Rebane's Ruminations

Culture Drives Reality

George Rebane

It is the unfortunate case that individuals can not only have their own opinions, but also their own facts that substantiate those opinions. – Rebane Doctrine

A person’s reality is a manifestation of his culture.  More specifically, an individual’s ontology or worldview of reality is, at a minimum, strongly influenced or maximally determined by the culture in which he was raised or has since adopted, and now lives.

This thesis has been argued by philosophers, historians, and psychologists for the better part of the last 50 years, and today goes a long way to explain the behaviorally cohesive cultural cohorts worldwide.  In America we have reverted into a strongly politicized polyglot of cultures (tribes?) whose diverse adherents no longer practice a common culture in the public square.  Instead, we take great pride in demonstrating to one and all our particular complement of unique behaviors which declare our cultural bona fides and tribe memberships.  And woe be it to anyone to dismiss, discredit, or discriminate against such behaviors as expressions of a sacrosanct culture whose dimensions include any combination of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.

Everyone has unique rights when operating under the obvious mantle of their culture, since all cultures are held to be valuable and of equal worth.  Actually, upon closer examination, some cultures have been and remain definitely worth more to humanity than others, especially if they derive from western or European cultures.

To illustrate the veracity of the above thesis, we can appeal to several examples that range from recorded history to current events from the present day.  We start by recognizing that one reality of human consciousness itself rose from a cultural transformation that reaches back to about 1200 BC (or BCE, if you prefer).  The late Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes gave a very convincing account of how consciousness, in the sense of the rise of the personal agency of I/me, arose in the middle east during the 400 years of the so-called Dorian Invasions (1200 – 800 BC).

In his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1990) Jaynes describes how ‘pre-Dorian’ people, who then lived nomadically or in small towns and villages, actually saw and interacted with their gods.  They recorded such occasions and incidents in their written records and graphic arts (e.g. murals and pottery).  From early youth their cultures taught them to see and hear such gods, and behave as the gods’ agents, essentially expressing little or no of what we today call consciousness or ‘free  will’ – in short, you did what the gods prescribed ‘in vivo’ or in your culture’s recorded scriptures/myths.  Personal decision making and its attendant stress were minimized or even absent from such people’s lives. (more here)

In the pre-enlightenment age even the most advanced western nations/kingdoms had populations that overwhelmingly believed in and interacted with witches and other agents of evil.  They actually ‘saw’ witches fly and cast hideous spells, and therefore felt quite justified in denouncing them for extreme punishments by the authorities.  These beliefs were cemented early on by the religious teachings of their culture.

In more recent times we have teams of cultural anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) who have encountered and studied primitive tribes with cultures that embed drastically different realities in their members.  An example of such a discovery occurred in the Papua-New Guinea highlands during the pre-war years.  There a tribe was discovered whose members believed that the world ended in the middle of a river on whose bank was their village.  They literally saw nothing of the other bank less than a hundred feet away.  Anthropologists visibly encamped on the other side were received as aliens emerging from a fog in their inflated dinghy.

A similar culture-induced reality was enjoyed by tribes on a neighboring island during the Pacific campaign of WW2.  The island had an airstrip for receiving cargo laden C-47 military transport aircraft.  To the natives these giant aircraft were bringers of never-before-seen wondrous things to enrich and expand their lives.  Not familiar with manufacturing processes, they believed “that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture had been created by spiritual means.”  And no matter how many times it was explained and demonstrated to them, they never saw the airplanes as mechanical things operated by humans – to them they were simply alive as large flying creatures.  When the war moved on and the airstrip was abandoned, the natives were bereft – the wondrous creatures stopped coming.  Their response was simple, they formed what became known as a ‘Cargo Cult’ whose members continued to maintain the landing strip, and built decoys in the shape of airplanes to attract more of these giant flying critters full of presents. The clear and demonstrated reality of the foreigners did nothing to change their culture-rooted alternate reality. (more here)

Scattershots – 10jun24 (updated 20jun24)

George Rebane

Government inevitably corrupts and/or badly screws up the projects it initiates in the public sphere.  This thesis has been a common RR thread for years and forms a basic tenet of Rebane Doctrine.  The 9jun24 WSJ has a short and succinct column, ‘Your Government at Work’ by Andy Kessler that summarizes this ongoing process of ineptitude.  And, of course, our government is not the only one charged; it is a common trait of all large bureaucracies operating without proper incentives and feedback.

Women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark didn’t make our Olympic team, it turns out, because she wasn’t diverse enough – i.e. white, straight, European, and all that.  The given bullshit reason was the claim that her fame would disrupt the historical somnolence with which women’s basketball has been received in the Olympics.  And all this in the face of multiple efforts to promote a more broad and enthusiastic reception of the sport’s distaff participation.  So now the public pushback has caused the sport’s political hacks to instate Clark as a first alternate in the event one of the twelve chosen can’t play.  Can you imagine the mentality of the jerks who made the decision to exclude her in the first place? (more here)

[11jun24 update]  Pelosi pleads pretermission about J6 security preparations for the Capitol.  Finally, the former Speaker admits that a mass protest with unknown consequences was long anticipated at the Capitol by both the DHS and the FBI for the Senate’s 6jan21 electoral vote certification.  Neither agency issued a timely intelligence report on this, and “Congressional leaders, including Pelosi, chose not to deploy the National Guard early over concerns of ‘optics’ amid 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots, according to a 2022 GOP report.”  Meanwhile, everyone including then President Trump got blamed for the Capitol breach, even though he was perfectly in his rights to encourage his supporters to protest the certification – there is no evidence that he directed the demonstrators to enter the building or do anything illegal. (more here)

[12jun24 update]  ‘Sports Should Unify, Not Divide Us’ writes Clay Travis in a compelling piece featured in the recent issue of Imprimis (here).  He again illustrates the deep evil that the woke Democrats have unleashed on the land – in this version another piece of established western culture targeted for destruction to achieve their dissolution of America.  And it boggles my mind to realize that these people walk and live among us as they do their dirty work while we remain ignorant and/or indifferent about the impact of their labors.

[13jun24 update]  Ignorance on parade.  In a recent Union Jo Ann pointed out the asymmetric street level responses of the Left vs Right when addressing public policies they don’t like.  As evidence abounds, the Left likes to riot, burn things down, and in general favor violence instead of more peaceful means.  Local leftwing worthy Daryl Grigsby writes in today’s Union (here) that my sweetie is totally wrong in her observation.  His cutting response alleges equity in that conservatives are “silent as election workers are harassed and threatened, promote divisive language, and see anyone seeking basic human dignity as Marxists.”  And, of course, J6 “was an attempt to burn down democracy”.  His intellectual coup de grace was citing the 1921 Tulsa massacre when white Jim Crow Democrats “burned down 1400 black homes and businesses, murdered over 300 African-Americans, destroyed the black business district, …”  Reaching back over a century and then missing the politics of his own white racist forebears is the best counter he can offer?  Point, set, match!

