Rebane's Ruminations

Doing it to ourselves – why?

[The Nevada County Board of Supervisors will again vote on Item 26 this coming Tuesday.  Item 26 involves the passage of an "urgency ordinance" that will levy draconian fines on NC residents and businesses for violating any of the decrees and diktats regarding Covid-19 passed by higher up government jurisdictions, and piles on a passel of additional ones in the form of a county ordinance (here) to which we who live here will be subjected.  None of this local government overreach and virtue signalling is necessary since we are all aware of the Covid-19 infection dangers and know how to mitigate the risk - our stats demonstrate.  We don’t need our local pols to establish a legion of STASI-like plain clothes snitches who will cite innocent infractions with fines of thousands of dollars.  We don’t have to do it to ourselves.  Write to your supervisor about opposing Item 26 on the agenda.  My sweetie-pie Jo Ann is doing her part, so I asked if I could publish some of the drafts of letters and emails she is sending to the Supes and senior county staff members.  Hopefully, some of these will inspire you to drop them a line.  gjr]

Jo Ann Rebane

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – live public meeting             

Consideration of item 26, the urgency enforcement ordinance should be held during a live public meeting.  As a board you previously sat through not hours, but DAYS of public comment on the Marijuana Urgency Ordinance.  The public needs to personally express their comments and personally see and hear your reactions thereto on this version of the urgency enforcement ordinance.  Surely you can figure out a way to let the public address your board in person while maintaining social distancing and other covid precautions. 

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I oppose the revised and current version of item 26, urgency covid enforcement ordinance.  This version is draconian.  It encourages the public to “snitch” or “tattle-tale” on individuals, businesses and commercial enterprises to cause code enforcers to levy excessive and confiscatory fines.  There is enough acrimony in this county already.  Don’t stir up more divisiveness.

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I oppose agenda item 26 for the express OVERREACH which makes it unlawful for any individual, business or commercial enterprise to do anything contrary to orders of ANY governmental body, agency or individual at any level in California.  It is impossible for the public to know all those rules, regulations, edicts, and orders.  Send this draft to the waste can.

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I urge you to oppose agenda item 26.  This county and its businesses, including restaurants did everything the governor required under the initial order in March.  This county qualified for special opening status and re-opened carefully.  Restaurants and others invested heavily in costly infrastructure and what did they get – another shut-down.  This county continues to qualify for the special relaxed opening status but the governor’s recent order doesn’t recognize this.  We comply and he punishes us.  Does one size fit all counties? 

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I urge you to oppose agenda item 26.  The Nevada County Board of Supervisors should be fighting the governor not our local businesses.  Scrap the urgency ordinance and fight for our county’s businesses and not against them.

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

Please oppose agenda item 26.  I urge the board of supervisors to petition/urge/lobby the governor to rescind the statewide “close all restaurants” order.  Nevada County is one of the “open” counties (but how can we tell?).  There is not one case of covid emanating from a restaurant here,  our hospitals are not impacted, and this county has done everything it was required to do to move to the current phase of opening. 

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

That the governor threatens to withhold recovery funds feels like blackmail for an offense that wasn’t committed.  Arbitrary, capricious, politically motivated, and wrong-headed. 

I would rather see the BOS stand up for the community and its businesses than to enact a punitive urgency ordinance.  You, Supervisors and the city councils should be doing all in your power to NOT lose another business (tax payer).   

Address comments by email for this BOS item in this format:

To: bdofsupervisors@co.nevada.ca.us, bos.publiccomment@co.nevada.ca.us
Cc: Dan Miller <dan.miller@co.nevada.ca.us>, Heidi.Hall@co.nevada.ca.us, Sue.Hoek@co.nevada.ca.us, Scofield Ed <ed.scofield@co.nevada.ca.us>, Anderson Richard <richard.anderson@co.nevada.ca.us>
Subject: BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11, Item 26

Absentee vs Mail-in Voting (updated 8aug20)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 August 2020.]

There has been a lot of confusion about voting by mail in the media lately; mostly purposeful with the aim of promoting a political narrative.  I would bet a good hunk of the ranch that many KVMR listeners are unaware of some very important details on what has now come to be the latest national election dust-up.

To start, let’s distinguish between two very different kinds of voting by mail – the first is absentee voting and the second is called mail-in voting.  Absentee voting has been successfully practiced for decades, and there have been relatively few problems of voter fraud or ballot mishandling with this kind of voting by mail.  In absentee voting the voter requests a ballot from the local election officials by providing appropriate information about him- or herself in the application for an absentee ballot.  The election workers vet the applicant by checking the active voter roll for the applicant’s jurisdiction to confirm that such and such a person is registered, and in which party for primaries, with a matching signature, and does indeed live at the applicant’s address.  It’s all very simple and easy to obtain a ballot, mark it, and return it in an envelope that requires the US Postal Service to cancel and date it.  Efficient processes for doing all this have been in place for generations.

