Rebane's Ruminations

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.

America’s Mass Suicide in Progress

[The following is a recent commentary by Victor Davis Hanson, an academic and national intellect familiar to RR readers.  In it he again summarizes the socio-political travesties that America’s Left, abetted by our foreign enemies, daily visits upon our people most of whom ill-prepared by their schooling to understand, let alone resist, these propagandized assaults.  VDH’s commentary was first posted on townhall.com.  gjr]

Victor Davis Hanson

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice.

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges.

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign - while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely "Russian disinformation." That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multi-year audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden's purported tax irregularities.

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden's appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar "reparations" payout to the state's Black residents.

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have.

One of the reparations board leaders asserts Blacks might be willing to accept an "installment" plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a "travel alert" advising Blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' announcement of a presidential bid.

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis - all outside Florida - have the highest Black murder rates in the nation.

Florida by contrast, with a Black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of Black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP's board of directors is himself a Florida resident!

Black Lives Matter has just announced it lost millions of dollars in investments and ran up huge deficits. The culprit was its former corrupt leadership.

Its extravagant spending, plush homes, and family hangers-on have nearly bankrupted the advocacy group. It cannot account for the millions of dollars in corporate guilt and protection money it leveraged following the George Floyd riots in 2020.

In New York, a threatening subway career criminal with 42 prior arrests was subdued by a bystander and died during the confrontation. The criminal is now deified. The would-be Samaritan is charged with felony manslaughter.

The deceased's uncle is vocal about his late nephew's confrontation. But he himself was just arrested with stolen property and armed with a knife. He was mysteriously still roaming the streets despite 70 prior arrests and current active arrest warrants.

In almost every American city and town, biological males, with enormous advantages in size and musculoskeletal mass, routinely win women's sporting competitions.

They are systematically destroying decades of progress that sought to ensure parity between men and women's sports.

Corporate America has joined this cultural revolution hysteria. Companies are apparently now hellbent on destroying their brands, profits, and net worth.

Under pressure from the LGBTQ activists, the Los Angeles Dodgers reinvited the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to celebrate Pride night at Dodger Stadium.

Catholics and Christians had objected to the invitation because the group's notoriety hinges on its sexualized and often pornographic mockery of Catholic ritual, the Holy Trinity, and Christian faith.

The supposedly courageous group would never dare extend its street-theater blasphemy to other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus.

The Dodgers apparently do not care that Greater Los Angeles may be home to 6 million Mexican American citizens and resident Hispanic immigrants. Most are Catholic and many were avid Dodger fans.

Anheuser-Busch has nearly destroyed its best-selling Bud Light brand by hiring transgender performance-art activist Dylan Mulvaney to hawk the brand - and his own transitioning - to America's working classes.

The Disney corporation, for decades, has enjoyed multibillion-dollar concessions and a veritable 40-square mile private fiefdom gifted from the taxpayers of Florida.

No matter. Disney has rebranded it films, amusement parks, and television offerings to reflect radical transgender, gay, and race advocacies.

The results so far are billion-dollar losses in Disney stock, subscribers, and viewers.

A woke CNN has all but destroyed its once-global audience. It now has fewer viewers than certain popular podcasts.

All these implosions are not just shocking but surreal. Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide - to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?

Hopelessness Confirmed Again (updated 21may23)

George Rebane

The release and concurrent suppression of the Durham report confirms once more that we are way past any hope of rapprochement of America’s great divide.  In short, our split is now permanent, all it awaits is for serendipity to finally resolve its form, structure, and shot heard round the world.  At least two thirds of our electorate and almost all of our youth have no idea what America once was and how it became the bright shining city on the hill that still continues to beckon the unending millions from their shithole homelands.

Our dominant political party is the Democratic Party that is run by an amalgam of anti-American collectivists surrounded by the pre-educated and dismally ignorant.  The country is now structured so its institutions of education, communication, and entertainment mutually support any set of lies that the Democratic Party wants to put forth as its reality du jour.  Durham’s well documented report citing the established record of FBI corruption is already enshrouded in a limbo that makes it invisible to most Americans, even if they wished to show an interest.  For all intents and purposes, the Durham findings will be erased within a few weeks (if that) from whatever collective memory that it has recently awakened.

What puts paid to this conclusion is the ineptitude of the Republican Party which has yet to demonstrate its ability to communicate with ‘the other half’.  This political party has made itself so ineffective that it doesn’t matter how they perform at the polls, the party exhibits no sense that our government’s deep state is a morass of intertwined bureaucracies dedicated to expanding its own powers and feeding itself from the public trough.

Today the Right has the supportive testimony of tens of the nation’s top legal scholars who confirm the government’s fraudulent actions detailed by Durham.  Names of people behaving criminally can be named and brought to account.  But don’t hold your breath that the Republicans will take any such direct actions against those demonstrably culpable.  All we can expect out of them is high sounding platitudes about how the Democrats violated the fundamental principles upon which our republic rests, principles unknown to the indifferent and uncaring millions.

[21may23 update]  All the conservative and right leaning outlets are telling their audiences that the Durham report revealed so much dirt about how the FBI operates, that it has now “embarrassed” the agency and its leftwing proponents who touted the agency’s findings about the Russia conspiracy, Hillary’s email servers, and Hunter’s laptop, among other intentional misdeeds.  Nothing could be further from reality.

As I pointed out in the above commentary – ‘Our dominant political party …’ – no such embarrassment is experienced by any of the agents who have supported FBI’s malfeasance of the last seven or so years.  Instead, almost all of them continue to deny Durham’s findings as one big “nothing burger”, and many of them remain stalwart promoters of the original lies.  This is blanketed daily to their audiences.  They evince not a even a smidgen of shame about the record of their reportage, as they double down on their ongoing campaign of lies.

However, it is the conservative media, led by outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, et al, that are misleading their audiences to believe that the liars have now been exposed, shamed, or feel any embarrassment about what they reported and continue to report even today.  Embarrassment can only be experienced by those who are contrite about their previous behavior.  Unfortunately, such actors are missing in America.

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.

Welcome to the new ‘CNN Lite’

George Rebane

Fair, balanced, and scared shitless?