[20jun24 update]  Democracy on the block.  The Democrat sleazebags continue telling their know-nothing constituents that Trump and the Republicans will kill democracy in America if they get elected.  Meanwhile it's the progressives who now actively thwart democracy wherever they find it.  Check this that just came out of Sacramento.

Dumbing Down Denied (updated 28apr24)

George Rebane

For years RR and its more enlightened readers have lamented and documented the degradation of our public schools and also of our higher educational institutions.  Over the last half century this decline has been relentless and extensively reported as anti-American socialists of all shades adopted policies and curricula designed to produce a workforce of diminishing value to our employers and benefit to our society.

Today with the woke movement the state of our education has reached new depths of idiocy.  Based on utter nonsense, school curricula are being removed, downgraded, restructured in order to eliminate what the Left says is our country’s ‘structural racism’ promoted by cadres of ‘white supremacists’.  These are identified primarily as whites of European descent who are now irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, …, the list goes on.

Apropos to this I refer to the latest op-ed, ‘Any learning loss recovery at local high schools?’, by my sweetie-pie Jo Ann.  Her piece in the 22mar24 Union (here) cited chapter and verse of the dismal numbers that document the downfall of our local public education system.  Since its publication the column has drawn a continuous stream of ire from our local leftwing loonies who also demonstrate their lack of prowess with the written word.  The initial criticisms were of Jo Ann’s purported attack on the incompetence of the teachers.  She did not single out teachers, but identifying the public school districts as part of the culprits hit close to home, and brought out the defense of the obviously weak component of our public education.  In that me thinks their ample protests are revealingly welcome.

To date these rebuttals have come in the form of the newspaper’s Other Voices columns, Hits & Misses entries, and Letters to the Editor.  This morning I was reminded of the Left’s desperate denial of this travesty by yet another letter to the editor, this time by one of our more prominent local Marxist worthies (here).  This time the criticism was not of Jo Ann’s quoted performance statistics, or of their perceived unfair umbrage against teachers, but the accusation that only rabid rightwing MAGA Republicans would dare point out such a devastating and divisive national deficiency.  The politically correct response to this ongoing educational tragedy and its long term impact on our workforce should instead be a prudent silence.

[28apr24 update]  I note the almost complete lack of interest in the dumbing down of the nation’s electorate.  It seems as if no one cares or is aware that it all starts with an ignorant horde of voters as our Founders feared and Bryan Caplan -The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (here) - pointed out several years ago and RR has argued forever.  It is such voters who believe the politicians’ bullshit about the economy, how government can spend money better that they can, and how the rich are taking it away from the poor.  And perusing the news confirms that people really like to focus on the knock-on and silly ephemeral impacts of national dumbth.  I suppose the readers of this little blog just reflect the country’s real interests.

We are a Republic, NOT a Democracy

George Rebane

The country’s socialists and globalists have found the corruption of language to best serve their purpose of blinding Americans to the critical aspects of our society and culture.  First and foremost is today’s established custom of considering precise semantics to be somewhere between irrelevant and unimportant, and most certainly politically incorrect.

As an example, many of us have come to accept open borders on the basis of promoting ‘immigration’, firm in the knowledge that today’s invasion of illegal aliens from countless countries violating our law is somehow similar to the process that populated our empty lands in days gone by, for are we not a country of immigrants?  No one from the highest levels of government to main street wants to acknowledge that immigration is a two-party process between willing participants – a pact between a discriminating government and the alien seeking residency in a new land.  Using the correct legal term ‘illegal alien’ to describe those wading across the river (formerly also known as wetbacks) has now become proscribed and not for proper use in a public forum.  Instead the naked term ‘immigrant’ is now the norm in lamestream media, and the right-of-center outlets barely use the appended ‘illegal immigrant’, all preferring more obfuscating labels like ‘migrant’ to describe the foreign lawbreakers crossing our borders.

Other similar examples can be offered to illustrate the desecration and demeaning of our language over the last several decades.

Perhaps the most egregious and dangerous of such examples is the new idea promoted by collectivists, especially of the woke variety, that our nation is a democracy that promotes (civil) equality.  Our Founders were keenly aware that democracies, promoted under the banner of indiscriminating equality quickly devolve into autocracies cum tyrannies.  This is the reason that they conceived and formed our nation to hold liberty sacrosanct within a constitutional republic, governed under a document that severely limits the powers of government.  As the thinking reader knows, universal equality and liberty are incompatible.  Our founding principles recognize and promote equality in the sense that we Americans are equal only under our laws and in the eyes of God.  Elsewhere, most certainly in our Constitution, equality is not mentioned and liberty is supreme.

Our socialists know this truth, and have twisted our public education, abetted by the media, to preach their unquestionable glories of equality cum equity in all things.  The damage to our republic that this perversion has caused was already evident almost sixty years ago.  Dan Smoot was one of the nation’s leading conservative commentators back then, and in 1966 he recorded this very clear and succinct 10-minute commentary about the real difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic (here), and the danger of our citizenry remaining confused about the two.  Today that confusion has been replaced by total ignorance.

Ruminations – 17jan24 (updated 21jan24)

George Rebane

Threats to democracy?  While the Marxist left continues to trumpet that the elected Trump will be a “threat to democracy” (no evidence of that from his previous administration), the Biden and Newsom administrations are the existential and accomplished threats to democracy as witnessed through the overflowing record of their ‘accomplishments’ to reduce freedoms on all fronts, increase confiscatory tributes on all Americans, trash any notion of national security through our mega-porous southern border, and invite an already growing list of international conflicts through our daily demonstrated national weakness.  Our Left cannot wait to hand over the country to the tender ministrations of the global elites.

Speaking of the mega-influx of illegal aliens, sociologists and political scientists have long demonstrated through the historical record that it takes an influx of only 5% of a foreign cultural element to destabilize the culture and governance of a host country.  The Democrats have reached this threshold through their planned “undocumented immigration” policy by allowing the uncontrolled release of more than twelve million aliens to join the already resident millions of the disaffected counter-cultured who are beholden to the unabashed purchase of their votes through leftwing wealth redistribution programs.