However, in the newly proposed mail-in process, each state automatically sends out an unsolicited ballot to everyone who is on the so-called active voter rolls, and many states even send out unrequested ballots to people listed on the inactive voter rolls.  In almost all states these voter rolls are abysmally out-of-date, incomplete, and contain thousands of duplicates and those having moved or deceased.  In mail-in voting there is no process to vet the voter for accuracy and currency of information.  Depending on local voting policies, ballots are mailed all over the state to be received by whoever currently lives at the address.  By law the USPS is not supposed to forward a mail-in ballot if the addressee no longer lives there.  But the USPS often ignores this and forwards it anyway.  Then the ballot goes to only God knows who.

E Pluribus Unum – Still? Really? (updated 2aug20)

George Rebane

‘There are more things that unite Americans than drive them apart.’  This shibboleth, or one in a similar vein, is often heard when conversation-lite turns to the polarization now visible everywhere in our land.  Unfortunately, these conversations don’t go much deeper than the participants sagely nodding their heads before abandoning the topic and hurriedly shifting to more comfortable topics.  Such tactics have always been eschewed in these pages, so let’s take an inventory of the things that unite and separate us.  Readers, as always, are invited to augment my inventory with edits and additions of their own.

The things that unite us –

1. We’re all Homo sapiens;
2. We co-habit within the same borders;
3. We drive mostly same kind of cars;
4. We eat mostly same foods;
5. We breathe the same air;
6. We dress similarly;
7. We enjoy same sports (mostly);
8. We vote in the same elections;
9. We use the same currency.

The things that divide us –

1. Language
2. History
3. Organization of society/economy (capitalist, collectivist, elitist, …)
4. Governance (role of nation-state, democracy, …)
5. Rights and Privileges (the armed citizen, Bastiat triangle of rights, voting, …)
6. Free speech
7. State of the nation (racist, imperialist, shining city on a hill, …)
8. Role of government (guarantor of freedoms, national security, economic security, …)
9. Role of education (trained/competitive workforce, common history and traditions, social contract, …)
10. Role of media (news, sports, entertainment, maintain common culture and currency, …)
11. America’s future (sovereignty, globalism)
12. Nature of Man (sexual diversity, gender identification, …)
13. Values (family, parenting, traditions, risk tolerance, …)
14. Ethics (racism, discrimination, equality, prejudice, …)
15. Individual Responsibility
16. National Sovereignty
17. Religion
18. Understanding of science
19. Awareness of current events
20. Patriotism (role of sacrosanct national totems, willing to defend, …)
21. Foreign Policy (world hegemon)
22. Logical thinking
23. National security (military, borders)
24. Private property (ownership, disposition, heritance, housing, …)
25. Wealth and Income (taxes, merit, enforced equality, …)

The only way that I can see healing such a devastating ideological breach is through education.  That requires the replacement of legions of incompetent socialist union shills with qualified teachers.  Even then it would take at least two generations to repair the damage.  And that is not going to happen.  So, given the Democrats’ most recent Great Leap Leftward, there is no palpable or plausible means that this polarization will cease, and we again become a more cohesive and unified people who can peacefully and productively live in one land.

Ergo, common ground between the two sides has long disappeared in the rearview mirror, and only two possible futures remain for Americans to determine their own path forward – the Left wins and forcefully subjugates the remaining Right (for we will not go quietly into that dark night), or the Right is able to convince the Left that we need to negotiate a Great Divide on the North American continent.  What then remains to be seen is how/whether the people of Canada and/or Mexico want to figure into the new North American order.

[I expand on each of the points which divide us in a downloadable pdf - Download E Pluribus Unum]

[2aug20 update]  This 8-minute video - 'The Deadliest Virus in the World' - explains in more graphic detail the historical crossroads at which we again find ourselves.

Ruminations – 30jul20 (updated 5aug20)

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks.  Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away, poor fools.  And their grandchildren are once more slaves. - D.H. Lawrence

George Rebane

‘America’s Summer of Cultural Suicide’ from Victor Davis Hansen is another voice that corroborates the sentiments of these pages.  With what we used to call the ‘silent majority’ practicing ever more persistent forms of quietude as our woke progressives rampage to transform the country, the chances for any return to normalcy have faded and now range between slim and none.

The Left’s desperate spinning of the country’s violent riots as “peaceful protests” has now become a staple in their stable of pre-election Big Lies.  When shown dated videos of mayhem on our city streets to counter their lies, they and their lamestream lackeys double down by calling the reporting of existential evidence as just rightwing Republican “narrative”.  The Left is confident in the effectiveness of such outrageous denials because they know their constituents are either ignorant or only lap up lamestream outlets, as we confirm in our comment streams.