Unbeknownst to Tucker Carlson, last Friday he broadcast his last show, a  program that has become an iconic fixture in the homes of the largest fraction of America’s cable news audiences.  Readers of these pages have known for the last several years of my assessment that Fox News was losing its edge as the leading media voice against the anti-American Left that is daily championed by the Democratic Party through its boot-licking broadcast and online outlets.

Tonight Bret Baier’s flagship ‘Special Report’ took the Scared Shitless Trophy by not acknowledging the major news item of the day, let alone daring to even repeat the sparse announcement of the event that was released by Fox Corporation about the “parting of their ways.”

Everyone tonight is asking how did Fox come to that decision to fire Carlson.  It’s known that Rupert Murdoch is a tough old bastard who makes business decisions based on dollars and cents.  So people on other smaller and independent networks like Megyn Kelly on Newsmax are favoring reasons based on future profitability that requires moving FN toward the center of the political spectrum.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are standing by to see how Tucker, who can write his own ticket, will now land on his feet in a new sandbox more to his liking.  When he finally does land, you can expect a seismic shift of cable audiences.  The risky part is that he will then have to deliver even more of his gloves-off impactive commentary than in the past.  His new copy will have to shoulder not only the ongoing leftwing and government travesties, but also the added burden of real and represented slings and arrows that this transition made him suffer.

Communism Arrives in California

From each according to his ability and to each according to his need – Communist Axiom

George Rebane

California consumers will soon be paying for their utilities according to how much money they make.  The long-denied face of Marxism will have arrived in full force if the utilities and the Public Utilities Commission have their way.

When this authoritarian regime gains a foothold, its principles will then be applied to control the means-based prices of life’s other necessities.  This is what always has happened when the butt stupid half of a country’s citizenry takes to using the government gun to milk their productive neighbors.  Our Left has always denied that their goal is organize America according to Marxist-cum-Communist principle.  Today they have gained enough support from our double dummies that they can talk about their progress to authoritarian rule out in the open.

All this is in the works in California because this is the way Gavin Newsom’s state government wants it: “The income-based bill proposal is part of the companies’ compliance with legislation passed by the California state government last year requiring these types of plans for utilities. The California Public Utilities Commission would have to approve the proposal and make a final decision by mid-2024. The fixed rate could start showing up on bills as soon as 2025.” After that, watch for the wall to be built around California to keep those who are productive from escaping becoming slaves to “equity,” unless the whole country has embraced Marxism by then. (more here)

 

‘DEI meets East Germany’

“U.S. Universities Urge Students to Report One Another for ‘Bias’ ”

George Rebane

Professors Ivan Mannovic (Stanford) and John Ellis (UC Santa Cruz) report that today’s universities are laying in another expensive layer of administrative bureaucracies designed to encourage students and other academics to report each others’ DEI infractions for general approbation, remediation of the accused, and TBD punishments.  The East German Stasi (secret police) last employed one third of its population to perform similar functions on its citizens.  America’s Orwellian conquest proceeds apace, abetted by cadres of reprobates that have the moral credentials of sacks of shit (a more civil description will not serve) lining the hallways of college administration buildings.

According to a recent study by the free-speech watchdog organization Speech First, 56% of American universities have adopted schemes that encourage students to report on one another anonymously for “bias” or “protected identity harm.” This means that anyone who falls short of campus orthodoxy on “pronouns,” transgenderism, microaggressions and proscribed language might soon be denounced and deprived of basic due process, including the right to face an accuser. (more here)

This evil is, of course, promoted by our Democratic Party as one more of their nationally implemented anti-American initiatives.  Added evidence of this is that no leftwing media outlet nor woke ideological commentariat will acknowledge that this is happening.  Free expression by at least half our population has been relegated to surreptitious exchanges, perhaps whispered in bathrooms with the water running.

But perhaps the worst aspect of this scheme is that the most destructive of campus bureaucracies—the diversity, equity and inclusion brigade—will grow, for most of the campus bias-reporting systems are housed in DEI offices. Yes, the same group that polices language, forces ideological training down the throats of faculty and students, and mandates loyalty oaths from faculty candidates will be in charge of administering the system of informers. Woke ideologues will obstruct the work of those who still believe that the mission of a university is to foster the free exchange of ideas.

Trump Derangement Syndrome – 31mar23

George Rebane

Now that former president Trump has been indicted by the country’s anti-American left, we are seeing the saner elements from both Right and Left decry the Manhattan idiot DA’s decision in countless media interviews and op-eds.  What strikes me is how these commentators are tippy-toeing around the notion of a violent opposition, while not exactly calling for one – but their message is clear – e.g. the 30mar23 Tucker Carlson program.  So let’s get cut to the chase, are we finally hearing that it’s time to start soaking the cannons?  Thoughts?

More later.

New California – Our 51st State?

George Rebane

The initiative to launch part of California as a new state, provided for by a number of treaties, agreements, and founding documents, has begun (here).  No matter how legal and above board the effort to liberate at least part of the golden state from its mire of tyranny, this effort will be opposed by all the usual political, monied, and anti-American institutions in the land.  However, our interest should be peaked in this kind of initiative because it shows that the desire for a return to constitutional liberties and governance is not yet dead and buried.

Scattershots – 5feb23 (updated 12feb23)

George Rebane

Chinese spy balloon.  One of the more intriguing and scary test purposes for the balloon could easily have been to see how easy it would be to float EMP nuclear devices over the American mainland.  The published altitude range for effective EMP explosions is about 60K-80Kft.  Such considerations make it even more important to immediately shoot down these incursions as soon as they enter US air space into payload recoverable territory.  I suppose then if an EMP device or test package was found, it could be considered an act of war.  But in such a contingency things would immediately get very complicated with the introduction of a lot of other factors.  The news about today’s underwater recovery results are guaranteed to be lies and propaganda; we should not tell the Chicoms what we found or didn’t.

[7feb23 update]  Microsoft to integrate ChatGPT into Bing in today’s announcement (here).  ChatGPT is the ‘complete natural language’ response system that represents the latest quantum leap in advanced deep learning systems and has already demonstrated how the new generation of smart machines will converse with users on a rapidly expanding base of human knowledge.  My son-in-law who does advanced AI research at Microsoft Research tells me to “stay tuned, this could be history in the making.”

