Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 3nov19 (updated 6nov19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘America’s Schools (continue to) Flunk’

George Rebane

Speaking of ownership of public policies and government operations, the Democrats own America’s public schools.  They have had title for fifty years to what our children are taught, as they are subjected to somewhere from 12 to 16 years of leftwing ideologies, by unionized teachers and administrators who have laid waste to our school systems from coast to coast.

RR has carried the torch for school choice and public school reform during its entire existence.  I have worked with local public schools here and in SoCal to see firsthand who is doing what to whom, and witnessed their resulting work product.  In this regard, our local schools’ performance, along with what has been happening in California over the last decades, is faithfully recorded in the longitudinal data archive of the National Center for Educational Statistics, and they aren’t pretty.

Today we have the results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which consist of tests administered to students around the country every two years.  A report on this is found in the 31oct19 WSJ (here) with the tagline, “Despite more spending, test scores fall and the achievement gap grows.”, which about says it all.

Digging into some of the more important results, we find that the smaller cohort of smarter students are pulling away from those not so smart, whose performance continues to degrade.  These latter are prime fodder for the progressive pabulum that extols the virtues of bigger government, more transfer payments, and dunning the existential benefits of individual enterprise, capitalism, and minimally regulated markets.  These cohorts of the poorly educated continue to feed the reliable Democrat voting blocks, whose subsequent existence is denied as they become (unemployed) adults – if you’re an American leftist, what’s not to like?

As examples, only 35% of the country’s fourth graders rated proficient in reading.  Overall math and reading scores are about level, save that the top students’ scores increased slightly less than the drop in the scores of the bottom decile.  The black/white learning gap remains dismally large.

Surprisingly (or not), 4^th grade scores increased only in Mississippi, but the real success story comes from Washington DC where charter school enrollments increased 60% since 2009, much to the chagrin of unionized ‘educators’ who felt the pressure to then increase performance in other public schools.  The unions’ answer to every such report of education deficits is to demand more spending for schools.  But spending increased 15% per pupil between 2012 and 2017 from its already (globally) rate, and the result has been no improvement as cited.  “Spending has been growing at an even faster clip over the last couple of years as government revenue has recovered from the recession.”

California, the state of the double-dummy educators, increased its education spending by $102B (more than 50%!!) since 2013 with absolutely no increase in student performance from its already bottom-barrel lows in the nation.  There it is joined by the other Democrat-dominated states – drumroll please – yes, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey.  Along with California, these states have also raised taxes for schools, all to no avail – the teachers’ and administrators’ pension funds suck up the new cash like a sponge.  The report concludes with – “Much of the money has gone to fund teacher pensions and administrative positions that pad union rolls. Maybe parents should go on strike to demand more accountability from the union-run public school monopoly.”

[Exit assignment - pay attention to the number and content of comments from our liberal readers.]

‘From Racism to Culturism’ (updated 18oct19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 23sep19 (updated 24sep19)

George Rebane

George Boardman again flies his true colors with his Union column ‘Trump’s great economy?  Depends on where you are on the food chain’.  He hits all the Democratic Party talking points, and even elevates the top 20% of Americans into the ‘enemy of the people’ class.  Why?  Because they’re getting the largest dollar benefits from our revived economy.  He ignores the wage gains of the middle class and denigrates the historic benefits to our minorities who now have historically low unemployment rates and are leaving entitlement rolls in record numbers.  The Democrats’ fear is clearly evident in his dour assessment - if the dark-skinned among us are able to leave the Progressive Plantation, then from where will come the votes to elect enough leftwing politicians to control Congress and keep alive the country’s lurch to the left?  For a more sober assessment of the country’s economy, you may peruse articles here, here, and here.

Negro names – Deion, Jamar, Keshawn, Lavaughn, Mashawn, Naeem, Rashon, Salim, Dericia, Kanesha, Lachelle, Moesha, Quisha, Talisha, Temima, … (more here) – are the latest and clearest expression of our African-American population’s desire to differentiate themselves and proudly declare their solidarity with their own kind.  Among other such minority initiatives to separate the races (e.g. segregated clubs, institutions, living quarters, …), such initiatives in race-based discrimination are now celebrated, laudable, and promoted behaviors among all non-white peoples.  Our leftwingers again demonstrate their selective blinders by not being able to connect the dots between such expressions and the general characteristic of humans (and other critters) that have the great propensity to dwell among their ‘own kind’ (shared culture and values) rather than having to be politically incorrect strangers in their own land.  BTW, my use of ‘Negro’ is an intentional button push guaranteed to loosen the latest charges and confirmation by the looney Left of my being a racist.  Here is a more reasoned discussion of the current status on the use of that formerly proper and much-employed label. 

Mark Zuckerberg is busy rebuilding human communities to counter their disintegration due to everything from rampant drug addiction to murderous totalitarian regimes.  At the 22jun17 inaugural Communities Summit he lamented that “for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter.  That’s a lot of people who now need to find a sense of purpose and support somewhere else.”  So Mark has been ‘using AI’ to build up new communities that “will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together”, and he’ll “change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on.”  What a nice guy to make such a selfless sacrifice with his business.  And while we’re patting him on the back, guess how and where these new communities will be formed?  Hint1 – it won’t involve real estate.  Hint2 – it will be an enormous new bonanza for harvesting data on people’s propensities, inclinations, and fears.  OK, here’s Hint3 – it starts with an ‘F’.

[24sep19 update]  Biden, ‘I never talked to my son about business.’  That bullshit is so far off the rails that it brings up the biggest concern about floating it in our public forum.  The Democrats know that their base and hanger-on constituents are so terminally stupid that they will actually believe that a very political father will not talk to his beloved underachieving son about a business opportunity from which he can make a load of dough for doing nothing save peddle his father’s influence.  That is really a dumb bunch of voters out there who constitute the biggest threat to our republic.  ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson.