[21jan24 update]  “Iran and Pakistan are both nuclear capable.”  So reported Fox News the other day in covering their recent exchange of missiles.  Now if that were really true, would you not think that this would make banner headlines worldwide, and Israel would be delivering bunker busters to appropriate sites in that terror-sponsoring Islamic republic?  Don’t know how that piece of bull pucky got past their editors.

Scattershots – 1dec23

George Rebane

In the Desantos/Newsom debate last night the California governor demonstrated to all what kind of a sleazebag politicians he and his ilk are.  Newsom did not give a straight answer to a single question asked of him – all of his responses were prevarications or more bald-faced lies.  Moderator Hannity illustrated many of his questions with data from various government agencies that compared and contrasted Florida and California.  The only good things California has left to recommend it appears to be the scenery and weather.  All of its public policies, overwhelmingly put in place by Democrats, have done nothing but promote an exodus of workers and companies, having left behind a list of what best may be described as shithole cities in the once Golden State.

Expatriate Californians are not welcome in red states.  This has become clear in news stories and reports from our friends who have sought greener pastures elsewhere.  Arriving Californians find themselves shunned by the longtime residents of their destination states.  The fear that the rest of the socially non-polluted country has is that our emigrants bring with them the dreaded ideologies for which California is now notorious.  Unfortunately, quite often such fears are misplaced because many (most?) Californians in their new homes arrive there to enjoy and preserve the values, mores, and social policies they find.  Shunning newcomers without first vetting them also allows insular leftwing cliques of immigrants to form and begin politically polluting their new nests.  A better policy would be to at least attempt assimilation of the newcomers.  I have yet to find a leftwinger contemplating a move who understands what has put our state into its dire straits.  And those concentrations already ensconced in red states are notorious for aggressively working to degrade the social fabric of their new homes.

‘Judaism and the Left’

George Rebane

Regular RR readers may recall the many posts in which I have questioned why so many people of the Jewish tradition continue to embrace all the various forms of collectivism – e.g. liberalism, socialism, communism.  This especially when all their acknowledged superior traits in the arts, sciences, and material wealth have been achieved in free market capitalist environments.  It is an enduring puzzle.

This week in the 16nov23 issue of The Union, columnist Terry McLaughlin provides an excellent overview – ‘Judaism and the Left’ - of this now centuries old phenomenon.  In it she also quotes several Jewish intellectuals who observe that “liberals have never done anything for the Jews.”  And this goes doubly for their uncritical adulation of anti-semitic American blacks such as the constituents of political leaders such as Maxine Waters, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan.

The best that I can figure is that such racially oriented anti-semitism is a cheap price to pay for a reliable block of bought-and-paid-for votes.

Flâneur

George Rebane

Years back in a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (see also ‘The Antifragile Taleb’) he described himself as having achieved the status of a flâneur.  His circuitous description of such a person was immediately inviting to me.  I am a long-time fan (student?) of Taleb, and admire his depth of knowledge about many things, even though personally he comes across as somewhat acerbic and stand-offish.  Anyway, I did more research on flâneurs and ordered a new set of business cards on which I describe myself as a ‘Flâneur-in-training’.

Since most people don’t know what is a flâneur, I made a little wallet card that I hand to those interested.  On it is my definition that expands a bit on its 1854 introduction as “an idle man about town”, and captures the more desirable traits with which Taleb and the modern definition have adorned it.

Flâneur – An accomplished gentleman of independent means, no longer having to scramble for a living, who is a keen observer of the human condition and has wide ranging interest in issues of currency and intellectual moment that include culture, politics, the arts, sciences, international affairs, etc.  He is often seen reading the news at a sidewalk café, perhaps sharing the passing scene with a like-minded friend.  Afternoons may find him invited to some exclusive salon, and evenings at a concert or lecture.  A flâneur is by nature a Bayesian, ascribing certainty or impossibility to no tenet in his credo of beliefs – the possibility of countering evidence is always allowed, nay, sought.  Flâneurs are basically elitists in that they discriminate, and are neither inclusive nor equitable in their choice of companions – they do not suffer fools – life is too short.

I have found my niche.

‘Why leftists align with Islam’ (addended 1nov23)

[Hat tip to a longtime reader who emailed me the article below.  The piece by Brandon Smith was originally published in Bob Livingston Alerts.  I post it in its entirety as received (with emphases in the original) because the views and perspectives expressed fly in tight formation with Rebane Doctrine as posted here in RR over the last years.  The piece is also timely due to the pro-Palestinian demonstration scheduled today at 4pm in Nevada City.  gjr]

Brandon Smith

In my recent article on the suspicious nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I noted that, just as with Ukraine, the establishment is seeking to lure Americans into supporting one side or the other despite the fact that neither side is really worth fighting for. It is a classic destabilization and globalization strategy reminiscent of WWI. Whenever Americans begin to rally around their own culture, their own security and seek to solve their own problems, suddenly another foreign conflict arises which for some reason requires us to intervene.

For many readers, it might not seem like much, but after nearly a decade of woke infiltration and far-left efforts to deconstruct the U.S., there has been a backlash that is now threatening to suffocate the woke movement. BLM is on a steep decline, SJW-infested universities are suffering from dwindling enrollment and lack of legitimacy, woke Hollywood is burning and their profits are collapsing, the trans agenda is finally being obstructed and multiple states are blocking their efforts to target and groom children, and focus has been returning to the dangers of Democrat open-border policies with a majority of Americans now demanding something be done.

Scattershots – 4oct23 (updated 8oct23)

George Rebane

Detracking America.  "’Detracking’ is an increasingly popular proposal among socialist educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.” (more here)

The daily confirmation arrives in truckloads that the Democratic Party is truly the evil anti-American party, aided ably in their quest to destroy our republic by harebrained Republicans who can’t get their act together.

‘The Data Prove Government Is Spending Too Much’  Americans for Tax Reform recently launched the Sustainable Budget Project from which we read - “The U.S. national debt recently passed $33 trillion, more than 120% of gross domestic product. Left-wing politicians assert that Americans are undertaxed, but the data show that the government spends too much.”  Americans for Tax Reform has offered a very practical rule by which to construct sustainable budgets – limit the budget increases to “the rate of population growth plus inflation.”  Bottom line – “If government grows faster than this rate, then it is growing faster than what the average taxpayer can afford.”  (more here) 

[8oct23 update] Estonia advises Ukraine.  "“You can’t bribe a computer,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told me. When it’s time to rebuild, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should heed these words. Estonia—a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—is No. 1 in providing government services digitally, according to the United Nations; first in democratic development among 29 postcommunist countries, according to Freedom House; first in international tax competitiveness, according to the Tax Foundation (the U.S. is 22nd); and sixth in the 2023 Index of Economic Freedom, according to the Heritage Foundation (the U.S. is 25th). It has the most startups per capita in Europe, and its 15-year-olds top the Continent in reading, science and mathematics." (more here)

Redeeming Aspects of American Slavery?