[12feb23 update]  From post-SOTUS media reports, Democrats finally admit that Republicans have a totally opposite direction they want to take the country, and that neither side believes in each other’s facts.  Given such terminal incongruity, what could then be the purpose of pursuing common goals for returning to or going forward to seek an unhappy state of America’s reunification.  Isn’t it past time to start negotiating a peaceful Great Divide?

‘Democracy Dies in California’

“To impose a new burden on fast-food restaurants, the state plans to ignore the constitution’s right of voters to review laws.”

George Rebane

California suffers a continuous stream of social, economic, and political disasters.  All of these are formulated, brought to bear, and implemented by the state’s virulently anti-American Democratic Party.  Most of the public policy tragedies arrive unknown and unannounced to the state’s shrinking share of maker residents.  The takers don’t care since they know that all the wealth transfer programs, no matter how scurrilous, all go to buy and pay for their votes.

The latest of these promises an historic change in how California’s referenda will now be treated.  Slated to go into effect tomorrow (1jan23) – “The law creates a state council to dictate wages, working conditions and benefits, among other things, for fast-food workers who aren’t unionized. The law is intended to coerce fast-food franchises to surrender to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).” (here)

What’s different is that this law was passed late in the legislative session to deny Californians any reasonable review of the matter.  However, an astute watchdog organization, Save Local Restaurants, has gathered over a million signatures on a petition opposing the referendum and filed it with the state.  According to California’s constitution “a law is required to be put on hold once a referendum petition with enough signatures is filed.”

The constitution is very specific about this 1911 amendment which reserves “to the people the power to pass judgment upon the acts of the legislature, and to prevent objectionable measures from taking effect.” Once a referendum is filed, “no such act or section or part of such act shall go into effect until and unless approved by a majority of the qualified electors voting thereon.”

The state is ignoring its constitution, and has stated it will “temporarily” implement the law until the signatures are verified, a task that will be completed sometime in October 2023.  At that time the law will either be withdrawn or made permanent.  Such an unconstitutional, temporarily-in-effect provision has never been attempted before.

If allowed to stand, this legislative tactic – passing bills late in the legislative calendar in order to limit their opponents’ ability to stop them from taking effect - will become yet another tool and precedent for our monopoly political party to continue its destruction of California.  Sleazebags on parade.

The only remaining hope on this is an order by a state judge prohibiting enforcement of the law until a hearing is held in two weeks.  Else “businesses would have to temporarily comply even though the laws may be later suspended once signatures are verified and eventually overturned by voters.”  So it is no surprise that we continue to witness large numbers of our businesses and people vote with their feet by leaving California.

Ruminations – 8dec22 (updated 15dec22)

George Rebane

Trump in 2024?  Hard to see how the man can get nominated by the Repubs, no matter how hard he might try.  His latest mis-pronouncements on the Constitution and having his business found criminally guilty of fraud provides a tipping point for the lamestream to finally castigate him cause, and the Republicans to unite in his finally being too tainted to touch.  None of this says that Trump won’t run as a splinter party candidate.  For a prayer that he won’t, we should all light a candle.

Christmas consideration.  Jo Ann and I put up our porch Christmas lights yesterday.  Today we got this tongue-in-cheek from a fellow bourbon drinking neighbor. “I don’t mean to be a grinch however....to those of you who are placing Christmas lights/decorations in your yards, would you please avoid anything that has Red or Blue flashing lights together? Every time I come around the corner, I think it's the cops and I have a panic attack. I have to brake hard, toss my glass of Jack Daniel's out the window, fasten my seat belt, throw my phone on the floor, turn my radio down, and push the gun under the seat. All while trying to drive. It's just too much drama, even for Christmas. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.”

[15dec22 update]  Here is a short on-the-mark commentary of VDH on FTX's scumbag Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk, the hero of Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter.

Twitter blackout

George Rebane

Last week Elon Musk released a tranche of Twitter internal communications to conservative blogger Matt Taibbi.  Since then, more has been released through Taibbi.  These missives between top and middle management at Twitter during the summer and fall of 2020 are damning evidence of how the Democrat Party, government agencies, and corporatist entities worked hand-in-glove to deflect the election toward Biden by censoring and discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop evidence of high-level corruption and government influence peddling.

As RR and its regular Ruminators have long-cited and argued, this case of carefully constructed and directed lies was most certainly the biggest ‘irregularity’ from which the 2020 election suffered, and still gives cause for many of us to consider that President Trump would have been re-elected had the laptop imbroglio received the timely national coverage it deserved.  Many legal minds and national commentators opine that the significance of how the Biden laptop was censored and propagandized makes Watergate look like a walk in the park.  I strongly agree.

Here we have two distinct issues at work – laptop evidence of Biden family corruption, and corporatist cooperation with political opposition to influence the outcome of a national election.  These working together gives a perfect example where 2+2=5, and why the DNC and Democratic leadership pulled all stops to bury the evidence before voters could hear of it.  The details of the story, especially as it involves collusion of the FBI (weekly meetings with Twitter) and a cadre of former intelligence officials, make for movie material reading (more here).  And, of course, the case is not closed yet if congressional Republicans will grow a pair and open a wide-ranging investigation in January.  Stay tuned.

Finally, what this illustrates once more is another example of how Americans live in two distinct and separate worlds.  Those light readers who consume mainly lamestream media will not have even heard enough to give this matter a second thought.  More observant leftwingers continue to consume the lies that there is no there there; most certainly not of government censorship since Twitter is a private company.  Of course, Twitter’s close coordination with the Biden WH and FBI, as the evidence now shows, is never mentioned in the leftwing outlets’ reports.  Through corporatism the government has been overwhelmingly involved in First Amendment censorship.

For a coda, put this coverage and the polarization it maintains in the context of finding common ground, of coming together again, or of the oft-repeated notion that there are more things that unite us than separate us.  No there aren’t.  (More here)

Two blind mice

George Rebane

Celebrating political monopolies.  Leftwing thought leaders, syndicated Thomas Elias and local George Boardman, write with glee how California’s Democrat Party cancer continues to grow.  Having already metastasized the state, it is now starting to pick off the remnant low population rural counties in the northern part, leading with our Nevada County. (Their columns in the 29nov22 Union, not online yet.)