Nevada County’s “Urgency Ordinance” to fine the bejeezus out of business and people who violate the notched-up version of Gov Newsom’s latest C19 diktats was tabled by the BoS for rewrite and clarification.  Now that everyone seems to be playing by the latest version of the lockdown rules, is there still any reason to prescribe fines at the draconian levels in the ordinance’s first go-around – in short, why do it to ourselves?  And the question still begs, ‘Why can’t an already informed populace in a remote rural county with low incidence of the pandemic not be allowed to take their own risks in following the guidance to wear masks, social distance, and not congregate in big gatherings where there is a higher chance of getting infected?’

'Stupid on Steroids' is how Bob Crabb has branded me and all conservatives for the above sentiments.

Mystery seeds from China.  "The U.S. Department of Agriculture said consumers in at least 22 U.S. states and several other countries had received unsolicited packages of seeds. Canada, the U.K. and Australia all are investigating the matter."  One of the Rebane clan in the county received such a seed package this week.

[31jul20 update]  Congressional Republicans are coming across to this commentator as somewhere between double dummies and dreadfully incompetent.  My general lament about today’s Republican Party (here) didn’t go into specifics, so I’ll highlight a couple of pieces of evidence here.  Thankfully retiring Rep James Sensenbrenner’s (R-WI) performance yesterday as the ranking member of the House Antitrust Subcommittee was a travesty (here).  As shown on FN’s 30jul20 news, every point he made was lame, and he phrased every question as a wrongway, unrevealing puffball to the tech execs.  He made a perfect Republican doppelganger of Democrat double dummies like Rep Hank Johnson (D-GA) who showed concern that Guam would tip over if we added additional military personnel to our base there (here).

Meanwhile, the ongoing Republican incompetence in the Senate is highlighted by WSJ’s Kim Strassel (here) – “As Congress spent another tortuous week nonnegotiating a fifth virus-relief bill, it finally dawned on Republicans that they are being played for fools. Democrats don’t want a bill; they want to win an election. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—who may go down as one of Washington’s greatest cynics—knew exactly what she was doing in May, when she cooked up the $3 trillion monstrosity known as the Heroes Act. If the GOP said no to her outlandish demands, Democrats would brand them as uncaring, unable to lead, unworthy of controlling Washington. If instead she bludgeoned them into swallowing her spendathon, Democrats would wave the win as proof they should control Washington. Heads Democrats win; tails Republicans lose.”  There are indications that McConnell and his caucus are finally having an epiphany as to the requirement for the Repubs to present a plan that robustly contrasts their approach with that of the Dems.  About f*&!ing time.

[1aug20 update] Rep John Lewis RIP.  As readers have come to expect, my take on the life and times of John Lewis runs counter to the national paeans raised in his honor and remembrance.  The historical record shows that he was indeed a courageous and self-sacrificing civil rights leader in the early 1960s, as he helped launch the landmark integration and voting acts of 1964 and 1965.  But then in the remainder of his public career, he reverted to join and then lead the other cynical Congress critters who went on to pass bill after bill that served to destroy the black family, deny education to their young, and create enduring murderous ghettos in our inner cities.  In these, residents mistakenly placed their last vestiges of hope on government largess, which did nothing but install an attitude of ingrained victimhood that kept them in place as they continued to vote for their calculating political ‘benefactors’, who perennially promised a better life that they had no intention of delivering.  Nevertheless, history will be kinder to John Lewis than this politically incorrect, socially unjust, yet factually accurate remembrance.

[2aug20 update]  Another nail in journalism’s coffin.  WSJ’s Paul Gigot joined all the lamestream journalists in reporting that the economy shrank 32.9% during the 2^nd quarter.  That’s like the GDP dropping almost a third in three months.  Notice they didn’t say it dropped at the annual rate of 32.9% during the 2^nd quarter, which is in fact what happened.  For the numerate out there, they tap a few calculator keys and quickly determine that the GDP actually shrank only 7.4% last quarter, and were it to repeat that for the next three quarters, then and only then would an annual drop of 32.9% come to pass.  The average Joe and Josephine on the corner don’t have a clue, and their takeaway is that Trump is mismanaging the economy so badly that it loses a third of its value in three months.  Journalists compete for the bottom of the barrel with politicians, public school teachers, and lawyers in the minds of the diminishing number of Americans who still pay attention.

The newest Big Lie from Democrats is convincing the already confused Joe and Josephine that all mail-in ballots are alike, and that since we have had absentee voting with mail-ins for years with no problems, expanding to all voting via mail-ins will follow suit opposed only by Republicans who want to reduce the minority vote.  Again, nothing is further from the truth.  County registrars mailing a mail-in ballot to all on their voter rolls are already causing reams of problems where such practices have been tried (and all of these in Democrat jurisdictions).  Almost all voter rolls across the country are woefully out of date, containing names of people moved, people dead, and people not qualified to vote – e.g. California has over 500,000 of these non-voters on the state’s active voter rolls.  On the other hand, absentee ballots are only sent to people who request them with appropriate vetting information.  Democrats love all the creative things that can be done with blanket mail-in votes.