George Rebane

One of our politicians, I now forget who, recently let slip the notion that American blacks have benefitted from having ancestors who were slaves – he stated that American slavery had bestowed redeemable aspects on those progenies who today share protected freedoms with our white population.

Of course, the politician was immediately attacked as a racist for proposing that slavery had any redeemable features at all.  In response he immediately succumbed and offered profuse apologies for his obvious error.  And the matter appears to have been settled as strong reminder that no one should ever again publicly imply that slavery was a “positive good in the United States” as was the regular habit of ante-bellum southern politicians during the 1810-1860 period. (more here)

Most people today reject the oratorical arguments of men like John C. Calhoun, et al. holding that regulated slavery vs unregulated free labor was indeed a “positive good” for civilized society.  But giving the matter a little more thought does bring up another perspective.  And that is in the comparison of the quality of life enjoyed today by the African-Americans to that of the trials and tribulations available to sub Sahel African blacks.  It is clear to many, most certainly to our African-Americans, that America continues to provide a much higher quality of life and opportunity for our black citizenry.  All one has to do is look at the predominance of which direction migration is taking place between the two continents.

In short, one can argue that whatever suffering our slaves went through compared to the then concurrent life of their African cousins on a continent of constant combat and corruption, our slaves bequeathed their posterity a much better environment in which to pursue their happiness than did those who remained in Africa.

If this has been a redeeming feature of American slavery, it most certainly was not planned that way a couple of centuries ago.  But today it is what it is, and therefore may require some more thought when we reconsider the darker side of our history.

Scattershots – 2sep23

George Rebane

‘How the AI Revolution Will Reshape the World’ is an essay in the 1sep23 issue of Time that presents an excellent summary of how the advent of generative AI is launching “the greatest redistribution of power in history.”  Not only is this new wave of technology based on large language models sufficient to found the greatest revolution in human civilization all by its lonesome, its redistribution of power will be abetted by accompanying technological breakthroughs in synthetic biology, quantum computing, and “abundant new sources of energy.”  Having understood all this, it is remarkable that today “this is the most underappreciated aspect of the technological revolution now underway.”  What’s more, previous technological leaps were reserved to the capital rich elite or national governments.  That’s no longer the case.  “We are facing a step change in what’s possible for individual people to do, and at a previously unthinkable pace. AI is becoming more powerful and radically cheaper by the month—what was computationally impossible, or would cost tens of millions of dollars a few years ago, is now widespread.”  For the sanguine among us, snooze on at your own peril.  (H/T to reader)

Blinders on black governance.  It’s with some trepidation that I offer this observation motivated by the recent slum apartment building fire in Johannesburg that killed over seventy poor immigrants to the Union of South Africa. (more here)  Over the last generation (i.e. post-apartheid) that nation’s largest city has turned from a crown jewel of Africa into the country’s, perhaps the continent’s, largest favela.  And here is the observation to which no one dare give voice – are there any black-governed countries in Africa, or anywhere for that matter, that compare favorably with first-world nations like those in Europe, North America, and Asia?  To carry this observation even deeper, the same may be asked of black-run cities in the United States.  Instead, these questions remain unasked and unexamined.  From an academic or demographic perspective such enquiries remain on terra incognita, and their causal factors define one of our culture’s growing number of forbidden territories.  Anyone daring to even explore whether there is any truth to the basis which such questions imply is immediately tagged as a racist or worse.  As evidence, I offer the comment stream below.

America’s Numeracy

George Rebane

America’s numeracy has been covered in these pages since RR launched.  As technology accelerates in these pre-Singularity years, our innumeracy has become more of a critical factor in how we govern ourselves and our general quality of life that depends on our ability to create wealth.  For example, it’s almost impossible for the innumerate among us to understand the axiomatic human behaviors that make the failures of collectivism hard to understand (e.g. the widespread acceptance of neo-Marxism).  A recent article that expands on all this is ‘I wish Americans would Stop Saying they are not Good at Math’.  The table below is from that article.

According to the OECD-PISA website [1]:  Mathematical performance, for PISA, measures the mathematical literacy of a 15 year-old to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts to describe, predict and explain phenomena, recognising the role that mathematics plays in the world. The mean score is the measure. A mathematically literate student recognises the role that mathematics plays in the world in order to make well-founded judgments and decisions needed by constructive, engaged and reflective citizens. [1]

‘The scariest poll …’

‘Freedom?  We don’t need no stinkin’ freedom’.  Anonymous leftwinger

George Rebane

The Pew Research Center released the latest edition of a poll on free speech that they have been conducting for years.  It contains the latest tranche of evidence that corroborates one of the longtime tenets of Rebane Doctrine – a major fraction of Americans are no longer smart enough to maintain our democratic republic.  Not only that, but the level of dumbth in the population is increasing at an alarming rate.  (more here, H/T to reader)

Over the last five years Pew has posed this poll three times.  “In 2018, Democrats supported free speech by a 57-40 margin, almost identical to the Republican view. They now oppose it by 70-28, a massive shift over the last five years, while Republican views have not changed.”

As RR has held for years, most Dems are true believers in big government that they entrust with managing their (and our) lives with an unending and ever-growing tsunami of regulations, and with the handling of an ever-greater fraction of your finances.  And in recent years they have been convinced by their lamestream media and neo-Marxist politicians that the whole effort to convince new ideological recruits and maintain existing membership is by convincing everyone that allowing people to hear “misinformation” in the public square is inimical to American democracy.  Moreover, those (Republicans) who continue to maintain and support the First Amendment are evil along every social dimension – white supremacists, racists, homophobes, inequitable, non-inclusive, rejecting diversity, … .

Today our progressives and woke contingents are actively working to break down our country from the inside.  As recently as 20 years ago these lame brains were overwhelmingly to be found in our ‘deep state’ bureaucracies and academe.  Now the infection has spread to and runs rampant in K-12 public education, corporatist business enterprises, and the military. 

The bottom line is that most Americans today would be sanguine living in a society where all permitted public speech must first be vetted by a newly established Ministry of Truth and its local offices spread across the land.