The social and economic devastation is totally invisible to these mavens, as these were to the Stalin celebretorians in Pravda of the 1930s and 1940s.  As with all autocrats, it’s the party über alles, no matter what trail of destruction it leaves behind.  They see nothing wrong with the exodus of the skilled and productive.  The exodus of small businesses for greener pastures.  The ever-increasing taxes and regulations to conduct and corral our lives.  Nothing wrong with the state’s top 1% earners paying nearly 50% of the state’s general fund revenues.  And many of these 150,000 out of 40M are now leaving or have already left, thereby causing huge ($25B) and promising bigger state budget deficits.

But what the Left’s cricket chorus hides is how decades of one-party control has made California the nation’s posterchild of every government folly and foible that places us in the bottom of the federalized barrel of states along almost every metric that is important to the country’s makers.  However, the country’s takers see an entirely different California.  They welcome its teeming cities filled with the homeless, littered with needles and feces, and rife with crime rates that are anything but equitable.

To be fair Thomas Elias does make a couple of good points about the state’s Republicans basically sitting on their collective butts celebrating a micro gain here and there, but none of it amounts to a hill of beans in being a relevant opposition party in the state.  Elias doesn’t have much advice for that achievement save give up on some core Republican planks like opposing abortion.

Bottom line though is that neither columnist gives a hint of lament about the detritus all around us as evidence of what the Democrat Party has accomplished during its tenure in Sacramento.  

Election 2022 – America’s Voters Tested (updated 15nov22)

George Rebane

So, election day 2022 is finally here.  It arrived with a months-long preamble of leftwing lies about the current state of the country and the portents for its future were we to deviate from the sorry road that got us to where we are under this administration.  The question now is how many of us believed the crap spewing from the White House, Congress, and their lamestream lackies.  And yes, it is the most momentous election since I started paying attention in my pre-teen years.  Communists of all stripes used to be pariahs in the American political menagerie.  Not anymore.  Now communism is being taught in our schools as one of the more beneficial ways to organize society after we rid ourselves of the capitalist democratic republic that we have had foisted on us.

The fault is not with our politicians, it lies upon those of us who put them in positions of power.  “A republic, if you can keep it.”

[9nov22 update]  The much-vaunted Red Wave has now turned out to be recognized nationally at best as the Red Ripple – and that appellation is still hopeful since neither the House nor Senate results are yet in.  Our Nevada County went predictably Democratic – RR has acknowledged for years that the county is blue, not quite as badly as California, but close enough for government work.  So what happened yesterday and its weeks-long preamble of early voting was a disaster for our republic.  My takeaways can be enumerated as follows –

1. The irretrievable decline of our constitutional republic is confirmed. The fraction of our electorate that is terminally ignorant of collectivist governance, economics and capitalism, the beneficial role of entrepreneurship and financial risk, elements of science, American history and history in general, AND the basic skills of literacy and numeracy has now breached the 50% level. (cf National Center for Educational Statistics)
2. The effectiveness of our progressive educational institutions working in tandem with our compliantly propagandized Fourth Estate is beyond question when it comes to the kind of learning and related behavioral changes that are still possible for our adult population to again support capitalism and American constitutionalism. There is no feasible road back from collectivism and collectivist dogma for a major share of the American electorate whose post-reasonable belief systems have become immune to evidence.
3. The Republican party is not an effective alternative to the Democrats, and continues to shrink its political efforts to champion the nation’s Right, which currently has no viable alternative through which to seek ideological resurgence.
4. The fork in the road of our national future lead to autocracy cum tyranny or the Great Divide. The peaceful resolution would be a negotiated Great Divide, the several forms of which have been discussed in these pages.  What stands in the way is that the Right wants to separate from the Left, but the Left wants to prevent separation and favors controlling a subdued, subservient, and shrinking Right.  This is made clear daily by their political leaders and media talking heads.
5. The above asymmetries to governance and social order are uniform across the land and visible daily even in our little rural county. In today’s Union, its op-ed pages featured a skewed admonishment of the newspaper’s political orientation which has faithfully represented the county’s invasion by coastal liberals who have soiled their former homes.  The paper does print rightwing authors whose sparse offerings are regularly decried for being allowed in print in a community with a majority leftwing population.  Such illustrative responses to inhibit free speech and opposing views are innately foreign to people of the Right.
6. No matter what the final counts will indicate, this election has proven to be a disaster for Republicans. Never since FDR’s atrocious New Deal policies have we witnessed a more incompetent, corrupt, and corrupting administration with ample evidence of its doings becoming increasingly available over the months.  The hopeful sentiment was that this much government corruption, imbecility, and anti-Americanism will surely make an impact on leftwing constituencies.  The results didn’t pan out and gives proof to the indelible mentality of the main street Left.  (The polls have been worthless, no good ways of random sampling remain in this age of screened telecommunications.)
7. The only glimmer that has come out so far is some visible migration of Hispanics and blacks away from the devastating inflation and crime that the Biden administration has brought about over the last two years. But even that was not enough keep the wave from turning into at best a ripple.

Coda: Apparently I’m not alone in the assessment of the American electorate.  Stephen Kruiser of PJ Media writes, ‘We're Done–American Voters Are Idiots’.

[15nov22 update] 'Tragically Trump' is Victor Davis Hanson's major essay on the election, the role of Trump, and the Republican Party's future that heavily depends on what Trump will do now.  I don't believe he will go quietly into the dark night of political has-beens.  H/T to commenters who also picked up on VDH's commentary.

America’s Foreign Policy

George Rebane

Our foreign policy is on the rocks, and has not been so badly mishandled since JFK’s screw-up brought on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  Our globally recognized incompetence in that national endeavor has brought us to the brink of WW3 with not only one, but two marginally stable enemies (I discount North Korea and Iran).  Russia and Red China are each exhibiting their opportunistic ire in the face of the weak leader now in the White House, one who has visibly weakened and demoralized our military and promises to continue down that path by withdrawing funding for critical technology upgrades and new combat systems procurements required to bring our defense establishment back up to par with our longstanding national security requirements.