[5aug20 update]  Insurrection Act of 1807.  OK boys and girls, here’s the skinny on sending in the feds, including the military and National Guard, to quell rioting in cities.  The act has been invoked numerous times by presidents since it was passed – last time by Bush1 in 1992 against the LA riots.  To pull the trigger on the full use of the act, the president needs to “publish a proclamation ordering the insurgents to disperse.”  Which in effect President Trump has done numerous times.  Check it out here.  (H/T to an astute reader who sent me the link.)

The Dilemma of a Disillusioned and Disaffected Republican (updated 31jul20)

George Rebane

To some questions a silent answer speaks volumes.

Say that someone is a longtime Republican who, after much thought, has come to believe that –

1. The national Republican Party (RP) is no longer a viable custodian, communicator, or champion of conservative and classical liberal values.
2. The RP is in full ideological retreat with one or another of its politicians succumbing daily to the demands of the radical Left and the Democrat Party.
3. The few remaining and widely accessible champions of the Right are found on radio, cable news, and the internet. Other conservative/libertarian media outlets and rightwing institutions are mostly echo chambers preaching to their choirs.
4. Rank and file conservatives are reserved, avoid public notice, and appear to be waiting for the arrival of a ‘man on a white horse’ to lead them. Donald Trump has shown himself not up to that task, even though his policies, as opposed to his mouth, have on the whole been quietly welcomed by Republicans.
5. Democrats at all levels have increasingly shown themselves to be virulently anti-American, now hell bent on transforming our republic into an anti-capitalist, command/control autocracy. Today their three generations of carefully public-schooled constituents – illiterate in history, governance, and the language – will expectantly follow their voluble demogauges anywhere.
6. Locally Republicans are almost invisible, reticent to show their colors in public, and they don’t support fellow Republicans who do champion conservative values in the public square – when attacked by Democrats and socialists, these are abandoned to swing in the virulent winds of the Left.
7. The Nevada County RP leadership is also reticent, having political imaginations firmly in the furrow of the same ol’ same ol’, while expecting a different outcome.
8. The California RP has published no realistic plan for its resurgence to again become a viable political entity in the state.
9. Does not know of anyone with a plan for California RP’s resurgence, nor does he know of anyone who knows anyone who claims to have such a plan.
10. The RP can still be revived if it can attract a courageous, communicative, and competent leadership, from some of their current back benchers.
11. Nevertheless, the now fallow RP remains on the political landscape as the only realistic opponent of Democrats today bent on establishing a socialist America.

The alternatives available to him include –

1. Do nothing.
2. Quietly re-register as an Independent.
3. Quietly re-register as a ‘Decline-to-State’ (remaining Republican)
4. Quietly re-register as a Libertarian
5. Volubly re-register as an Independent
6. Volubly re-register as a Libertarian.
7. …?

This grim outlook on the Republican Party is shared by most of my conservetarian friends and acquaintances.  For that reason I sent these thoughts to a well-known congressman with whom I have enjoyed years of exchanging ideas during visits, with emails, and through telephone conversations.  I was seeking his own observations on the matter, and also his counsel to such party members and supporters.  To date our other conversations continue, but on this his response has been the sound of silence.

[31jul20 update]  Some examples of my frustration with today’s Grand Old Party are posted in today’s update to the 30jul20 ‘Ruminations’.

Election2020 – Electoral College Predictor

George Rebane

Something is possible when it can happen with non-zero probability; something is probable when the chance of its happening will impact a decision.

One of our commenters pointed me to 270towin.com, a website that presents a map-based tool to predict the Electoral College (EC) votes which will determine our next president.  They show how the states are going to vote given various pundit assessments and polling results.  The site also lets you assign to each state whether and to what degree it will vote Republican or Democrat.  The degrees shown for each party are – Safe, Likely, Leans, Tilt, and Toss-up.  You can also add ‘Tilt’ to the spectrum.  Assigning such degrees to each state allows the site’s visitor to come up with his own prognostication.

The problem with 270towin is that its algorithm to compute the total EC votes for each candidate is not revealed.  To overcome this shortcoming and make the EC predictor more useful and transparent, I constructed a rigorous one in the spreadsheet form shown below (click on image to enlarge).

This has the trending categories shown along with their 1 thru 9 trend numbers that identify each one uniquely.  As per convention, the blue numbers are to be input by the user, the black numbers are calculated by formulas (keep you mitts off of them).  All the 538 EC votes are shown for the states and DC.  Inputting your own trend numbers will recalculate the expected number of EC votes each side will get along with their underlying probability distribution.  This permits some math to be applied to compute the actual probabilities of each side winning the EC vote – i.e. getting more than the needed 270 required to win.

