.

Hunker Down Diary – 27apr20

George Rebane

Today is HD51 for the Rebanes.  As most people, we have been doing extensive Facetime with family and friends, and Zooming in for meetings.  We also meet surreptitiously for dinners with equally hunkered family and friends. The rest of the time is taken up with household chores and deskwork.  RR readers know what I’ve been noodling about.  Jo Ann has been busy with her Republican Women Federated, NC Republican Central Committee,  and Union editorial board work.  My labors on the boards of MIM and SESF have been minimal since the C19 lockdown.  And now that the weather guessers are predicting warm weather going forward as far as the eye can see, it’s time to get the farm going and the horseshoe court spiffed up for competition.

We are also participating in weekly online cocktail sessions with other couples.  These have turned out to be more fun than we anticipated, and all of us look forward to the next week’s happy hours.  So all in all, social life continues along newly created paths.  We always have a fire going during the evenings which are divided into TV nights and reading nights.  The TV fare is all prerecorded stuff of various series, new/commentary programs, movies, and documentaries.  (Years ago, we pretty much weaned ourselves off of live broadcasts, everything gets put on the DVR – we pace the presentations, they don’t pace us.  I suppose everyone now does that so it’s hard to see why advertisers still pay to advertise, unless some people still watch live TV.)

Today we had to make a trip into town for bags of soil and sand – soil for Jo Ann’s farm and sand for refurbishing my world-class horseshoe court.  She gets the best manmade soil you can buy which contains all the nummies that her veggies want, including 15% chickenshit.  Long ago we decided not to run the numbers on the actual cost of our vegetables – we’re not in competition with Safeway, but they are with us.  It has turned out to be a labor of love and the pure joy of eating loads of home-grown veggies.  We even enjoy the late night hunts for tomato worms with our UV flashlight.

But my big report of the day is that regardless of what our out-of-step governor dictates, the people of Nevada County are not staying at home.  Traffic on the roads and Brunswick Basin was somewhere between normal and heavy.  The nursery parking lot was so full with people coming and going that they had two clerks out there directing traffic.  Picking up sand at B&C was no different.  The entire shopping center’s parking lot was full of cars, and the store full of  people.  More than half the people were not wearing masks.  It is clear that it is the people who have ended the lockdown – rural Californians are not waiting for the word from Sacramento.  The only thing we are still waiting for is the county to get their jackboot off our necks and let the restaurants, bars, churches, and theaters open up for sit-down food, worship, and entertainment.

Sometime in the not too distant future I’d like to see some constitutional legal beagles from the Left argue the legality of the government’s peremptory shutdown and destruction of our economy and social life.  From my perch, this has not been the finest hour for enterprising and independent America.  And now the data is coming in from multiple sources overseas and within our borders that national lockdowns are wrongheaded and more dangerous, most certainly in the long run, than hunkering down.  (more here)

Scattershots – 25apr20 (updated 27apr20)

George Rebane

The C19 timeline again shows that the WSJ does not walk on journalistic water.  In its 29jan20 edition the newspaper published a whopping load of bullcrap, reporting that “Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told President Trump the coronavirus epidemic was under control.” Turns out he said no such thing, nor did he say/imply a number of other claims that the article by Rebecca Ballhaus and Stephanie Armour reported.  The Federalist has a detailed timeline (here) that should dispel the other lies that also continue from the Left’s lamestream about how Trump’s administration fell down on the job responding to C19.  Should be interesting reading, especially for those suffering from chronic TDS.

Death by ‘doctor’.  Longtime RR readers know of the respect I have for the medical industry that is lead by the untouchables who hubristically exhibit their exalted position in our society and resort to high dudgeon whenever their opinions or performance is called into question by the lay public.  It turns out that I have been a bit soft on the sawbones and the whole lot that supports them when I have cited that they and theirs kill almost 200,000 of us annually through what are swept under the rug as “under-recognized medical mistakes”.  Well I was wrong.  Johns Hopkins Medicine, you know the data guys on C19, has just concluded a new study that shows “medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in US.” (more here)  Almost 10% of all US deaths are due to medical screw-ups.  Today that amounts to over a quarter million (251,454 to be exact) buckets kicked prematurely even way back in 2013.  What would you say if America’s airline industry plowed three wide-bodies chuck full of passengers into the mud every day, day-in and day-out, year after year?  And our political leaders and the media don’t make a peep.  They keep their high-flying jobs by making it very hard to get that MD after your name, and reducing the types of available healthcare providers who could more economically minister to our everyday ills.  ‘First and foremost, do no harm.’ (Primum non noceres’, as the ol’ Hypocrites used to say.)  Hah!  Double Hah! 