A nation’s foreign policy begins at its border.  And our president has been purposely and impeachably delinquent with his policies starting at our southern border which he has kept invitingly open to millions of illegal aliens pouring in at a steady stream – over five million during the last two years.  This lawless stream has contributed to unmanageable crime, thousands of drug deaths, and an ongoing cultural shock to communities.  Upon closer examination, Joe Biden has done nothing to fulfill the oath he took in January 2021.  His only accomplishment in keeping half the nation in deep ignorance is his daily stream of historically preposterous lies about the state of the world, the nation, and his political opponents.  With a willing and compliant media, and a dumbed-down electorate, almost anything can be passed off as an acceptable and palliative version of reality.

We Americans permit this dangerous assault on national security and our way of life by a continuing, if not deepening, ignorance about the world and our role in it.  As mentioned, our media and educational institutions have been partners in keeping Americans in the dark about global happenings and how to relate these to our foreign policy.

This social deficit was first recognized by James F. Byrnes (1882-1972), politician (congressman, senator, governor), jurist (Supreme Court justice), and diplomat (Secretary of State) extraordinaire.  He was the ‘President’s Hand’ under Roosevelt and Truman, and critical architect of wartime and postwar policies, including peace treaties with Germany et al and Imperial Japan, and agreements to keep the USSR and international communism at bay.  He was America’s principal advisor or principal negotiator at international conferences and head-of-state meetings from 1939 to 1947.  Having taught himself shorthand in law school, he became the inveterate note taker at every meeting he attended.  No one could cite erroneous memories from previous meetings when Byrnes was involved, since he could read them chapter and verse of direct quotes of who said what when.

After the war Byrnes’ accomplishments became known and his fame spread.  There was a national outcry for him to write the definitive record of the war’s diplomatic back story and how the major decisions were made, decisions from whether/when to drop the atomic bomb to how the post-war world should be partitioned.  He acceded to this and published a detailed and fascinating history titled Speaking Frankly (1947), which instantly made it to the top of the charts along with being highlighted by the then enormously popular Book-of-the-Month Club.  For WW2 history buffs like me, reading it was an expansion of my own knowledge and a thrilling page-turning reveal of the highly classified and secret goings-on that guided where and when the battles occurred.  Along with the inevitable barnacles that collect with such a career, he was among the several under-appreciated giants that determined the course of the war and subsequent international relations.

On the subject of foreign policy Byrnes promoted openness and public participation as prerequisites to peace and avoiding unnecessary wars.  He wrote –

I continue to think that, if we are to have a lasting peace, it must be a people’s peace.  The people can exert their full influence in the conduct of foreign affairs only if they know more about them.

The basic democratic right, the right of the people to know, must be applied increasingly to the conduct of foreign affairs.  If that right is essential – as I believe it is - to the functioning of democracy here at home, it is at least equally necessary to apply it in the field of foreign affairs where the need for knowledge and understanding is so much greater.  To carry this policy into action involves a break with the diplomatic habits of the past.  Such habits are not easily broken.  Time, effort, and a constant demand by the public to know what is happening will be needed.

People cannot act intelligently if, in all matters of importance affecting our relations with other governments, they are kept in the dark.

Let there be light – and lots of it!

Ruminations – 29oct22 (update 4nov22)

George Rebane

Left fears the ‘start of political violence’ with the Pelosi assault.  As commenters from the 25oct22 Sandbox observe, why have such fears suddenly come up now, and none such during the summer of city riots and Justice Kavanaugh assaults?  Judging from his lodgings, the nutjob’s political orientation was leftwing.  And given Nancy’s horrible anti-American policies that hurt all of us, ‘Where’s Nancy?’ is politically an equal opportunity query. Is there anyone on the left with balls enough to explain the matter to the rest of us?  Don’t hold your breath.

How come cancer of or inside the pericardium, the sack that surrounds the heart, is so rare?  This question keeps recurring to me.  Maybe a reader knows the answer.

“What are election crimes?”  Well, it appears that the FBI has come up with an answer (here), the remaining mystery is how it intends to seek out and capture the ‘criminals’.

[1nov22 update]  Conspiracies exist.  They have always existed, and always will.  How then can we examine, debate, and expose harmful conspiracies in the public forum if our citizenry is brainwashed into believing that theorizing about the existence of any conspiracy or surreptitious activity is on its face an extremist, ignorant, and/or socially harmful endeavor?

[4nov22 update]  Bumblebrain is to meet with China’s Xi in a “summit” during the G20 conference this month. (more here)  What possible motivation would we (i.e. the administration and Democrats) have in allowing that level of incompetence to take part in a one-on-one meeting with perhaps the shrewdest tyrant on earth?  Is Biden going to wear ear buds so his handlers could at least attempt to mediate what comes out of his mouth?

The Durham Disaster (edited)

George Rebane

Igor Danchenko walked in a jury opinion that made special prosecutor John Durham’s ‘strike two’ as he concludes his three-year investigation into the Russia collusion hoax.  Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman was Durham’s first failure at the bar of justice.  The evidence against both sleazebags was overwhelming to most who understood the magnitude of the hoax from its start, now more than six years ago.

But for reasons that still boggle my mind, our legal system is now so convoluted and corrupt that main street reason and logic cannot even comprehend its processes and products.  The convoluted part has always been there since biblical times for all legal systems - i.e. the lawyers' full employment act.  It’s today’s corruption add-on that is most disturbing.

Durham’s last chance at bat is his vaunted report that is forthcoming.  Of course, there’s no guarantee that Biden’s law firm, aka the DoJ, will ever let it see the light of day.  In that event, I suppose that is why God invented leakers.  The much-awaited report is supposed to be a summa indictment of the now thoroughly corrupt FBI.  Can you imagine that they offered ex-Brit spy Christopher Steele one million dollars if he could come up with what would pass for evidence in corroborating the fictions Danchenko generated and passed off as another Clinton hireling involved in what was mischaracterized as opposition research.  When you weave the contents of the infamous ‘Steele dossier’ out of whole cloth, that is at best creative writing and not research. (more here) 

And, of course, Hillary continues on her perch on top of Mt Olympus, totally shielded by the lamestream and the federal justice system from any splatter as all this hits the fan.  No one knows when Durham will wrap up his disastrous exercise to count coup on any part of the neo-Marxist machine that is powering the country’s turn away from constitutional republicanism.  No one should bet a dime against the FBI coming out of this as a rehabilitated institution - aka smelling like a rose.  Meanwhile, the sheeple remain quietly bedded down, and the Republicans are doing their best cricket imitations.