And here’s the good part.  In my model, the win probabilities that quantify each trend category are shown and can be changed by the user.  Mine are 0.51, 0.55, … shown in blue under the Republican side and replicated in black on the Democrat side.  If you don’t like my picks for each of the indicated trending categories, then substitute your own, and fill in the trend numbers for all the states and DC.

The model outputs are shown in the yellow block, and consist of the expected number of Dem and Repub votes along with the probabilities that the Dems and Repubs get at least the needed 270 votes to win.  The trend numbers shown were the current ‘consensus’ assignments from 270towin, and with my assigned probabilities, a Democrat win is practically a certainty.  I will put in my own trend numbers as time goes by, and so can you.  You can download the spreadsheet here – Download ElectCollege2020

I will publish your assessments if you send me an image of the relevant cells as shown above – put your own name and date YYMMDD in the cell under the copyright notice.  Have fun.

And despite today's bad EC numbers, here is a little Lucky Strike Extra for all of you without TDS.

Letters from the Revolution – 24jul20 (updated 26jul20)

George Rebane

No one’s interests, objectives, values, … will exactly match yours.  The best you can ever do is support those with whom you share the most in common.

Kudos to our local restaurants Old Town Café, Sergio’s, and Friar Tucks for remaining open and in business despite Gov Newsom’s unconstitutional diktats and the compliantly cringing Nevada County Environmental Health Department’s threats to close and fine them.  The poster on their doors says it all.

[update] ‘News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’ observes Gerard Baker in the 20jul20 WSJ.  He cites Orwell’s “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”, and writes, Part of George Orwell’s genius lay in his insight that manipulation of language was essential to the revolutionary project. If you can command popular compliance with a lexicon that reorders—or even inverts—the widely understood meaning of political terms, you can remake society as much as you can with any law, mandate or act of force. Thought is constrained by the limits of language, and so language becomes a vital tool for placing limits on thought.”  Baker apparently is not aware of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of which Orwell undoubtedly was.  S-W makes the strong claim that one can only think thoughts that can be expressed in the language(s) one knows.  The Left quickly became the leading practitioner of this facet of human cognition, and has applied it worldwide where it has come to control the institutions of education, news media, and entertainment.

[26jul20 update]  Democrat Big Lies just continue washing over the country.  The latest is from Dem big city mayors who tell their know-nothings that the president’s sending federal forces into their cities to enforce federal laws, which the mayors refuse to do, is unconstitutional.  As former AG Michael Mulkasey patiently made clear on FN, the truth is exactly the opposite.  The Constitution requires the president to send in federal LE forces wherever they are needed in the country in order to enforce federal laws – e.g. secure and defend federal property.  Another longstanding Dem whopper is the ongoing charge that Trump has mishandled the federal C19 response, which ‘mishandling’ no one seems to be able to define.  So, when Bumblebrain was asked on MSNBC what the correct response should be when he is president, he stuttered through his ‘six point plan’ containing items each one of which had already been initiated by President Trump and is already in operation.  The liberal interviewer was either too ignorant to call Biden on his purloined ‘plan’, or didn’t want to tell her audience that Bumblebrain had blown another one.

 

The Reliability Roulette of Testing (updated)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 July 2020.]

It’s again time to bring up testing for the Covid-19 virus.  Let me start by saying that testing has shown no value in formulating reasonable pandemic response policies by public officials.  It has become an election year political football, a game played by both parties and all our healthcare institutions starting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.  And there’s a lot more to be said to support such a strong and wide-reaching assertion.

The communists try again … (updated 17jul20)

George Rebane

From The Patriarch, David Nasaw’s mega-biography of the life and times of Joseph P. Kennedy, we read –

The Depression, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted in the first volume of his The Age of Roosevelt, offered “radicalism its long awaited chance.”  The unemployed, underemployed, dispossessed, and hungry were not sitting idly by waiting for prosperity to return.  Many were too numbed, too crushed, to protest, but a small and vocal minority were not.  The Socialist and Communist parties more than doubled their tiny memberships and exploded in visibility.  Communist Party organizers were actively operating in city neighborhoods from Harlem to Detroit, in the coal fields of Pennsylvania an Kentucky, and the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, among tenants and sharecroppers in the South and migrant workers in California, and outside and inside closed and closing mills and factories in the Northeast.  Their argument was simple: capitalism had failed and needed to be replaced.

In the 1930s FDR’s big government nostrums kept the country in a depression so deep and enduring that it took the greatest war in history to bring us out of it (aided through Truman’s fortuitous rejection of the post-war return to FDR’s alphabet soup agencies) and reject communism.  What is it going to take this time in today's Democrat-promoted recession as their socialists/communists again marshal their forces in the streets and in the ballot boxes?