California’s next economic enema.  The state is in dire financial straits because of the way it has set up milking its high earners for tax revenues while buying votes from the welfare throngs who pay little or no taxes.  The Hoover Institution explains the matter here, and points out that “in every recession, California inflicts its own fiscal wounds by relying on a tax system "that is explicitly designed to collect gobs of revenue during booms, but which completely goes in the tank during downturns, much more so than any other state. … To give you a sense of the inefficiency of California’s tax system, consider California’s economy just after the financial crisis of a decade ago. In fiscal year 2010, California revenue fell by 20 percent, compared to less than a 2 percent drop in state GDP.”  And the double dummy Democrats in Sacramento have brought this upon all of us as the decades-long political custodians of the once Golden State.

[26apr20 update]  How to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.  From time to time RR presents various pieces of generally useful information as a public service.  This is a short video that summarizes the comprehensive recommendations from our authorities on how to correctly combat C19 in these trying times.

The C19 interviews with ‘experts’ and talking heads are getting beyond boring.  If you can predict exactly how the person will answer, it’s like playing the same record over and over again.  And it is very easy to do once you know whether the person is a Lefty or healthcare professional, or a Rightie.   If your choice was to add another trillion to the national debt or accept one more C19 death, then the answer for most people is easy and it bookends the dollar value of a human life.  And if your choice was to pay $10 more in annual taxes to save a particular person from dying, most people would pay, thereby establishing the other bookend value of a human life.  So now that we’ve established that human lives have a dollar value, we can cut the ‘… if it can save even one life, then we should …” crap.  The problem that makes TV interviews boring I covered in ‘Fighting C19’ where we illustrated the different utility functions for the Right, the Left, and the healthcare people in the middle.  The latter only concern themselves with policies that would save one more human life, so you know what they’re going to say.  The Right is concerned with saving the economy by assuming risks to minimize additional C19 deaths; the Left simply wants the economy to tank, preferably while keeping the death rate high.  After all November is just around the corner.  Meanwhile the pabulum pours out of the boobtube.  So, dear reader, if you’re a thinking person, how many additional dollars would you add to national debt to prevent another C19 death?

[27apr20 update]  Today’s WSJ reports on a “Secret Group of Scientists and Billionaires Pushing Trump on a Covid-19 Plan."  They are working around the clock to cull the world’s most promising research for what they describe as a virus-era Manhattan Project.” (here)  This self-identified group of “America’s top scientists and a collection of billionaires and industry titans” with high-access to the Trump administration has been doing a lot of research on C19.  They have published a short readable report on their conclusions to date that you can download here – Download Scientists_to_Stop_COVID19_2020_04_23_FINAL.  Bottom line, some of their pharma recommendations on repurposing of existing drugs are already dated (e.g. the hoped for effectiveness on Gilead’s remdesivir - here), but their assessment of tests and testing strategies are valid and totally in line with what my fevered brain deduced starting a month ago – no one knows jack about test reliabilities, and effective testing programs require tests administered wholesale and frequently to everyone who desires to be out and about.  The rest of today's hyper-ventilation about tests and testing is just that.  They give short shrift to herd immunity and see the conquest of C19 to be based on medicines and new vaccines.  Until then they accept the RR recommendation I gave (here and here) for getting our economy back on its feet.  

Ruminations – 20apr20

George Rebane

“We are all in this together.”  Who make up the “we”?  What defines the “this”?  Porter Stansberry makes a very compelling cast that this assertion by the governments and their loyal lackies is the Big Lie of today (here)  – we are not all in this together, and the ‘this’ is different for all of us who live in various regions of the country. Its main purpose is to convince good-hearted people to overlook the realities of the C19 epidemic and follow the ever more invasive and pervasive dicta of the authorities who laying in command and control procedures that will survive the end of the epidemic by decades.  What’s happening now that we’re hunkering down is training us to accept a whole slew of new constraints on the liberties that our Constitution guarantees.  Again, harbinger Numero Uno is when they come for our guns.

The Great Divide confirmed more than ever.  Cohesive nation-states have always come together and shown their fundamental unity when confronting an external threat or national emergency.  America has been a posterchild of such unity since the War Between the States (erroneously still called the Civil War).  No more.  As we have been observing now for over a decade, the divisions between us today are unfathomable and too large to overcome.  Nowhere is this demonstrated with greater unambiguity than in our response to the C19 pandemic.  Here in this election year, one party is doing its best to heal the nation and return to normalcy, while the evil party is doing everything possible to extend the human misery, bring longterm destruction to our economy, and blame America under the current administration for any and all ills across the world.  Their goal is to bring the US to its knees as the disease abates, in order to present the global collective a fundamentally transformed nation that is weak, compliant, and chastened.