On Fox News this afternoon we saw Iran’s President Rouhani eat Chris Wallace’s lunch.  It was an extremely informative interview and it will play very well back in Iran.  Rouhani was calm, erudite, and had more than an answer and a counter to Wallace’s attempts to conduct some sort of an expose on the crap that Iran has been pulling in its 40-year effort to become the mid-east hegemon.  Much to our chagrin, Wallace couldn’t lay a glove on him.  Next time we should send someone on varsity to interview smart and fast-thinking people.

Nancy Pelosi has now given her imprimatur to an “official” impeachment inquiry against President Trump.  The problem is that this only moves the peanut ahead in the above mentioned mini-minds of Democrat constituents.  Such an official inquiry is no different than what has been going on until now.  What she has failed to launch is a ‘formal’ inquiry which constitutionally allows the issuance of subpoenas and the empanelment of the congressional version of a grand jury.  And having over-the-hill John Lewis (D-GA5)) make the announcement in the well of the House lends special flavor to this three-ring circus.

The House Judiciary Committee got all worked up about getting the Ukraine telecon “whistleblower” to testify in the face of the President releasing the transcript of that conversation which was monitored by a dozen people here and in the Ukraine.  The question which no one, especially Nadler, is asking is on what information beyond the transcript did the whistleblower base his “serious and critical” complaint.  If it was nothing beyond his second hand reading of the transcript, then that means serious egg on the collective Democrats’ face.  But no one has said that he had anything beyond what everyone in the intelligence communities already knew.  Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who has consented to the transcript’s release, is going to throw some cold water on this witch hunt during his UN visit and talk with Trump.

Mayor Reinette Senum of Nevada City is a sincere and dedicated worker for the common good.  She wrote a Union column (here) discussing the ways and means of broadband connectivity – especially 5G – for western Nevada County.  Although I’m seldom in sync with Reinette, I consider her a friend and have defended her right to express and promote her initiatives, no matter how far off the rails they seem to me. She wants broadband to come to our community in a “technology-neutral way”.  Now why would anyone want that???  I thought we all want technology to come our way definitely biased to our greater benefit; forego the losers and go with the winner.  She also wants to place our wellbeing in the hands of “independent scientists and well-informed medical professionals” when it comes to local radio frequency transmissions, but not when it comes to global warming, the impact of which is OK to leave in the interpretative hands of bureaucrats and consensus science.  Nevertheless, I credit her with informing us that the California constitution contains the following - “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”  This, of course, is anathema to the A21 (now Agenda 2030) promoting governor and Democrat overwhelmed California legislature daily taking more private property away from Californians.

Scattershots – 20sep19 (updated 21sep19)

George Rebane

The Daily Signal of the Heritage Foundation discovers ‘The Real Reason for Trump Derangement Syndrome’.  RR readers have been discussing and debating the real reasons for the Left’s virulent TDS ever since the 2016 election.  Yes indeed, with foot firmly planted in mouth, our president is still our champion in the “multifront pushback—politically, socially, economically, and culturally—against what might be called the elite postmodern progressive world.”

Piers Morgan, liberal commentator and journalist, is concerned about where today's liberals and progressives are going with their political correctness cum incipient Soviet communist society.  This video interview (here) on Real Clear Politics is a bit lengthy (hence complete), but the first 10 minutes makes clear that most of what we have been saying in these commentaries for some time is not only shared by conservatives and libertarians, but also by many of those leaning liberal who are alarmed by the utter insanity that now grips the Left.  Morgan summarizes it very well.

Climate hysteria is scheduled on 27 September 2019 to reach globally coordinated proportions with a “first ever international General Strike for Climate” planned by Earth Strike and its affiliated organizational members. (more here)  Their intention is to literally stop the world doing its business.  They must take to the streets to disrupt for the simple reason that their attempts at presenting their arguments for preventable manmade global warming simply don’t hold water in the public forum.  So now it is time to disrupt society in order to push their narrative before the last of their consensus science withers and dies.  Nothing they have prognosticated and presented has panned out, and their cause looks more ridiculous with each passing month.  Hence, the time has come to rout reason.

[21sep19 update] The utter stupidity of AB5 (here) has been picked up by both sides of the political divide now that it is law.  Here is what our favorite cartoonist Bob Crabb published in the 21sep19 Union.

Scattershots - 5sep19

Trip report.  We’re now on the Rhine heading for Koblenz to view some historical fortifications.  On this trip we landed in Munich, and drove to Bad Worishofen for a big reunion with four German families we have known and visited for decades, and ate ourselves silly at different places in the foothills of the Alps.  Very interesting was that no one wanted to talk politics very much - a staple of German conversation.  Then we drove to Basel through Austria and Switzerland to catch our Viking river longship.  The trip down the Rhine has been wonderful, especially the tour of the actual battlegrounds of the little known Colmar salient (contemporaneously fought with the Battle of the Bulge and the campaign made famous by Audie Murphy).  The daylong walking tour of Strasbourg was almost a reminder of the march up the Bataan peninsula.  We’re again traveling with friends with whom we done this before.  So far we’ve been through four countries and will add Holland before coming home.

Demise of Capitalism?

George Rebane

The world’s population is stabilizing, if not starting to ‘stagnate’, and will soon start declining.  This argument and its impacts on humanity are presented in two newly published books – The Human Tide: How Populaton Shaped the Modern World (2019) by Paul Morland, and Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.  As a result, capitalism as we know it will disappear explains Zachart Karabell who reviews the books in the Sep/Oct issue of Foreign Affairs – ‘The Population Bust – Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It’.

The crux of that striking conclusion rests on the theory that capitalism remains viable only in an environment of eternal growth; once growth stops or reverses, then capitalism, as we know it, will collapse.  “If global population stops expanding and then contracts, capitalism - a system implicitly predicated on ever-burgeoning numbers of people - will likely not be able to thrive in its current form.”  But I have no idea where this ominous ‘predicate’ comes from.