[correction]  An astute reader caught my error in ascribing Danchenko, instead of Steele, as the intended recipient of FBI's desperate $1M payoff.  Many thanks.

Scattershots – 12oct22 (updated 16oct22)

California is a warning to the nation.  Kevin Kiley

George Rebane

Unhinged leftwinger op-ed in the 12oct22 Union. (here) In this community the ideological sentiments (aka blinders) of Ms Cheryl Cook are well known.  In today’s column she corroborates her reputation as a woke progressive who strives for a world repulsive to anyone to the right of Joe Manchin.  She highlights her ignorance from the gitgo with “At River Valley High School in Yuba City recently, it was three shirtless Black students who suffered humiliation during a videotaped mock slave auction. They were lined up against a wall with objects hanging from their bowed heads while they were yelled at and assigned monetary values by a few Varsity football team members.  That’s humiliation! That’s embarassment!(sic) Yes, sir! Right there in Yuba City, California. With a capital C, that rhymes with C, that stands for Cruel.  Ever wonder how the pain of unresolved history is inherited by our own children?”  Anyone with a minimum room temp IQ knows that this was an historical enactment willingly participated in by the black students wanting to graphically act out the unsavory and tragic aspects of US history.  From there Ms Cook’s screed goes down hill winding up with the assertion that MAGA Americans are Nazis equivalent to those of pre-WW2 fascists who brought Hitler to power.  And, of course, you know who is the MAGA-Hitler.

Democrats continue their reputation as the anti-science party while loudly claiming the Alinsky alternative.  The Steamboat Institute had a hell of time putting together debates on college campuses on the resolution: “Climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”  Dr Steve Koonin, MIT theoretical physicist and prominent author (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters), has agreed participate in all three scheduled debates to argue the negative.  When this became known to the leftwing ‘scientists’ proclaiming climate hysteria, they went ballistic.  Ms Jennifer Schubert-Akin, CEO of the Steamboat Institute, informs us (here) that “Some of the responses we received from well-known climate scientists and academics stated that we are “wildly irresponsible” for giving Mr. Koonin a platform, that there is “no room for debate on these issues,” and my favorite, from a well-known climatologist who is on Reuters’s “Hot List” of the world’s top climate scientists: “I don’t debate climate science. It’s a poor way to get at the truth.”  To socialists, the way to truth, goodness, and light is take Marxist maxims as ex cathedra.

Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.  For those truly interested (and concerned?) about climate change, here is a look at it from an apolitical perspective and one that really relies on all that science has to offer on the subject.   “The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC, as its name suggests, is an international panel of scientists and scholars who came together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. NIPCC has no formal attachment to or sponsorship from any government or governmental agency. It is wholly independent of political pressures and influences and therefore is not predisposed to produce politically motivated conclusions or policy recommendations.”

[15oct22 update]  ‘How EVs Can Power the Grid’  Well, they can’t really do that today, but governments are keenly interested in using the increasing number of EV batteries as a distributed storage cache for electricity.  These EVs will have bidirectional inverters that let you plug in and charge your EV or, when the utility decides, then to drain your battery for the greater good of the grid users.  Utrecht in Holland is leading the way in studying this possibility with the city’s EV charging stations.  Implementing this V2G capability will give someone else the ultimate control of your EV - whether you can drive it or not, when and how far.  No grousing allowed; it’s for the common good you see.  (more here and here)

[16oct22 update] ‘The Biden Admin Has Been A Chaotic Disaster. But Will It Matter?’ That is my perennial question; are there enough Americans informed and smart enough to make it count in the voting booth?  The affirming evidence is hard to find. Jared Whitley of the Daily Caller writes, “The first two years (God help us, it’s just been two years) of the Biden Administration have been an irrefutable disaster. Biden has wiped out $9 trillion in wealth from the stock market. The rate of inflation is 8.2%, four times what it was under former President  Donald Trump. The cost of energy is up almost 33%, whereas Trump sold oil to the Middle East. … After a 25-year trend of decreasing violent crime across the country, hopelessly blue cities have seen a spike, with murder rates up 44% since 2019! … The president is himself a barely coherent, maladroit zombie. Whereas the corporate media roasted George W. Bush for saying nucular instead of nuclear, today they blissfully ignore the gaffes of a man who was gaffe prone even before he was senile.’ (more here)

Dark Days Diary – 30sep22 (updated 1oct22)

George Rebane

Sen Joe Manchin has turned out to be another double dummy political hack and a major disappointment, succumbing to the predictable and obvious wiles of Sen Schumer.  Ol’ Joe had us all fooled during the past year as being the staunch stalwart, along with Sen Sinema (D-AZ), against the economic ruin the Dems were cooking up with their Inflation Reduction Act bamboozle.  They got Joe’s vote with the promise of including his pipeline and permit facilitation bill, which most on the Right correctly saw as Lucy’s football.  Now that the bill has no chance of passing as is, Manchin’s reputation is in the mud with Republicans, moderate Democrats (vanishing breed), and, of course, his West Virginia constituents who expected more than the meadow muffins he wound up delivering.  Tough to see how he’ll ever recover.  (more here, here, and here) 

Fire tax – Nevada County voters will have a chance to vote down the proposed ½% sales tax increase that’s supposed to fund wildfire prevention and mitigation.  Actually, the collected monies will go into the general fund where the Supes promise they will be carefully watched and audited by a “citizens oversight committee”.  California’s Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association warns us once more (here) how such taxes will be misused as they have been in the past.