Under ‘Autocracy Rising’ we are getting reports of new egregious behaviors by our LE cadres as they start imitating Stasi tactics across the land during this pandemic.  One Florida student who caught C19-type symptoms on a high school band trip and recovered, posted her experience on Instagram.  The school became enraged and sicked the local cops on her.  These showed up at her residence and threatened to “start taking people to jail” for “disorderly conduct” unless she immediately removed her post, which she did.  Later it was pointed out that our Constitution makes no “pandemic exception” for denying 1A rights.  Sign of the times – bend over and spread ‘em. (more here)

More on Autocracy Rising - NYC mayor and its Stasi’s Oberführer Bill de Blasio is now exhorting New Yorkers to report social distancing infractions by neighbors to the authorities (here). He wants the citizen snitch to take a picture of the scofflaws, and send it immediately to the police so that “we can get help there to fix the problem.”  Gotta love them Dems – give ‘em an inch, and they’ll take … .

A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

[This was submitted by reader and Nevada County resident Don Bessee.  It is posted as received. gjr]

Don Bessee

Commercial activity in Residentially Zoned neighborhoods is fundamentally in conflict with their land use protections that everyone agreed to when they signed their title papers that included mandated disclosures.

There are allowed things like piano lessons and day care and there are limits on the traffic those produce in your neighborhood that are meant to protect your peace and personal space.

There is a concept that your home is your castle, but I would submit that your home is your place to relax and enjoy the fact we live in a pine forest and the joy that brings to us all. Avian joys as well as the critters wandering around who are not threatened by us. Ticks notwithstanding.  A tranquil island of peace in a sea of turbulence if you will.

For some reason the County is considering an assault on our homeowner’s rights by expanding COMMERCIAL activity in peaceful residentially zoned neighborhoods.

They are still looking to abuse the neighborhoods again by trying to repeal or grossly modify the OUTDOOR EVEN ORDIANCE that became necessary to protect our neighborhood from folks that didn’t care about your block’s peace or your property values. It was all about the Benjamin’s for those abusers.

Some years ago there were people who disrespected their neighborhoods to grab a quick buck and endangered their Fire Evacuation routes in spite of their zoning not allowing their commercial party plans. It was the Road Association Folks who were having their pockets picked for road maintenance to support 1 properties commercial parties that led the way from across the county to stop it with the outdoor event ordinance.

The wedding planners who did not want to pay their way were incredibly aggressive against the neighborhoods in the committee that developed the ordinance with rhetoric that did not stand up to the actual wedding license activity record. Then Chair Beason bought their own industrial journal to refute the spin and hyperbole! I believe the video is still available.

Then Chair of the Board Beason and Supervisor Anderson were on that committee with me that included department heads, County Council,  both sides of the issue as well as Fire,  Law Enforcement to speak to the reality on the ground and the very real fire threat to Neighborhoods as well as Environmental Health issues.

Code has no presence on Friday afternoon to Monday to protect you and they knew it.  That’s why we need the Sheriff to protect the neighborhoods peace on the weekends.

Recently I was being lobbied with the line that the hospitality industry was crushed by the heartless Outdoor Event Ordinance.

Yet again the facts do not support the narrative no matter who is repeating the tired narratives.

The numbers tell the story as they always do.

Weddings are a trackable metric with the license data just like they were the last time around.

The average number of wedding licenses issued in Nevada County over the last 5 years was 453.

In 2015 there 435 licenses issued.

In 2016 there were 480 wedding licenses and that was very near the highest ever.

In 2017 there were 465 licenses issued.

In 2018 there were 432 licenses issued.

In 2019 there were 457 wedding licenses issued in Nevada County.

If you live in LOP or lake WW you might think its not your issue because of your CC& R’s that won’t allow a property to do that there.

The real financial threat my friends is that they want to do for profit events that will not generate new business but just cannibalize the business of those venues that have to pay a ton to support their commercial infrastructure in the properly zoned areas such as country clubs and event centers.

The idea to double the allowable events to 8 from 4 in your neighborhood is intolerable.

1 Saturday event in your neighborhood means trucks moving in on Friday to setup then departing, the event and all the cars of the attendees in and out, then another caravan to breakdown on Sunday.

Does that sound like something you want 8 times a year in your neighborhood?

The Ag tourism project portion of this proposal looks totally viable and appropriate.

If you live in a R1 or RA neighborhood then you are threatened by this erosion of your established rights as a homeowner. If you live in WW or LOP the financial stability of your country club/restaurant is at risk.

Tell your supervisors what you think of this assault on neighborhood rights.

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.