Capitalism is fundamentally based on human nature organizing economies in an environment of open markets in which prices effectively communicate the supply and demand for goods and services.  Therefore, if demand slows down and then contracts, so long as open markets are allowed to operate, capitalists will adjust their enterprises accordingly.  The only aspect of such a contraction of available services and things for sale is its impact on the value of money. 

The value of any given supply of money depends on the amount of available goods and services it can command in transactions.  Its value, as reflected in open market discount (i.e. interest) rates will track the size of the economies in which it is used as the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value.  For example, the value of a lot of fiat dollars will decline if there is less to buy or build with them.  But again, such values will adjust accordingly as central banks ply their wily ways of taking money out of and injecting it into economies.  Granted, if human perceptions about markets change rapidly, then there will be financial shocks as the value of monies held by governments and the public also changes rapidly – after all, we must always remember that fiat money by its very nature is strongly faith-based.

So here we are in the pre-Singularity years as birth rates all over the world are dropping and populations are aging (older folks don’t consume as much as younger ones).  Advances in healthcare and productivity promoted through capitalism are making poorer countries richer, and encourage the richer countries to maintain growth through immigration. The current world population of approximately 7.6B will probably not exceed 10B by mid-century before it starts pulling back.  And given the impact of accelerating technology on systemic unemployment and income inequality, global population pullback is not something to be feared, but to be managed through judicious wealth distribution so as to maintain civil societies that continue to provide an increasing quality of life.  And once the Singularity does occur, all bets are off, as most then alive scramble to become trans-humans (q.v.).  For an entertaining and stimulating treatment of such a plausible future, I recommend Childhood’s End (1953) by A.C Clarke.

The Lone Wolf Killers

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 August 2019.]

Each spate of mass shootings reveals yet another aspect of current American politics and how easy it is to manipulate the country’s masses.  As a result of the El Paso and Dayton massacres we are drenched in daily calls to ‘do something’, anything to stop rightwing ‘racists’ and ‘white supremacists’ from continuing their reign of terror wherever innocent people gather.  The ‘do something’ cries have reinvigorated our Second Amendment opponents to take more “common sense” steps on the road to total confiscation of guns.  Currently these steps involve more background checks, red-flag laws, and, of course, the ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’.  (more here)

Non-political experts continue to tell us that neither the current background check laws on the books, nor the newly House-passed Background Checks Act would have stopped any of these killings by first-time lone wolves with clean police records.  Nor would red-flag laws, already on the books in many states, provide any guarantee of prevention, since people naturally hesitate to apply them because of their high false alarm rates and their impact on personal relationships.  This latter point was highlighted by psychiatrist Richard Friedman in a recent NYT op-ed where he stated that “experienced psychiatrists fare no better than a roll of the dice at predicting violence. The evidence suggests that while red-flag laws do stop suicides, it isn’t clear they prevent mass shootings.”

And our progressives, including the Democratic candidates, declare that the real problem for such indigenous terror is the presence of a persistent and burgeoning number of ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ Americans.  According to these leftwingers, the problem now is so bad that all of President Trump’s supporters can be classed as ‘white supremacists’.  It is this massive body of misfits that spawns the killers of innocents among us.  For such progressives, America is still a racist country overrun by white supremacists who continue to deny people of color their legal and constitutional rights.  These assertions are ludicrous on their face as argued by among others, historians such as Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute and David Harsanyi of the Federalist.  America is the overwhelming destination of emigrants from all over the world, and over 90% these emigrants are people of color, most of whom clamor for entry from Hispanic America and Africa.  So, what do all these would be immigrants know about white supremacy in the United States that Democrats don’t know?

The tragically populous tails of terror (updated 10aug19)

George Rebane

Last weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings are today’s national conversation, a conversation that does not yet communicate much beyond the emotional demand that something must be done.  The conversation is yet a babble that has little reason, meaning, or direction in either working toward a shared understanding of the problem, and most certainly not toward any shared understanding of possible solutions, were they even to exist.

The little contribution here is only to record my own perceptions and feelings, and not offered as some definitive insight, the application/adoption of which would miraculously relieve our national pain.  The overarching insight is that all these nativist massacres (as opposed to those motivated by foreign ideology/theology) are the inevitable result of a growing cultural deficit.  The population distribution of cultures has become flatter as the former dominant cultures are practiced by ever fewer people – in a statistical sense, the tails of such distribution of multiple cultures are becoming fatter, and therefore more populous.  This means that the number of people who invent, join, practice new and extreme cultures and belief systems is rapidly growing.  The inevitable result of such an amalgam is that more and more individuals are out there on the borderline of doing something to act out their recently acquired and strongly held beliefs about what is wrong with the society in which they find themselves.  And with more on the borderline, more are likely to cross it with the results we see.

Scattershots – 23jul19 (updated 24jul19)

George Rebane

Marxist-Leninist ideology has proven itself as the world’s most toxic way to organize society, primarily because of its appeal to the simple-minded and uneducated (according to Rebane Doctrine).  Today the so-called Justice Democrats have joined with Our Revolution to form the most prominent ‘legitimate’ political organization to promote an M-L future for America.  Our Revolution is the front for the three most influential Marxist organizations in America – Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party USA, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  This is what you will get when you back Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the Squad.

‘Can’t We All Just Get Along?’ Here’s Victor Davis Hanson putting many things from the Obama years in perspective, things that our liberal contingent shows us daily that they have forgotten, if they ever even noticed such happenings in the first place.  As VDH reminds us, the Democrats have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.  (H/T to reader)

Fire Team (a squad is divided into two fire teams) Tlaib and Omar are heading for Israel and the West Bank with the blessings of President Trump and the welcoming Prme Minister Netanyahu.  They will be there to promote their anti-Israeli BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) bill that Pelosi will never allow on the House floor.  That doesn’t matter, the Squad has become the mind and message of the Democratic Party whose more politically astute members are trying to stifle before the election season gets too far along.  Every Republican considers those brainless broads to be the gift that keeps on giving – long may they wave.