Scattershots – 27may23

George Rebane

State Farm Insurance pulls out of California.  Another one of the country’s largest insurance firms will no longer write new policies in the once golden state where wildfire risk continues high and the state’s regulatory and tax environment makes the cost of rebuilding a house prohibitive at the permitted premium levels.  Bottom line – we have done it to ourselves again by electing certifiable idiots to represent us in Sacramento.  Tragically things will not change peacefully since these policies don’t affect the state’s takers directly, and there are enough ignorant makers to maintain the voting block required to keep the legislature and administrative bureaucrats firmly in Democrat hands.

Dropout Derby time again?  Back in the 2019 election season, leading up to the 2020 election, we had 26 Democrat hopefuls vying for the presidency.  Knowing that sooner or later the slings and arrows of inevitably outrageous fortune would reduce that number to a manageable few, we introduced Dropout Derby to these pages (here and here).  Readers were invited to record and submit the order in which the candidates would drop out of the race.  Eight of us chose to enter the competition that ran for several months into 2020 with the eventual winner being Estonian Fox.  (In memoriam we sadly note that three of the participants are no longer with us.)  Given the number of Democrats lining up to relieve Bumblebrain from having to attempt another disastrous four years, I consider starting another Dropout Derby given sufficient interest and substantial number of declared candidates.

All cultures are not of the same worth/value to anyone living on this planet.  However, the progressive mindset has taught us otherwise.  Evidence for the inequality of cultures abounds, as measured along any attribute, and is confirmed daily in the news media – yes, even in the leftwing outlets.  RR has made this point for years in its arguments on how to maintain the sanctity of our sovereignty (more here and here).  Now the latest confirmation comes from the cohort of Sudanese immigrants rampaging through the chambers of the Minneapolis City Council (here).  As pointed out before, it doesn’t take much of cohesive plurality in a minority for it to start impacting public policy.

Reckless Reparations

George Rebane

We as a nation-state have now reached the nadir of cohesion that keeps a society together and working to serve its collective needs.  This has been achieved through the introduction of a reparations policy for the nation’s black population, the cohort of Americans whose ancestors may have been enslaved by whites during the early decades of our republic.  The reparations in the form of cash payments collected from non-blacks are supposed assuage the alleged race-based suffering by blacks and cleanse some of the guilt that still burdens those who may have had slave-owning ancestors.

As many have made clear, the enforcement of such a policy is not only impossible, but its attempt will definitely contribute to the growing forces that will finally rend our country into a collection of warring tribes.  Such paths to internecine conflict are well known and have been practiced countless times before – they always end with blood.

I don’t understand how such a large number of Americans today can support this kind of forcible wealth transfer that will forever differentiate us both legally and fiscally.  Both sides will proudly carry their memberships in the ranks of the givers and takers.  The givers will always be seen as the descendants of racists (if not racists per se), indicted and found guilty of the alleged systemic racism running rampant across the land.  The takers will be confirmed as having one more race-based benefit that adds to the trillions in wealth already having been distributed to them (since the start of Great Society), and undeserved due to their outsized and ongoing contributions to the nation’s crime, educational decline, family break-up, and drug problems.  These endemic societal ills in the black community will not be diminished by any imaginable sums they will be paid by the ridiculously lavish amounts now being contemplated by Democrats in Sacramento.

The factors that contribute to the utter foolishness and insanity of instituting such a wealth transfer program are outlined in Victor Davis Hanson’s ‘Reckless Reparations Reckoning’.

Ruminations – 10may23 (updated)

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”  W. Churchill

George Rebane

The tyrant’s last refuge of legitimacy on the world stage is that his brand of governance provides the best prosperity for those under his heel.  When it comes to the legitimacy of China and its CCP, we read, “for decades China’s biggest fear was a Taiwanese declaration of independence producing a crisis for which Beijing had no good options. Yet now the regime is telling us its legitimacy will have to rest on reclaiming Taiwan because, with the prosperity machine sputtering, the ruling Communists have no other good answers for why they still rule.”  So conquest of an economically better performing neighbor is now legitimate. (more here)

Today’s debt ceiling derby is going nowhere.  GOP wants to reduce spending as part of the package, and the Dems want to continue spending under a “clean bill” that will only raise our borrowing limit with no spending limits.  Neither side will give in, even to the GOP proposal that we should only borrow enough to match the percent growth of our GDP.  The Dem proposal would blow this cap by raising our debt to 110% of GDP.  And the Repubs don’t do much better with their current budget which will raise our debt to 106% of GDP.  So go figger.  In the meantime ol’ Forked Tongue Joe promises to consider spending cuts after the GOP accepts his clean-bill demand.  Speaker McCarthy should check with Joe Manchin’s office on the pipeline deal.

DEI in academe has gone Kafkaesque.  Scott Gerber, a prominent law professor at Ohio Northern University, has been summarily dismissed for having a “lack of collegiality” in his public opposition to the school’s woke policy of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  No specifics have been given on the charge other than Professor Gerber’s views on the practice of DEI “are not part of our diversity, belonging, and inclusion plan.”  As in Kafka’s The Trial (1925), Gerber was accosted by armed police and campus security while in the middle of teaching a class, and marched out to the astonishment of all who witnessed the event.  The book tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested, prosecuted and killed by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.  (more here)

[update] Again we await a new “trove of evidence against the Biden crime family.”  PJ Media report (here) that this latest trove of “bombshell evidence” was to be released today by Rep James Comer chair of the House Oversight Committee investigating the source of all the Biden family millions.  But it appears that this bombshell was just another in the long line of evidentiary duds as the sun sets tonight and all is quiet on the lamestream media front, not even a fizzle of it in the New York Post.

Peeking Into Progressive Minds

George Rebane

As most RR readers know, the Rebanes have been in local leftwing crosshairs for some years now.  Jo Ann’s prominence in Republican circles - Nevada County Republican Central Committee, President of Nevada County Republican Women Federated, ... - and her long hitch on the Union’s editorial board have reserved for her a regular ration of opprobrium from our Left.  In today’s (29dec22) Union she garner’s the paper’s Hits & Misses column headline – ‘Miss to Rebane’s comment on immigrants’.  Thereunder reader Richard Howell writes, “To Mrs. Rebane’s comment (12/23) ‘… five million illegals and hundreds of thousands of known got-a-ways(sic) invade our country?’  Actually, 5+ million were intercepted trying to cross illegally into the U.S.  Perhaps next week she can write a ‘Hit’ comment for our border patrol under President Biden.”