[17jul20 update]

Scattershots – 15jul20 (updated 19jul20)

George Rebane

Putin’s favorite party is the Democrats by far.  As they lavish their baseless stream of Big Lies on America’s electorate about Trump’s Russia collusion, for which there is absolutely no evidence after years of investigations cum witchunts, the truth again is the Alinsky opposite.  Since they can’t do it through legislation, the Left continues to stifle the production, transport, and distribution of America’s fossil energy through legacy regulations and litigation.  This has made America’s sale of natural gas to Europe uncompetitive with what Putin can deliver through its expanded Baltic pipelines to countries like Germany et al.  (more here)  There is no doubt that Putin, Xi, and the Iranian ragheads (e.g. recipients of pallets of cash) favor our demonic Dems over any Republican.  Besides crippling our country’s lead as the world’s energy producer, our progressives continue to do everything they can to weaken our ability to project power as the world’s white hat hegemon.  And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet until they really rule the roost in Washington.  Our Left has given new meaning to colluding with despots.

[16jul20 update] In ‘The Politics of Hydroxychloroquine’ Allysia Finley presents an update of results from the clinical applications and testing of HCQ.  The bottom line of it is that HCQ has very large domain of beneficial use in fighting the corona virus where it saves lives and greatly reduces the morbidity of the disease.  Finley correctly argues that the physician, taking this information into account, should determine its use on a per-patient basis.  However, almost all of these results are still suppressed in the lamestream media (we recall that the socialists’ utility for fighting the pandemic is to maximize mortality while suppressing economic recovery).  Not only that, but much of the politically motivated anti-HCQ reporting continues to be fraudulent – ‘fake news’ is too mild of an appellation for murderous journalism.  HCQ is overwhelmingly safe when applied according to its standard of care, and has been for decades.  Banning it has been part and parcel of the TDS toolkit for defeating Trump in November.  Since the end has always justified the means – being a socialist means never having to say you’re sorry.

A rational liberal answers.  I asked a longtime friend, who has been drifting leftward over the years and purposely limits his intake to overwhelmingly lamestream outlets, to comment on the video of Rep Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (D-MN) with the question “How do you interpret her remarks and her goals for America?”  His answer sheds a lot of light on how far we have drifted apart, and by no means is he alone in the ranks of the thinking Left who view themselves as mid-roaders. 

I’m not overwhelmed by carefully extracted snippets from the most radical edge of the Democratic Party. She and her opinions couldn’t get elected in 90% of the other Democratically held districts, so I don’t consider her a spokesperson for the Party. Additionally, she didn’t propose a Government-controlled, centrally planned economy, the abolition of private property, pro-Communism, or any of the other things that are attributed to the radical left by conservatives. I believe that the present system is not cost-effective from an income distribution perspective. I think the economy would be stronger and more robust if more of the income were in the hands of the lower 50%. They have to spend all their money, so it goes directly into the consumer portion of the economy. Most of that is spent on food and shelter and would directly help the Agriculture industry overcome the shortfalls that have resulted from the Tariff War with China. The challenge, of course, is the choice of mechanism for broader income distribution. The problem is the conservatives either don’t see income disparity as a national problem or are convinced that the cure would be worse than the disease. I don’t believe wanting to fix it makes one a Communist.

[17jul20 update]  Opening schools this fall.  I have no idea why our politicos are making this into a cause celebre.  Every day confirms that there is no ‘settled science’ on the C19 virus or its prophylactics and prescriptions.  Rebane Doctrine gives kudos to President Trump for using his bully pulpit to push for school attendance for a number of good reasons.  Local school districts have the final word, and should do their best to max the hours kids will spend in classrooms.  But all the controversy would come to an end if we adopt the public policy that honors the wishes of the parents (what a concept!).  Let the parents be the final arbiters on whether and how their children will attend school.  Problem solved.  (Also fight those evil politicians who want to take school choice away from parents, and support those who work to expand school choice across our land.)

The liberals really do fear Trump the dictator.  I want to share another bagatelle from correspondence with my longtime buddy who claims to be a mid-roader (and member of No Labels) and writes – “It is my humble opinion that President Trump with his need for total control, his egomania that everything revolves around him, his penchant for punishing any foe or less-than-loyal friend has established the most invasive Central Government the US has seen in a long time. He has threatened to defund schools if they don't open fully in the Fall, attacked (both verbally and legally) States and Cities that offend him, sent members of Federal Law Enforcement Teams into cities (DC and Portland) without uniform markings in plain vehicles to seize citizens without a shred of due process.”

 

An African-American by any other name …

George Rebane

Why is someone designated ‘black’ when they clearly are not completely of African descent – e.g. they obviously have caucasian or oriental ancestors?  Assigning the black label to everyone with even a tinge of Negroid heritage makes it seem as if such ancestry is a blight.  A condition that once you have even a smidgen of it, you’re tainted or glorified in its completeness forever.