J6 show trial postponed closer to election – Moving the century’s biggest-to-date show trial closer to the election again tells you all you need to know about this hyper-partisan kabuki theater.  The Dems have no viable platform or record of achievements to present to the voters, so all they have left is to pump up the J6 hysteria of imminent attacks by Trump led ultra-right MAGA white supremacist terrorists.  The real tragedy is that there are millions of muddle minded Americans who swallow this political swill. (more here)

Dems’ Big Lies – As opposed to counting Trump’s political bombast as lies, the real material lies that continue unabated from the Left need to be reviewed, revived, and reinserted into the public’s attention span.  This, of course, is the job of the Republicans who have not shown much political moxie in keeping these highlighted in the public fora.  Oh, to again have two viable political parties.  Here is the list from a recent post -  

When the dissemination of prime-time, first-rate whoppers comes up for discussion, our leftwing neighbors, both national and local, volubly maintain that both sides are at least equally guilty, with the Republicans dispensing the majority.  By any comparative listing of such poetic truths (aka Big Lies), the contest is not even close, nor has it ever been.  Historically socialists are the big liars, for that is the requirement for their public square bamboozles to gain any traction in governance.  Today’s examples overwhelm –

‘Our southern border is secure, there is no border crisis’,

‘Crime rates are not up, there is no urban crime wave in America’,

‘Increasing taxes will not exacerbate the ongoing stagflation’,

‘Increasing taxes will grow the economy’,

‘Tax rates do not affect investment and productivity’,

'You can keep your doctor ...',

'Obamacare will reduce national healthcare costs',

‘Fossil fuels are bad and unnecessary; our energy needs can be met entirely by renewables’,

'America is better off being energy-dependent on foreign suppliers,'

‘Illegal immigration and illegal aliens in the workforce are necessary for economic growth’,

‘Capitalism and minimally regulated markets are arbitrary, cruel, and don't work’,

‘Men and women are exactly the same, making sexual distinction racist and unnecessary’,

‘Christians are intolerant’,

‘Trump’s collusion with the Russians swung the 2016 election’,

‘The tenets of Critical Race Theory are not taught in our K-12 schools’,

‘Merit based education (especially in STEM subjects) is racist’,

'Western culture is intrinsically racist',

‘America is a systemically racist country’,

‘Blacks don’t overwhelmingly kill blacks, cops gratuitously kill blacks,’

‘Government enforced equity motivates better than equal opportunity,’

‘Multi-cultural factionalism serves to unite America,’

… and on and on.

[1oct22 update]  Competing for the biggest of the Dems’ big lies is their ‘Republicans want to destroy the Constitution, censor free speech, do away with our freedoms, and establish a totalitarian state.’  This message to their cognitively constrained constituents is Alinsky and Lenin on steroids, each part being exactly 180 from their own daily demonstrated policies and activists on the march.  Today’s fragmented conservative pro-life movement is as close as any leftist can get to some Republicans wanting to limit your freedom to kill your unborn child.  Other than that, it is ONLY the Republicans who work for fewer regulations, lower taxes to support a smaller government, and a nation of constitutional laws instead of a corrupt and growing administrative neo-Marxist state.  And to put a bow on it, today’s Republicans leave a lot to be desired in their efforts to keep our republic.

[2oct22 update]  One of our astute readers and commenters posted a link to a recent VDH piece, ‘The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization’.  In communicating the current state of western civilization, the good professor has again hit it out of the park.  Definitely a must read and share.  One wonders how much of such writing is comprehensible to our Left.  Dark days indeed.

Name the bastards!

George Rebane

Rep Tom McClintock (R-CA4) writes ‘A Nation Without Borders Will Cease to be a Nation’ in the Washington Times.  In the piece he gives his usual erudite arguments that support his banner thesis.  But this open border travesty is not due to some natural disaster or act of God.  The closest he comes to ascribing the cause is to blame the “Biden administration”, a polyglot of faceless, anonymous, and unaccountable minions.  The congressman and I have had several talks on how ineffective such responses are in today’s political wars.  When the Democrats attack Republicans, they identify their targets by name and pile on them additionally fabricated faults.  To the voters this makes the cited problem real, one that is caused by known and dastardly Republicans.  It also makes a news story interesting and worth reporting in the vein of ‘let’s you and him fight.’

I have strongly advised our local congressmen (LaMalfa, McClintock, Kiley) in face-to-face conversations to always include names of the Democrat(s) guilty of foisting the latest feckless, foolish, and/or anti-American policy on the country.  While I have received mild agreement and no pushback on my recommendation, I have also gotten no traction as is again evident from the above column.  If the Republicans want their opposition to Democrats be heard, they need to name names of the guilty bastards who introduce and support the continuous stream of insanities which comprise progressive legislation.  Such one-on-one counters make news which people can understand, while word-smithed intellectual repartees will go on to sustain the sound of Republican silence across the land.  Engage, dammit!

Underserved, really?

George Rebane

Underserved groups used to describe populations without adequate access to goods and services, e.g. education, medical care. This included rural, elderly, low-literacy, blue collar, and poor populations. Minorities (i.e. Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, transphiles, illegal aliens, …) per se were not included, but often belonged to one or more or the included categories.  The current politically correct definition first and foremost characterizes all minorities as being underserved, and therefore needing wealth transfers along with a growing slate of “socially equitable” laws, regulations, rights, and permissions.

Today the underserved minorities are grist for the Democrat voting machine.  But the government’s own wealth transfer data from its myriads of welfare programs tells a markedly different story.  Starting around 1970, when the Great Society laws and programs started kicking in, it turns out that if anything, the minority populations in the big urban areas have been overserved.  (Culture and public education explains away why these monies have not been used more wisely.)  What keeps the underserved Big Lie alive in the lamestream is the way that progressive government bureaus, agencies, and departments keep score on the dispensed cash.

A good illustration of this is the cited statistics on the country’s child poverty rate.  Nationally prominent economists Phil Gramm and John Early debunk (here) the leftwing claim that currently one in six (over 16%) children live in poverty.  When you look more closely, you find for openers that “the Census Bureau’s tallies still don’t include $1.9 trillion in government transfer payments. … If the Census Bureau had included the missing $1.9 trillion in transfer payments, child poverty would have been only 3.2% in 2017, compared with the official rate of 17.5%.”