Can’t rightly tell whether the man is terminally bamboozled by the lamestream’s misreporting our border crisis, and thinks that the 5+ million were denied entry, or that when illegals are intercepted by the border patrol on our side, they then have broken no laws and it’s OK for them to be turned loose and stay here.  And wanting a hit for Biden is beyond ludicrous – the president who has created the most porous border in the country’s history, and is personally responsible for tens of thousands of migrant and America’s drug overdose deaths that continue to mount daily.

Also right below was the following letter from a George Roberts to the editor labeled ‘Misguided immigrant comments’.

I just finished reading Joanne Rebaine’s (sic) hits and misses holiday rant (12/24) about the asylum seekers.  She must have special glasses to have spotted specific “sex traffickers, fentanyl dealers and terrorists.”  Sort of like Trump’s “rapists and murderers.”  I don’t have those special holiday glasses.  All I saw were some poor, cold, hungry, scared but hopeful human beings.  I think the Christian bible would call them the most vulnerable and precious of god’s children.  “Feliz Navidad” to Ms. Rebaine.(sic)

It is clear that Mr Roberts belongs to the country's tens of millions of news nebbishes who don’t have a clue about what’s really going on at our southern border and its follow-on impact across the entire land.  The lamestream media has so effectively papered over the ongoing tragedy that it’s coverage and communication to a large population, one with purportedly free speech rights, will be studied for years by anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists as one of history’s most effective campaigns of large scale propagandized fake news.  The Third Reich’s Göbbels and the entire Soviet ‘truth’ nomenklatura were not able to convince even a smidgen of their populations to their versions of ‘truth’ (Pravda).

The dimensions of Roberts’ ignorance are immeasurable.  He hasn’t an inkling that the overwhelming share of illegal aliens from all over the world come not as asylum seekers, but only economic opportunists (including criminal) who take advantage of Biden’s abandonment of America’s national security.

But dear reader, we must remember that the final and perhaps greatest tragedy and threat to our  republic is that the country is swarming with mind-mangled people like Richard Howell and George Roberts.

Enduring Impact of Imported Cultures

George Rebane

As we anticipate the horrendous impact of abandoning Title 42 for managing the current tsunami of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, George Mason University economics professor Garett Jones comes out with The Culture Transplant (2022), a major essay on the enduring impact of cultures brought in by America’s immigrants.  In the book review (here) we read –

… cultural traits can persist for generations after migrants arrive in a new country. Newcomers don’t simply assimilate to their new homes; as the book’s subtitle puts it, they “make the economies they move to a lot like the ones they left.” It’s a thesis that is at once highly provocative and a restatement of common sense: Poorly chosen immigrants can undermine a country’s success; cultures don’t disappear when people move from place to place.

A point long made in these pages, the presentation of this research underlines the damage, not only possible, but to be anticipated from the hordes of millions of illegals that have been released with no effective controls into all corners of our land.  More ominously –

… even after four generations in the U.S., immigrants continue to hold attitudes toward trust that are significantly influenced by their home countries. On a host of other matters, such as family, abortion and the role of government, fourth-generation immigrants on average converge only about 60% of the way to the national norm. “Overall,” Mr. Jones contends, “that low level of conformity is a bad sign, unless you think most immigrants come from countries with better political attitudes than Americans currently have.”

The bottom line is that immigrants from bad and backward countries don’t leave their cultures behind.  They continue to embrace and practice them here, especially when they gather in ethnically homogenous enclaves.  The resulting disunity impedes the falsely touted assimilation, and gives lie to the progressives’ chant that ‘Our diversity is our strength.’  In this shibboleth Jones writes “you’re hearing the cultural equivalent of second marriages: a triumph of hope over experience.”  As demonstrated over the centuries, first and foremost, people like to live with their own kind, no matter where they locate.

In this work Prof Jones has introduced a migration-adjusted SAT (state, agriculture, technology) score which usefully predicts the assimilation attributes of our immigrant ethnicities – e.g. predicts more than 60% of modern day income differences between the groups as derived from their countries of origin.  It turns out that the technology component of SAT is the most impactive.  Correlating with their home countries -

Technology also seems to be the best long-run predictor of government quality. So the main story seems to be about technological development persisting over time, and of people bringing their technological capabilities to new places. 

Continuing to allow uncontrolled entry of millions of illegals portends a cultural and existential disaster for America – “These concerns are immediate and tangible, not preoccupied with the effect of immigration generations from now. To address some of the more compelling worries, we might start placing greater emphasis on skills, perhaps implementing a points system, as Australia, Canada and the U.K. do, to grade potential immigrants.”

But first and foremost, to implement any of these factors into an immigration policy that sustains America, we have to secure our borders.  This is also understood by our neo-Marxist and anti-American elites who will fight tooth and nail to maintain our borders in their current dysfunctional state that promotes, nay invites, the uncontrolled invasion by millions of illegals who will implant their own counter-cultures in this fair land.

America’s Ingrained Indelible Ignorance

George Rebane

Union columnist Terry McLaughlin penned an important column in today’s (3nov22) newspaper titled ‘Perceptions and reality’.  In there she cited studies from academe and data from government agencies about the large deficits in what our adult population, which includes the electorate, knows about our country and what beliefs they actually use on which to base their decisions.  The information derived from academic surveys paints a picture of a population that has almost no knowledge about the important parameters that define the country they live in.  McLaughlin does an excellent job in summarizing the skewed view our neighbors have about America.

For example, Americans’ average belief in share of adults who belong to unions is 36 % to the actual value of 4%.  They believe that about 26% of American household incomes exceed $500,000 when the real share is about 1%.  They also think that about 41% of Americans are black when the reality is approximately 14%.  The numbers are 39% for Hispanics instead of 17% according to the census.  We believe that 30% of us are homosexual when again the real number is 3%; that 21% are transgender which in reality is 0.6%.

It's not hard to attribute the reason we have such a grossly misinformed citizenry.  Almost all of them have been educated by barrel-bottom teachers in unionized public schools which promote the country’s leftwing narrative, and that recently have started incorporating various neo-Marxist ‘critical’ curricula based on the teachings of the Frankfurt School (more here).  All of these educational institutions, even at the university level, are teaching the country to believe that there is a new norm in place that is markedly different from what the older folks were taught and grew up with.  And all of this is reinforced daily by the preponderant leftwing (aka lamestream) media.  When we look at its emphasized news items, ads and commercials, and entertainment program contents, we see such skewed population shares being foisted on the consuming audiences with brains in neutral.

And to put a bow on this state of our nation, McLaughlin cites "research (that) seems to indicate that shining a light on public misperceptions and providing accurate data may have little or no impact on changing the firmly held positions and opinions of Americans on almost any topic."