And why is it asymmetric?  Why is not a mostly Negro person with some white or Asian ancestry not then labeled ‘European-American’ or ‘Asian-American’, or simply ‘white’ or ‘Asian’?  Why does every mixed-race person’s identity have to immediately revert to ‘black’ or ‘African-American’ when they are visibly a mulatto or of some other mixed-race ancestry?

The best I can tell is that this kind of labeling is entirely political.  Collecting such people under the ‘black’ and ‘African-American’ label somehow forces on them an identity that induces them to adopt the politically assigned pejoratives of victimhood, and immediately makes them to then be beholden to the benefactors of the plantation on which they see themselves unjustly interned.

I also wonder how long such mixed-race Americans will let themselves be treated as second class citizens by their self-proclaimed benefactors – politicians and ideology-agendaed ‘activists’ who must retain their purloined powers only by fooling all the so-labeled African-Americans all the time.  These unasked questions are the rhetorical gorillas studiously ignored today in America’s tense and stressed public forum.  It reminds me of the real-life version of 'The Emperor's New Clothes'.

Letters from the Revolution – 8jul20 (updated 9jul20)

George Rebane

Reports of the number of cumulative C19 cases in any given jurisdiction misses the point.  Nobody should care about cumulative cases, only the number of active cases, and maybe the number who have died.  It’s the active cases that communicate some measure of risk for those who are out and about.  The ones who had it and were “released” (died or recovered) are history.  The 7jul20 Union headline piece (129 total cases as of last Friday) misses the point and tells us nothing about how risky it is to go grocery shopping.  This kind of reporting is shared by our crack journalism industry across the country.  (more here)

Our Bob Crabb is again flying hot, true, and normal in the Left lane as is evident in his latest graphic contribution in yesterday’s Union (filched below).

Bob's cartoon falls right in line with the nation’s lamestream outlets advancing the narrative that it’s the people from the Right who are the dangerous gun-toting rioters out there amongst the righteous folks of Left filling the streets with their "peaceful protests against racism".  The falling statues, looted shops, and burning buildings can easily be explained away by natural expressions of social justice and spontaneous combustion – remember, correlation is not causation.  Bob would do a lot to rescue his ‘mid-road’ credentials were he to draw something that illustrated the riotous actions of clearly identifiable Antifa and BLM thugs.  But with high likelihood that could also cause  the locals to pull his Leftwing License, and maybe even get him booted from The Union – worse things have happened for less to those progressives who stray from the straight and narrow.  We are reminded that revolutions first and foremost eat their own.

The causes of “gun violence” in minority neighborhoods continues to be ignored by the nation’s pro-communist commentariat.  Even FN (‘fair, balanced, and scared shitless’) is using that label in reports of the mass murders occurring every weekend on a Democrat-controlled urban plantation near you.  So when the next anti-2A push comes, you won’t have to worry your little head in the effort to discriminate between law-abiding ownership and use of guns, and the ongoing onslaught on black lives that really don’t matter.  Everyone wants to stop gun violence, right?

Speaking of legal guns, entering our Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital yesterday, I was again reminded of the utter insanity of policies that put up signs reading ‘The carrying of firearms in this facility is prohibited.’  This ensures that the facility is a ‘free fire zone’ for any deranged shooter until the police arrive, and then get organized to enter and confront the shooter.  Experience has shown that an in situ CCW-armed individual is the fastest way to stop the murderous mayhem and save countless lives.  For those not familiar with the safety stats of America’s CCW holders, consider that you are six times more likely to be murdered by a criminally rogue LE officer than a CCW civilian.  And here we’re not talking LE shootings caused by mistakes and/or incompetence.  Given the background checks and vetting required for a permit, CCW holders are the nation’s safest cohort of gun-carriers.

[update] The Bumblebrain Administration.  It is now old news that his VP woman of color will exercise historic powers in the Executive Branch; the DNC will have it no other way (and you heard it here first, I think).  But now a cascade of leaks from the Dem leadership also inform us that it’s “inconceivable” that Bumblebrain would run for reelection.  (Recall, for me it’s inconceivable that he’ll complete his first term.)  Additionally, in order to calm their constituencies, the Dem king-makers want our presumptive president to identify the complete spate of nominees for his cabinet, preferably by convention time.  Then everyone will know that capable and politically progressive people will be in charge of the various arms of government, and a vote for Bumblebrain will really be a worry-free vote for a socialist POTUS-optional government – the fundamentally transformed country’s first steps toward a post-constitutional Politburo.