Puerto Rico’s hot summer continues as San Juan’s citizens by the tens of thousands demonstrate to get their governor Rossello to resign after some revealing tweets of his were made public.  But the question I ask readers to consider is why Puerto Rico continues to flirt with being a banana republic.  Why has that island remained a corrupt and essentially dysfunctional state after enjoying more than a century of being a succored territory of the United States with special dispensations for its citizens, trade relations, investment sources, economic aid, … ??  I suggest again that it is their culture that keeps them in their perennial dire straits; a culture that they share with much of the western hemisphere south of our border, and the same culture that most on our Left are trying to infuse into our land with its porous borders.

[update]  Seven Dems on the House Judiciary Committee floated fake Russiagate stories. Tomorrow they get to quiz Mueller.  Such is the nature of the carnival that was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.  No more deliberation allowed, just time-worn, disproved allegations and outright lies.  There is the cast of characters ready to expose their character and show their prowess in questioning Special Counsel Mueller in the fervent hope that he will break and tell everyone that Trump was really guilty as sin, his report was a whitewash, and now he is sorry. (more here)

[24jul19 update]  The Mueller testimony to Congress is over. The man came across confused, timid, and uninformed – the Dems ‘movie’ to follow the ‘book’ was a bust.  But au contraire, to hear the Dems on the media outlets tonight, they had a great victory – now the American people know that Trump colluded with the Russians to assure his election victory, and then partook in numerous criminal acts to obstruct subsequent justice.  This is straight out of the Stalinist/Leninist playbook – just counter with bigger lies that contradict truth.  Mueller found no evidence for collusion or obstruction; had he done so, he, who set a new standard for RINO, would have said so.  Instead, his best efforts against Trump was a lame statement, never before heard from a prosecutor, that he “did not exonerate” Trump from the obstruction allegations, having yet to find any evidence of support – a non-news statement first made public in AG Barr’s letter summary of the report over three months ago.  So all the Dems are now busy in the political sweatshop trying to sew silk purses out of sows’ ears.  Only Pelosi is justifiably happy that, no matter the further efforts of Nadler’s nitpickers, the butt stupid effort to impeach the president is dead.  As a footnote, one of my liberal friends assured me today that Mueller’s 17 crack lawyers only included 4 Democrats, when in reality they were 13 Dems, 0 Repubs, 6 Hillary donors, and most having being associated with Team Clinton in one way or another.  But all that only underlined that Mueller’s obvious unfamiliarity with his own investigation and report, strongly indicated that he did little to lead the investigation which was conducted and reported by his ‘never Trump’ troops (e.g. "not familiar with Fusion GPS").

Racism and Racists revisited (updated 24jul19)

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

George Rebane

In a more learned time ‘racism’ was defined by first class dictionaries like the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged) 2 ed as “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.”  Today, Dictionary.com still posts that same definition verbatim.  Unfortunately, that’s where it ends.

In days of yore, and perhaps still among the more precise speakers and writers, a ‘racist’ was a person who embraced such a belief or doctrine.  No longer.  Today in the public forum ignorance and political cynicism rule the day, and are reinforced by the hour in print, online, in schools, and by politicians of both parties.  Racist can be an indictment of someone's comments that have absolutely nothing to do with racism, simply on the invocation of 'We know what he really meant'. It is of a piece of our declining culture that does not bode well for America.  One of my early commentaries on racism was ‘Who is a Racist?’; there I particularly call your attention to the intense and self-assured responses from our liberal commenters.

Today, racist is a label publicly, cynically, and even gratuitously hung around the neck of –

1. Anyone who disagrees with your speech or opinion;
2. Any white person who disagrees with the speech or opinion of a non-white person;
3. Any white person who describes a non-white person in any but the most salutary terms;
4. Anyone who tells a non-white to ‘go back where you came from’;
5. Anyone who describes radical Islam in their own terms;
6. Anyone who opposes illegal entry into the US;
7. Anyone who opposes taxpayer funded succor and sanctuary to illegal aliens;
8. Anyone who calls a shithole country a shithole country;
9. Anyone who wants illegal aliens deported according to our laws;
10. Anyone who wants to enforce our immigration laws;
11. Anyone who cites the race-based IQ testing results published by the American Psychological Association;
12. Anyone who points out the cultural deficits of a non-white country;
13. Anyone who identifies a mulatto as a mulatto;
14. Any white person who disagrees with an elected politician, official, teacher, … of color;
15. Any white person who criticizes the government sponsored demise of the black family;
16. Anyone who points out that overwhelmingly and obviously people like to live among cultural likes;
17. Anyone who points out the failure of certain non-white groups to assimilate;
18. … .

The list goes on indefinitely as expressions and behaviors are uncritically labeled ‘racist’.  What they all share in common is that each has absolutely nothing to do with the original precise definition of racism.  In spite of this, for the Left 'racist' has long become the preferred pejorative with which to tar their political opponents.  So today ‘racist’ can mean anything, when it actually means nothing.  The danger to our republic is that the Humpty Dumpty approach to semantics has now been baked into our justice system.

[24jul19 update] The national press is taking up the points of my above commentary.  To wit, that the media offer no proof or basis for charging President Trump’s tweets to have been ‘racist’.  They just continue to pile on empty moralizing, repeating the racist charge with no accompanying reasoning or evidence whatsoever.  In the comment stream below, we see the echoes of this from our local liberal light-thinkers who have never been able to go beyond the lamestream’s talking points.  To their benefit we beseech, ‘Lord, forgive them for they know not what they say.’