The lament of those who are not so encumbered is what will this existential plurality take into the voting booth next Tuesday.  Looking at the condition of our country, and especially California, we know how they have mis-marked their ballots in the past.  Given the hysterical level of daily lies from the Left – the economy is sound, crime is low, borders are secure, Republicans will destroy democracy, wind and sun will replace fossil fuels, higher taxes and more regulations are good, … - does not promise anything better from the upcoming mid-term election.  But then again, I may be wrong.  Even a pecking blind chicken will eventually find a seed.

Thus spake VDH

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.

 To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.

 Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.

 So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often unforgiving nature.

 But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.

 As a result, the once-prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.

 We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.

 We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish Green New Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age—as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.

 But meanwhile, Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.

 Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.

 What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.

 The Biden administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.

 When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.

 The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that they might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.

 The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals.

 It’s not to hector soldiers based on their race. It’s not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It’s not to become a partisan political force.

 The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes such as Iran.

 At home, the Biden administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.

 Utter chaos followed. Three million migrants have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high school diplomas, or capital.

 The streets of our cities are anarchical—and by intent.

 Defunding the police, emptying the jails, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It’s now open season on the weak and innocent.

 America is racing backward into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure them exemption from punishment.

 Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.

 But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support—as green nihilists are attempting—and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.

 Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.

 So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed, and sheltered America.

 Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite—terrified of what they have wrought—selfishly retreat to their private keeps.

 But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism can’t even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.

 As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization.

 When stripped away, we’re relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.

 Victor Davis Hanson

‘The Real Threat to Our Republic’ (updated 12sep22)

George Rebane

Over the years I’ve touched on the impact that the ‘educated’ liberal woman have had on our society and our republic.  My own experience with such people has been uniformly informative and corroborated by many readings on the subject.  I’ve been meaning to write a definitive piece on these females who pervade our big cities and suburban communities, and now Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has beat me to it with his excellent essay, ‘Why ‘Educated’ Liberal Women Are the Real Threat to Our Republic’.  Along the way he coined ELF as the efficient acronym for future reference.

Through my many years I have had the opportunity to take the measure of ELFs in divers social and professional situations.  They all share a set of common characteristics which start with a collectivist ideology expressed through fewer than 50 tried-and-true leftwing shibboleths and slogans, an ideology which they can neither dissect nor defend, and which is sustained on a solid foundation of unwarranted hubris held together by generous dollops of ignorance and one-sided mis/disinformation.

These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.

Institutionally, they have co-opted formerly non-partisan organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women.  Additionally, in academe they have been stalwart foot soldiers in both pedagogy and administration to turn our public schools and institutions of higher learning into critical-thinking-free zones operating under the façade of ‘education’.

At the core of the ELFs' (intellectual) vulnerability is their ignorance, if not at the top, certainly among the masses.  This should not surprise.  Everywhere and always, men have performed better on political knowledge tests than women (just as conservatives routinely outperform liberals and independents).  Researchers exploring this particular gender gap long ago gave up on questioning whether this was true and have focused instead on why.

When ELFs vote, they vote as a homogeneous block.  The DNC and Democratic leadership have long been painfully aware of this, and the fact that they only trust and get their news from the lamestream media and social media sites.

In the not too distant past, women attended college with the expectation of finding a spouse.  Today, they would have much better luck hanging out at a construction site.  As late as 1970, there were five men for every four women in America's four-year colleges.  By the fall of 2021, there were almost two women for every man. … Once in college, the progressive grooming that began discreetly in high school now publicly and proudly moves to center stage.  A study of faculty voter registration at 40 leading U.S. universities showed a more than ten-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans with the numbers skewing higher in liberal arts and among young faculty.  In some fields, there are no Republicans at all. … Lacking a male counterpoint in their lives and often majoring in subjects with a social justice agenda, college women enter the political arena not so much uninformed as misinformed.  Given that communications/journalism faculty members skew 20 to 1 Democrat, the media these young ELFs consume will only reinforce the biases nurtured in college.

Jack Cashill expands on all these points, citing many studies that corroborate the above characterization of ELFs and the institutions under their influence.  We can put a bow on it for now by also recognizing the current thrust of the Democrats’ divisive pre-election rhetoric, especially Biden’s Philadelphia speech that could not have been better staged by Joseph Göbbels himself.

In November, Biden needs the ELFs to vote en masse.  This will happen only if they remain ignorant of the things that should worry them — the border, crime, inflation — and scared silly of things that need not.  Something tells me that the producers of Biden's Nuremberg-style spectacle knew what they were doing.

Incapable of giving it further thought, the ELFs will confidently vote us into the kind of American autocracy that the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has been planning for decades.

[12sep22 update]  Victor Davis Hanson’s recent essay ‘American Delira’ puts the above threat to our country in its greater and proper context.  In recent years such essays have appeared regularly, not only from his pen, but also from other astute observers of the American saga.  Nevertheless, VDH has a unique gift of being able to wordsmith a comprehensive description and analysis of what has brought us here and what we are doing now to undo ourselves.  A hat tip to one of our regular commenters who has also regularly been the first to alert RR readers to the timely contributions of VDH and others.

California Exodus Refuted?

George Rebane

A reader and correspondent sent me the following article – ‘A Shocking Number of Californians Are Moving to Texas Unless You Do Basic Math’.  Therein the author cites data and analysis from a market data firm Placer.ai which sidesteps the long-running and well-established California exodus phenomenon, focuses on the California-to-Texas migration, and erroneously concludes that there is nothing unexpected about the numbers that Placer has collected.  To wit –

The logic here is very simple. Some people move between states every year for normal life reasons. That’s good and normal and not cause for alarm. And California has the most people of any state. Therefore, all things equal, we’d expect lots of people from California to be moving to Texas. In fact, we would expect that more people from California would be moving to Texas than from any other state, again, because California has the most people. This would not in itself imply anything is wrong with California or great about Texas. It would simply mean people are doing what we would expect them to do. The only way this particular data point would suggest something is indeed amiss is if a disproportionate number of new Texans came from California relative to California’s population.

That may sound confusing, but doing some quick math makes it all very clear. The population of the United States minus Texas—because people already in Texas cannot move to Texas—is 300.86 million people. California’s population is 39.35 million, or 13 percent of the U.S.’ non-Texas population. Therefore, more than 13 percent of Texas’ new residents would have to be Californians in order for there to be something of note going on here.