A similar Big Lie treatment generates the “myth of American income inequality”.  The authors treat this issue in an excellent online version (here) of their similarly titled book.  The income inequality ‘facts’ are cooked from statistics that garble earned income and the myriad of transfer payments that induce people not to work.  The continually cited poverty stats range in the one in five or six level (16-20%), when the actual rates are really less than one fifth (about 3+%) of that.  This fact is known by all illegal aliens who risked life and limb to get here.

The bottom line of all this is that these lies are used by our Left to perennially bolster their voter rolls with the unread and diseducated of the land.  At the same time this narrative forms the basis for the Democrats’ constant drumbeat of promoting vote-buying payments to these populations which require ever more taxes and national debt increases.  You can bet the farm that none of this has been covered in the Dems’ lamestream media, and therefore at least half the country has no idea of who is underserved, and to what extent these populations are actually being overserved.

Scattershots – 21sep2022 (updated 23sep22)

George Rebane

Do any of them know what they’re talking about?  Here’s a comment from a liberal sackhead –

I sense much desperation on this site from the host's diatribes against women, blacks, and the march toward MAGA extremism. ... The hosts(sic) denigrates educated women, and assumed anyone not a rank MAGA is an idiot when in fact the QAnon prone MAGA are far more dangerously ignorant and mind controlled.  Posted by: Whole Foods | 21 September 2022 at 07:21 AM

As the record shows, RR contains no “diatribes against women, blacks,” nor has it ever given evidence of any “march toward MAGA extremism.”  Does the commenter have a definition for ‘MAGA extremism’, or even know the tenets of MAGA?  My money is on ‘Not even a clue’.  Naked allegations without a shred of substance behind them is the progressives’ de rigueur of accepted indictments.

They also have a very coarse, actually a binary, concept of ‘hate’.  Their lexicon between embracing and hating is a barren desert.  Once you criticize something or someone, especially one of their totems, then you are automatically accused of hate.  Nuanced semantics are relegated to their never-neverland.  An example of the other bookend, once someone embraces any one of the many conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, they are automatically relegated to membership in the internationally fractionated and unstructured organization, along with embracing the entire smorgasbord of socio-political worldviews attributed to QAnon.  There is no middle ground.

On the lighter side.  Here’s a brain teaser reputed to have even caused Einstein a moment of puzzlement.  An old car is to drive a stretch of 2 miles, up and down a hill (one mile up and one mile down). Being so old, it cannot drive the first mile (the ascent) faster than with an average speed of 15 miles per hour.  How fast does it have to drive the second mile (on going down, it can, of course, go faster) in order to have an average speed of 30 miles an hour for the whole journey?

[23sep22 update]  Democrats’ partisan 501c3 charities use tax deductible contributions to register leftwing voters.  Such charities are not supposed engage in partisan activities.  The evil party has done this for decades knowing that the IRS will continue to give them a pass (consider if the Repubs did this).  Kim Strassel provides chapter and verse about this crap in the 23sep22 WSJ, “America’s charitable giving laws have been an enormous force for good, but Democrats are cynically abusing the system for partisan gain. If Congress wants to keep dollars and politicking in the political sphere—and under the remit of the Federal Election Commission—it needs to change tax law to prohibit ‘charities’ outright from taking part in voter-registration or get-out-the-vote drives. The problem isn’t ‘dark money’—it’s the sham ‘philanthropy’ voter-registration racket, taking place in broad daylight.” (more here)  Talk about election fraud; and what has the incompetent GOP leadership done about this?  Nothing, absolutely nothing.

A One-Party Humanitarian Crisis (updated 17sep22)

George Rebane

‘Humanitarian crises’ in ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions set up by progressives across the land.  Sending a few scores of illegal aliens from overcrowded border towns to sanctuary cities and exclusive enclaves is trumpeted as a “humanitarian crisis” by the Left and their lamestream media.  To do that is a “cruel, inhumane way to treat people” who have been enticed by the Biden administration to travel thousands of dangerous miles, paying cartels and coyotes their life savings to chance getting across our border without being raped, human trafficked, or killed in the process.  None of what the Democrats are putting the poor of the world through to get them illegally into America is seen by progressives as the greater humanitarian crisis compared to the final plane ride or comfortable bus trip to a community that advertises itself as a welcoming sanctuary.

What’s more galling is that so-called conservative commentators are unable to compare and contrast all this to their audiences.  They are joined by the eternally dumbfounded Republicans in ignoring the ongoing travesty, not even being able to point out how Democrats ignore the secreted midnight planes rides they sponsor to transport unannounced illegals to various cities in Republican governed states.  And all this is done to the continuously headlined Big Lie from the White House that “our border remains secure” and the problem is our “broken immigration system” which was caused by then President Trump.

And the biggest tragedy, as we approach the election, is that half the electorate that is eternally ignorant and/or consumes only lamestream outlets has no idea that all this is going on pursuant to a purposed and dedicated Democrat policy which is part and parcel of their ongoing successful program to fundamentally transform America.  The eternally timid and out-to-lunch Republicans have given us a one-party country that now openly operates under a dominant neo-Marxist ideology.  This means that the other half of the country has no effective representation in national politics and policies.  The Republicans were the only game in town to stop the march of collectivism over the last half century, and today they have demonstrably failed to deliver.

[17sep22 update]  National Conservatism – we encountered news of the new direction in America’s conservative circles in the last Scattershots (here).  Now we get the announcement that the venerable Heritage Foundation has announced this ideological tweak in its socio-political philosophy (here).  I find nothing outrageous in this change, and have long encourage a more robust use of limited government resources by the Right to direct and implement socio-economic policies in our republic – and mainly for the Republicans to get off their collective ass and start making themselves heard on our behalf, especially in the face of the Left’s now desperate campaign of wall-to-wall lying bordering on ‘save democracy from semi-fascist, white supremacist, domestic terrorists’.

According to Heritage, the new direction will engage in “promoting a more restrained approach to foreign policy and a more active government role in the regulation of big tech, while moving away from the conventional wisdom that conservatives shouldn’t use government power to advance their interests.”  We’ll see how the rest of the Republican leadership adopts and implements this change.  And there will be more to say on all this.

‘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.