An example of this appears in ‘Prove the Tweets Were Racist’ by WSJ editorial board member Holman Jenkins.  Excerpts from his piece follow –

• Numerous outlets this week deceived themselves when they referred to Mr. Trump’s “racist tweets” as if their racist nature was an established fact that good reporting had nailed down. They think they are being brave when they are being the opposite. Brave was a dissenter: Keith Woods, National Public Radio’s diversity chief, who argued on NPR’s website that reporters should report facts and do interviews and leave the moralizing to people they quote.

• (The media sought) to incriminate Mr. Trump with words and actions of people who are not Mr. Trump. Media outlet after media outlet confidently asserted that Mr. Trump was speaking in racist code. But if it’s code, its meaning cannot be detected in the plain words, so we must rely on the media’s anointed code breakers to tell us what Mr. Trump really meant. (emphasis mine)

• Trump makes a great deal of trouble for himself because he insists on free-associating in public. He won’t, like other politicians, stick to scripts carefully scrubbed of ambiguity. But the press does not make truth out of ambiguity by putting words in his mouth. (emphasis mine)

• If they acquired a bit of political realism (from Trump’s election), reporters might even notice something about Mr. Trump’s “make America great again” slogan. It gives a large and ineradicable part of the electorate a way to frame their interests and discontents without reciprocating the identity-based claims of those they see (not altogether inaccurately) as assailing them.

• Frankly, some humility is also in order from a press that has displayed a more than usual amount of gullibility, conformism and poor judgment on just about every matter that has come before them in the past few years. If the media’s not-so-secret agenda is to defeat Mr. Trump, they might consider the possibility that they are (again) going about it in exactly the wrong way.

Scattershots – 13jul19 (updated 16jul19)

George Rebane

Thistle and Shamrock is a weekly program of Irish music on NPR hosted for years by Fiona Richie who speaks in a rich Irish brogue.  On weekends at our house we hear about the first ten minutes of it before one of us turns it off or to another station.  And that is because neither of us have developed an ear for rhythmic Irish tunes, the kind that are played by small combos at gatherings or in public houses.  To us they all sound pretty much alike.  The deficit is clearly ours, because we like many varieties of music and have always supported this cultural art form.  Every time I hear another Irish tune on the radio, the long-held notion always crosses my mind that I could write and program an Irish tune-composing algo that could readily pass the Turing test – i.e. people alternately listening to such machine and human composed music would in their aggregate judgments not be able to tell which is which.  Maybe some music major could do that in a graduate program.

Our language continues to languish under progressive pedagogy. So many words have lost their unique meanings as they are required  to carry excess semantic baggage that makes their parsimonious use obsolete and obfuscates their meaning, especially in today's political commentary.  My latest addition to this list of overburdened words is ‘hate’, ‘hatred’, ‘hateful’, et al.  (It joins established residents like ‘racist’ and ‘hero’.)  In days gone by, the semantic for using anything from the ‘hate genre’ was reserved for feelings and expressions of “intense dislike, or extreme aversion or hostility.”  Not anymore.  Today our liberal literary lightweights append the hate-word to any and every person, group, behavior, or expression that simply disagrees with any one of the limited number of shibboleths that for most progressives comprise their politics and worldview.  If you happen to disagree with some Democrat or communist’s prescriptions or assessments, and write or talk about it, that is immediately labeled as ‘hateful’ or ‘hate speech’.  And make no mistake, they are the final arbiters of such judgments, from which there is neither appeal nor available eleisons.  The real scary thing is that they all want Big Brother to become the all-seeing and powerful censor of everything that to them is hateful.

Mighty today, missing tomorrow. ‘Remember Visicalc?’ asks Christopher Mims (here) in the 13jul19 WSJ.  Visicalc was the first spreadsheet and killer app, and I remember the relief of switching to it around 1980 after spending a weekend programming a cash planning model on the HP-85 for an electronics manufacturing company I was just hired to turn around.  In those days it cost about $10K and over a week to have your accountancy firm do a cashflow projection for, say, the next 8 quarters, and $5K for every subsequent update of the model.  Once Visicalc arrived, I turned my people on to it and quickly became a spreadsheet ‘expert’ – suddenly the PCs had a real and unique business use.  Soon Lotus 1-2-3 came along and we all jumped on that bandwagon, until Bill Gates brought us Excel, and we’ve stayed with that ‘forever’ (while always keeping an eye out for the next better thing).  Anyway, the succession of spreadsheet makers illustrates the history and ongoing saga of companies making it big, and then failing by missing the newest big wave.  Next into the breech is Google according to Daniel Colin James in his very readable ‘This Is How Google Will Collapse’.  Many are now eagerly awaiting its demise, especially since it so obviously and salaciously abandoned ‘Do no harm.’

[14jul19 update]  Even the vaunted WSJ sometimes comes off the rails, as they did recently in a column written by some worthy claiming economist credentials.  He patiently explained to the reader that markets work and trades occur when buyer and seller value equally what they are willing to give each other in the trade.  You don’t need to be an economic maven to understand that such an arrangement is patently not true.  If both parties value equally what they already have, then there is no reason to go through the risk and bother of a trade.  It is ONLY when both parties view what the other has as being more valuable to him than what he currently holds that then make functioning markets and dealing possible.  When prices are set at value parity or higher, markets stagnate.  (Methinks the writer has strong grounds for demanding a refund on his tuition, since he can now demonstrate that they taught him nothing.)

[15jul19 update]  President Trump screwed up again tweeting the recommended return of the Democrats’ Squad members to their native countries.  With another swipe at the English language, Pelosi called his tweets “xenophobic”.  Representative AOC and her House rabble rouser squad have their origins in Somalia, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and Africa.  To be fair, Trump did advise them to go back to fix the obvious problems in their native lands.  However, IMHO he should have called attention to their outrageous policy proposals by pointing out that they are seeking to bring to America the same kind of policies and political methods that have devastated places from which they and/or their ancestors hailed.