But that’s not the case. According to Placer.ai, which uses “foot traffic data” gleaned by tracking people's phones, 11.1 percent of new Texans from July 2019 and July 2022 are from California. That’s actually slightly less than one would expect based on an even distribution. If anything, the pertinent question from Placer.ai’s data is: Why are so few Californians moving to Texas?

The main flaw in the argument here is that people move randomly between states with ingress and egress rates proportional to source and target populations.  This is a gross error in the current situation where most of migrating Americans are motivated by economic (taxes, regulations) and socio-political (crime, education) reasons.  For example, Texas receives many new residents from so-called shithole cities in states like New York, Illinois, New Jersey, in addition to California.  Such movements can invalidate any arguments based on randomness.  For example, California’s lower percentage of “new Texans” can be completely explained away by the greater number of the state’s immigrants arriving from the other escape-worthy states that need have no relationship to population proportions, and greater numbers of Californians moving to other states such as Idaho, Wyoming, and Florida.

Bloomberg reports, “The long-term migration out of California accelerated during the Covid-19 crisis, with Texas, Washington and Florida as top destinations for people moving out of the state, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.” (here)  The LA Times continues its ongoing reports of the exodus with ‘California Exodus Continues: LA, San Francisco lead the way’.

Liberals across the land are desperate to refute the mass migrations out of the major shithole regions that Democratic administrations have created since the launch of Great Society programs.  This gives rise to a number of loudly argued but logically weak pieces that appear in various lamestream outlets.  The fundamental reality is that California continues to create conditions that drive out large numbers of its wealth-generating workers and businesses.  This is apparent from all types of correctly analyzed data starting with what we learn from the Dept of Commerce (Census Bureau) and going all the way down to California’s historic first-time reduction in the number of representatives we send to Congress.

Need I be fearful of most black people?

George Rebane

My clear answer is yes – let me explain.  Yes, I am physically afraid of blacks in the urban neighborhoods.  They have demonstrated to all that there is inherent danger to life and limb in neighborhoods where blacks rule the streets.  This same sentiment has been publicly acknowledged by black leaders such as the Rev Jesse Jackson.  The criminality of young black males is now well established, and it is not a minor fraction of the population.  Their historical arrest and incarceration rates attest to this.

But perhaps my greater fear of blacks is when they join the ranks of the America’s voters and make their presence felt at the ballot box.  They have now demonstrated across many generations that they do not vote to promote their own best interests.  They elect dismally stupid, corrupt, cynical, racist, rapacious, and/or simply crooked people to represent them in the halls of political power.  It would not be so bad if their voting habits only impacted their own communities.  But that is not the case.  Black-elected politicians (no matter their color) extend their unfortunate ethics, socialist ideologies, and corrupt practices far beyond the precincts that voted them into office.

To be sure, black communities suffer most from the ministrations of their political leaders.  No one has done more harm to our African-Americans than the politicians who regularly garner their votes through promises of ineffective policies or those never kept.  And again, as history has shown, no learning takes place from one election cycle to the next.  Generation after generation, they send the same people to occupy the same seats of power and expect different results, while decrying their carefully taught lamentations about white supremacy and systemic racism.  It is these politicians with black constituencies who join with those voted in by ignorant whites et al that have launched national programs to usurp American culture over the last half century by engaging in the ongoing fundamental transformation of our country.

I write this in response to the column by Mr Daryl Grigsby – ‘Need I be fearful of most white people?’ – which appears in the 27aug22 Union.  As an African-American, Grigsby goes on to answer the question with a YES, and then continues to back-up his sentiment with yet one more diatribe against Trump, filled with the familiar ignorant tedium comprised of all the usual unsubstantiated allegations.  He opens with –

I am troubled by this possibility (of fearing most whites). As an African American who has lived all over this nation, I have seen and experienced much that raises this question. At the same time, my life has been enriched by generous, affirming, justice-seeking white Americans. … Yet, the opening question often plagues me. By “most,” I don’t mean the overwhelming majority. I do mean some number more than half. Anything more than half is “most.”

… and closes with -

Republican candidates who stand against Trump lose their seats, voting in Black communities is a hurdle instead of a right, Anti-CRT movements flourish. The real question is, do we want a just and multi-racial society, or one of white privilege and dominance?

And what of Black Lives Matter? Professor Treva B. Lindsey says, “to even have to proclaim ‘Black Lives Matter’ and know that people will dispute it, or counter with ‘all lives matter,’ is a result of entrenched and learned anti-blackness. In what world would saying ‘Black lives matter’ prompt a rejoinder? A fundamentally anti-Black one.” I am hopeful we can create a society different than described by Professor Lindsey.

No amount of skulduggery(sic), lies, treason or corruption deters millions of white Americans from supporting Trump. What explains that devotion? Anger? About what? Fear? Of who(sic)? As white militias grow and the internet rumbles with threats, I fear the majority is silent. I believe but a small fraction of white America is prone to racist violence. That small group, however, is dangerous if the majority does not stand up. … Believe me when I say, I don’t enjoy thinking this, and frankly, I would be happy to be proven wrong.

His reasonable tone withstanding, it is clear that I and mine have a lot to fear from the Grigsbys of America who cast their ballots within the collectivist glow of goodness and light, as they send the next tranche of corrupt fools to the nation’s capitols.  The exoduses from California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey are exhibits of their political accomplishments.

The Democrats' evil is professionally inbred

[This piece came across my email transom forwarded by a lawyer who apologized for his profession and how it confuses litigation with governance.  gjr]
 
Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate – Biden (no surprise) was at the bottom of his class).  Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.  Barack Obama was a lawyer. Michelle Obama was a lawyer.  Hillary Clinton was a lawyer. Bill Clinton was a lawyer.  John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards was a lawyer.  Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is a lawyer.  Former Senator Harry Reid was a lawyer.
 
The Republican Party is different.  President Trump is a businessman.  President Bush 1 and 2 were businessmen.  Vice President Cheney was a businessman.  President Eisenhower was a 5 star General.  The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor.  Dick Armey was an economist.  Ex-House Minority Leader John Boehner was a plastics manufacturer.  The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.  Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer?  Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against actor Ronald Reagan in 1976.  The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers.  This is very interesting. I had never thought about it this way before.
 
The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers.  Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Trump, Bush, and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich.  The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America .  And, so, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, we have seen the procession of official enemies grow.  Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail?  Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation. 
 
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers.  Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, which, in this case should be the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.  Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation.
 
When politicians, as lawyers, begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming.  Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government.  We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit.  We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
 
Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives.  America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked.  When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big.  When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
 
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
 
The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers!  Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits.  This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party.  When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association go to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high.