NYC’s DeBlasio is now hands down the top Democrat big city incompetent idiot.  Single-handedly he has reversed the city’s years-long declining crime rates by denying the legitimacy of its justice system.  In the process “He propagates the smear that the majority-minority NYPD unjustifiably targets minorities when conducting street investigations. He knows there is nothing racially proportionate about reported violent crimes in the city, which in the busiest precincts affect only minorities. His posturing and gamesmanship provide fuel for the worst kind of conspiracy theories and hate speech against officers. Never has a mayor been more disdained by his police.”  Lest you think this turkey is the current Lone Ranger in these generations long urban disasters of governance, DeBlasio is joined by like-minded incompetents from his party in a long list of cities that begins with San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.  (more here)

[16jul19 update]  "We have a really hard time (“connecting with voters”),” Sen Hirono (D-HI) lamented (here), "and one of the reasons it was told to me at one of our retreats was that we Democrats know so much, that is true. And we kind of have to tell everyone how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain."  Unfortunately, that is neither true nor anywhere close, as Will Rogers said, “It’s not what you know that worries me, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”  However, she did nail the Dems’ attitude about their constituents; intellectually they are a challenged lot as we have pointed out for years.  And Sen Hirono herself is one great example of a Deficit Diva leading her flock of gimmes.  (H/T to RR commenter for digging this out.)

Happy Fourth, if you can (updated)

George Rebane

This patriotic graphic was posted on last year’s 4^th of July.  Continuing our national trend, this year’s celebration has gotten a bit more tense.  We now have invented and baked in the country’s psyche the national notion that everything ante-bellum that was part of American history is fair game to be attacked, withdrawn, denied, silenced, or destroyed.  The latest is the very familiar Betsy Ross flag, the first Stars and Stripes to grace our newborn country with its familiar ring of thirteen stars for the original thirteen colonies.  No more.

Picking a Politically Proficient Heritage

George Rebane

Kamala Harris’ insistence that she is African-American, in spite of the Jamaican detour of her father’s lineage, raises an interesting and, perhaps, important point on how we claim our racial roots in this age of political correctness. (more here)  Not imposing any reasonable limits on climbing up our ancestral tree would, of course, allow each of us to call ourselves African-American.  That would effectively kill that label’s semantic in American politics.

(A language derives its power from the accuracy and precision of its words or lexicon which allows its users to readily discriminate between shades of meaning.  Therefore, the more words - precisely defined, meticulously preserved, and correctly used – within its lexicon, the more effective are the communications that a language supports in the sense of enabling complete, clear, and compact messaging.  Semantically prostituted words with multiple meanings are inefficient and ambiguous, and require additional discriminative words to correctly communicate ideas and assertions.  Today’s English is a mess created by our educational system.)

So, how far back should we go in claiming and projecting our ethno-racial heritage?  In my case, I could call myself a Mongo-American since my racial derivation is from the Finno-Ugric segment of Europe’s Nordic clans.  The Ugric tribes originally migrated westward from Mongolia, leaving some in the Ural Mountains of Russia before spreading out into eastern Europe.  Estonians and Finns are genetically identical, and both speak what modern linguists call a Finno-Ugric language.  Or perhaps I should proclaim myself to be an Ugric-American.  I don’t know, but Estonian-American sounds as bland as Jamaican-American.  Neither effectively communicates its aggrieved past as required in today's proper public use of identity politics.  So what kind of hyphenated American are you?

Ruminations - 1jul19 (updated 2jul19)

George Rebane

George Boardman writes ‘Trump wants to turn the 4^th of July into a political rally’ in the 1jul19 Union.  Students of American history know that patriotic holidays, especially the 4^th of July, have been used by politicians – incumbents and wannabes – to meld their message within a patriotic mantle.  It is the recently educated who have no knowledge of our country’s past, and today are using everything to excoriate Trump.  I could have sworn Mr Boardman to be old enough to know better.

Kamala Harris owes her career to being a privileged mulatto – Jamaican father, Indian mother – which in today’s racial labeling allows her to call herself a black - “I am black and I am proud of it.”  She has played the black card for advancement all her life, and now she is beating her fellow Democrat presidential candidates over the head with it.  And it might even get her the nomination, unless one of her opponents has the courage to tell voters that her claims of having risen through racial discrimination is just politically motivated bull crap.

Bullet buying background checks start today in California.  This new law will have no impact on criminals and their use of firearms to commit crimes.  But it will further constructively restrict the Second Amendment rights of the state’s law-abiding citizens.  And after all, the constructive confiscation of guns is the objective of all socialists, especially those still in denial.  The objective has always been to restrict guns to government and criminals, and out of the hands of citizens who might one day choose to revolt as autocracy evolves into tyranny.

[2jul19 update] Under Obama, porous borders admit a dull roar of illegals who are incarcerated with children in separate quarters.  Millions are subsequently deported under our immigration laws, Republicans promote border security infrastructure, but do not criticize the stark detention quarters.  Under Trump, Democrats issue international invitations to disgruntled foreigners to enter the US illegally with promises of amnesty and citizenship.  Millions respond, creating a security and humanitarian crisis at the border.  The Democrats refuse to fund either border barriers to slow the flow or increased detention facilities to house the illegals as required by law.  Instead, they attack the president and Republicans for “separating families” as our law requires, and having created the crisis by not allowing free access through our border, sufficient welcoming succor at our border, and the unvetted and unconditional release into America’s interior.

Scattershots – 24jun19 (updated 27jun19)

George Rebane

The Left wants nothing measured the public reporting of which it cannot control, or that goes against their established narrative.

Our intrepid progressive pundit and Union columnist George Boardman is all exercised in his ‘Double dipping at the public trough, in the spotlight, and just the facts’ published in the newspaper’s 24jun19 edition.  There he leaps off the rails to rail those double dipping Dahles, while totally missing the definition of double dipping as it pertains to government payees.  Megan Dahle plans to run for her husband Brian Dahle’s recently vacated California Assembly seat since winning his seat in the state’s Senate.  If Mrs Dahle wins, she will become the elected representative from her district, doing the work of an assemblyman, and on her own merits and efforts earning that position’s pay.  That having a second member of the family also performing an independent job in government is in no way double dipping, save it serve a distinctly progressive political narrative.  Apparently Mr Boardman misses that significant nuance that spouses of elected politicians are also individuals with a duplicate set of rights to independently seek employment and recompense as they see fit.  Ah, the bespoke blinders of the Left.  (On the same op-ed page see also Manny Montes’ commentary that helps explain Mr Boardman’s values.)

In the 24jun19 update to my ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ commentary, I posited the following observation about cultures.

Peace and prosperity were generally maintained as long as such a governed society’s culture was allowed to evolve without obvious interdictions by government.  It is easy to see why this approach to organizing societies worked as long as the dominant culture was sufficiently cohesive.  A little reflection reveals that culture is able to inculcate and control the most complex sets of human behaviors, and allow their natural expressions in new environments/situations without having to write down a single law or regulation.  Behaviors (acceptable and unacceptable) are learned in the family and in the village square, and ‘enforced’ by the culture’s collective – i.e. everyone.

In searching for exceptions to the above, the Talmud of the Jewish diaspora occurred to me.  The Talmud is an extensive collection (or collections if you consider separately its Babylonian and Jerusalem parts) of Jewish civil and ceremonial law along with its ethnic legends.  It comprises quite a collection of volumes that painstakingly detail a comprehensive body of behaviors and processes permitted and proscribed to practicing Jews everywhere.  And ‘everywhere’ here is the key idea.  After the Romans destroyed their Jerusalem temple in 70AD, the Jews were driven from their traditional homelands, and found themselves spread all over Europe and northern Africa.

While always seeking to stick together wherever they found themselves, they were necessarily separated and for centuries mostly out of touch with other Jewish communities.  So how to retain, practice, and promulgate the culture that defined them and their very Jewishness when so dispersed?  The answer was through the formalization of their culture in written form, which, as I have often argued, requires many volumes to record, study, and teach.  The Talmud is thus the exception that highlights and supports my dissertations on the function and efficiency of cultures in prescribing normative behaviors within coherent populations.

[25jun19 update]  The lamestream outlets are exorcising President Trump for his new sanctions against individuals in the Iranian leadership.  Specifically, vindictive opprobrium is dished out at Trump’s sanctioning Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and leading negotiator who has been our main point of contact in the sub-rosa diplomatic efforts between the two countries.  Their common wisdom is that now we have lost someone with whom we have been able to communicate.  What these pinheads and pundits miss is that the president has to include Zarif in the sanctions if he is to remain as our point of future contact.  Omitting Zarif’s obviously needed inclusion would have made him suspect among the raghead mullahs, and cost him his job or worse.

[26jun19 update] "Remarkably, a recent study cited in The Atlantic (gasp!) found that “the most politically intolerant Americans” tend be white, highly educated urban progressives. ... Long ago, religious zealots embraced feudal ideals, but increasingly it’s the ultra-secular progressives who reprise the role of Medieval Inquisitors."  Whoulda thought?  (H/T to reader)

[27jun19 update] Photo journalism at its worst as far as providing information to impact public policy - that is conveyed by the photo of the drowned father and his toddler daughter floating face down at the water’s edge (here).  This emotional picture drives all reason and logic from viewers’ uncritical minds; whatever narrative you want to connect with that image will now be taken as God’s truth about illegal border crossings, immigration, President Trump’s border security policies, … .  No one will consider factors such as the abnormally low death rate that is connected with illegal border crossings per se – illegal aliens die before getting to the border, and a few die after successfully entering the US, but given the circumstances, the death rate is mercifully low.  How do we know?  Had there been any previous border crossing deaths, crack photo journalists would have had such pictures posted and published in every imaginable outlet all over the globe.  Fortunately, that is not the case.  I do note that the father did a very foolish and deadly thing by stuffing his daughter into his t-shirt, thus guaranteeing the toddler’s death should he not be able to stay afloat with that ungainly load in the roiling waters.  In any event, now we are guaranteed another spate of public policies based on emotion and the absence of reason.

Democrats continue to dramatically disrespect and discount the intellect of their base and those voters they desire to attract.  A particularly specious attractant their presidential candidates are using is their promise to forgive student debt.  They are betting that their supporters will be like the now-infamous video clip of an Obama voter who believed that all the promised goodies she received would be paid for out “the President’s stash”.  OPM continues to be the salve Democrat elites will use to fix everything that ails us if you just give them your vote.  Michael Solon in the 27jun19 WSJ adds to the obvious when he writes - Debt forgiveness punishes those who did the right thing, made sacrifices, and acted wisely and frugally, as well as those who simply didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Isn’t this the sort of private gain at public expense that people on the left claim to abhor? … Such forgiveness would also eliminate a quality-control device that drives students to ensure their investment can be monetized to cover their costs. A student who borrows must make sure his future earnings will be enough to pay off the loans. If that incentive disappears, with free debt or free college, the graduate and the nation would suffer economically.  (Also see my ‘Student Loan Scam Solution’)

‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ (updated 24jun19)

George Rebane

Yes, that is the advertised name of the event in public libraries, including our own, during which a man, who dresses and wears make-up to look like a woman, will gather children ages 3-8 around him and read them stories.  Our 21jun19 Union reports (here) on the program and the community’s reaction.  Therein we hear Supervisor Heidi Hall extoll of overwhelming public support for the program, and assert that “naturally open and curious” children in that age bracket will be “better off” when they “see that the world is a big place with a lot of variety.”  And some supporters even feel that such a ‘flaunting display of sexuality’ will be of special benefit to young boys who “could use a little bit of help in growing up and not being jerks.”

Here I want to record my reaction to this most visible evidence of the recent years’ rapid transformation of what was our culture.  It has been a long-enduring intention and objective of our country’s progressives to convince Americans that what we formerly considered as aberrant should now be seen as just another aspect of an accepted and embraced ‘normal’ in our society.  In this case, we should not look askance, let alone discourage, a young boy traipsing around in his mother’s dress and heels.  And even more so when he wishes to expose this different mode of expression on days he goes to school wanting to feel like a girl.

Scattershots – 14jun19 (updated 20jun19)

George Rebane

Proto-socialists on parade.  I noticed in the 14jun19 Union’s lead op-ed another example of a good-hearted, light-thinker wailing about our country’s unequal distribution of wealth, and its pitifully inadequately small government.  A Ms Becky Goodwin laments that no “millionaire” attended her kids’ college graduations to pay off their student loans, and why should such largess be a sometime thing instead of a universal benefit across the land.  She gives no evidence of understanding how such inequalities contribute to the overall wealth and weal of a nation.  As a devoted leftist, she eschews private charities and wants all such benefits to come from a much larger government that gets such monies from taxing the bejeezus out of rich folks who just happened to belong to what was known as the middle class (more here).  The country is chock full of these proto-socialist Beckys who deny the label but would eagerly vote for every Bernie, AOC, and Green New Deal that comes their way.

Growing populism and middle-class anger.  If there’s any hope for liberal governments, then it may well begin with what VDH summarizes in his ‘Why Are the Western Middle Classes So Angry?’  He outlines six “gripes” that are also part of RR’s mantra –

• Illegal immigration and open borders have caused institutional chaos and cultural compromises – e.g. multicultural identity politics.
• Globalization that has enriched Western elites who have “outsourced, offshored, and ignored their own industries and manufacturing.”
• The viral explosion of unelected bureaucrats at all levels of government consisting of sinecured, feedback-proof regulators, planners, auditors, inspectors, and adjustors.
• The global lamestream media reaching and indoctrinating billions rather than practicing what was known as ethical journalism.
• The post-educational academia that now functions as a “shrill agent of cultural transformation … charging more for less learning.”
• “Utopian social planning”, a la Agenda21, that has “increased housing, energy, and transportation costs.”

VDH concludes that “because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up—or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a non-democratic, all-powerful Orwellian state.”

Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard?, asks our favorite Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute (see also here).  This paragon of academia, that enjoys a $39,000,000,000 endowment made possible only through the largess of western capitalism, is now teaching its students that, in fact, capitalism contains “systemic inequities”, and the “capitalist ethos” is false because it teaches that “we deserve to win because of our skill, our hard work, and our contributions.”  Not at all, maintains Dean Rakesh Khurana, because in reality capitalism is a zero-sum game that rewards its players simply on the roll of Fortuna’s dice – remember “you didn’t build that”.  Khurana most recently disseminated this blather at Harvard’s commencement in a speech which pointedly ignored that his “parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, one of the events leading him to conclude that at least 85% of his current status is due to circumstances beyond his control. His parents presumably came to the U.S. because they saw opportunity, not “systemic inequities.” That opportunity arises from Western civilization’s accomplishments: the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression and inquiry, and the relative absence of corruption—all matters about which Mr. Khurana was silent. This civilizational inheritance allows social mobility and wealth creation unimaginable in most of the non-Western world.”  Read MacDonald’s article for the full story.  (H/T to correspondent)

‘Socialist’ Nordics are moving toward private healthcare – what a revoltin’ development!  As we have reported for years, free healthcare is unsustainable, and its dive into the mud is slowed only by providing fewer and slower services.  The answer to it is - seatbelts please - private healthcare funded through private health insurance.  Daily Signal reports that quiet trend has been going on for years with increases in such insurance purchases by 7% of Norwegians, 4% of Swedes, and leading the way, 22% of Danes who have been able to augment their ‘free’ healthcare.  A good piece, that covers what is offered to whom, when, and for how much in various countries our socialists are trying to emulate, is detailed here.

[17jun19 update] Our broken Constitution and legal system.  SCOTUS upheld the cynical double jeopardy provision that our Constitution specifically prohibits.  The Daily Caller reports,  “The Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause prohibits multiple prosecutions for the same offense. An exception to this rule called the separate sovereigns doctrine allows state and federal governments to bring successive prosecutions for the same crime. Monday’s decision leaves the doctrine in place, meaning any person Trump pardons remains exposed to state prosecutions.”  The only reasonable conclusion here is that our Constitution does not apply equally to the federal government and those of the several states.  The ‘separate sovereigns doctrine’ and the entire quagmire of a sub-rosa administrative law legal system give continued evidence that our legal system is both broken and corrupt.

Cap & Trade slush fund.  Years ago when CO2 cap & trade was first proposed, I and my fellow climate change skeptics predicted that such monies would soon be used for all kinds of other progressive vote-buying give-aways by Sacramento.  Well, that day has arrived (more here).  The scumbags in the state legislature, who have claimed CA is flush with cash, can’t hide the truth any longer and have to go after money wherever they can find to fund their follies, or just to keep minimal government services going.  RR readers, of course, know what the response of the local lefties was to such predictions. (H/T to reader)

[20jun19 update]  My new favorite communist is Umair Haque. I have reported on his virulently anti-American essays before.  This prolific, yet amazingly ignorant, ultra-left ideologue is published regularly on Medium.com which is an outlet primarily by and for Millennials, and therefore deserves a regular look-see by those seeking to keep up on their thought and sentiments.  Umair’s (that’s how he signs himself) latest mind bending contributions are ‘(Why) There Was No Jackpot at the End of Capitalism’s Rainbow’, ‘The Pattern of the 21^st Century is Predatory Collapse’,  and ‘The Soviet Union of Capitalism’.  Enjoy your visit.

Alabama Abortion Law

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

‘Religious Freedom in Islam’

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like likes Likes - once more (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruminations – 30apr19 (updated 3may19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 24apr19 (updated 25apr19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our K-12 education is a national travesty

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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