[9jul20 update]  Victor Davis Hanson, one of my many mentors, makes a curious argument in his ‘The Fragility of the Woke’.  He correctly points out their fecklessness, insanities, and virulent ideology, but makes no case for the movement’s fragility.  In fact, he seems to do the opposite and confirm what we all witness in the news and daily round.  The woke movement, along with its militant BLM and Antifa arms, Democrat political support, and Soros et al financial support, appears to be the most robust, dangerous, and long-lasting  anti-American enterprise yet launched by the Left as their latest political road to socialism.  I’m confused as to why anyone keeping up with today’s events would consider this movement to be fragile as more and more institutions fall to its socio-political dicta.

Among the cavalcade of Dem Big Lies is Pelosi’s daily refrain about “the president is not above the law.”  What her constituents apparently are too dense to puzzle out is that President Trump has never been above the law, but has always gone through the bowels of the appropriate legal processes, defending himself as the law allows everyone to defend themselves.  And this is what is happening with the recent SCOTUS ruling concerning his financials and tax returns.  It’s only the lying leftwing loonies who continue to portray the process as the president somehow remaining above the law.  Now you have another litmus test to tell if a person is an idiot – just ask him if what the president is doing is above the law.

Scattershots – 5jul20 (updated 6jul20)

George Rebane

Division is caused by Trump’s speeches is now the steady narrative from the national propaganda outlets.  Specifically, it’s the speeches in which he mentions the protests cum riots that result in death and destruction that have now emerged as the daily visible signs that divide our country.  Were they not of evil intent, then one would have to ascribe to them ignorance of how primitive causality works.

‘Settled science’ is the fools’ errand on which the Dems have sent the country’s light thinkers.  Evidence abounds from countless sources that even the basics of ‘standard of care’ for C19 is an item of lively debate among health workers.  This was detailed in the 1jul20 WSJ in the report ‘Months Into Coronavirus Pandemic ICU Doctors are Split on Best Treatment’.  In these parts I wrote a Union piece in the attempt to enlighten the local leftwing loonies about settled science (here), and was lambasted by the know-nothings as therefore being against science.

“Invest in Black America” is another movement inviting more monies be spent on enterprises for racist reasons.  Their rallying organization is on gatheringforjustice.org.  Originally founded by Harry Belafonte aggrieved by hearing of an unruly black girl being taken out of a classroom by police, and now operating with renewed purpose on the streets across America.  Today the organization demands that both public and private funding be funneled into black holes (double entendre intended) with an equal likelihood of getting any return or benefitting African-American communities.  That for the simple reason that billions have already been spent for no visible benefit (according to their own assessments), and there has been no change in the recipient communities to support any reasonable expectation that this time it will be different.  It was then a recalcitrant culture which prevented progress, a culture which has now grown even more hostile to self-reliance, enterprise, and capitalism.

America’s dumbth – in these pages a perennial paean to our dysfunctional education system – is now being reported on by so many authors, analysts, and observers of the national scene.  One of the most recent pieces appeared in the NYT (gasp!) book review reporting on a just published book by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.  From there we read, “If only Americans knew more about the world.  It’s a common refrain among many foreign policy intellectuals, and Richard Haass joins the chorus in The World: A Brief Introduction. Young Americans suffer from poor educations, he contends, while older people find it hard to keep up with profound changes that have unfolded since the Cold War order crumbled three decades ago. The consequences of ignorance, Haass warns, are serious: American disengagement from the wider world and poor decision-making at a moment of mounting global dysfunction.”  Our country’s wholesale ignorance is so pervasive that it can be seen in daily interviews with the rioters who have no clue about the basics of Americana, deficits also corroborated by our local leftwing loonies who frequent here and our community’s media.  The latter have no concept of the intellectual state of our nation, let alone their own abysmal deficit as can be seen by their desperate denials of this state of affairs, and baseless accusations of people (e.g. me) who attempt to enlighten them.  Again, is it evil or simply profound ignorance?

[6jul20 update]  First black Fed president Raphael Bostic writes that “systemic racism is a yoke that drags on the American economy.”  In his recent paper Dr Bostic states that the pandemic “has coincided with a rethink inside the Fed of how it should evaluate the impacts of its policy decisions on those at the margins instead of focusing on broad aggregates”.   His Fed colleagues agree with this shift of priorities, perhaps because of the central bank’s poor overall record of dealing with the country’s economic aggregates and now with the Left ascendant, it would be an excellent time to instead give minding the margins a try.  There’s gotta be a prudent policy pony in there somewhere.  (more here)

President Trump’s Mr Rushmore speech was judged by most (not burdened by TDS) to be his best since inauguration.  However, and in lockstep, the hate Trump chorus immediately broke out with the same song – “At Mt. Rushmore, Trump uses Fourth of July celebration to stoke a culture war.”, LA Times;  “Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message.”, NYT;  “Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore”, AP;  “At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day.”,  WaPo.  A less hate-filled reading would reveal that the speech contained an accurate assessment of the state of the nation, and nothing divisive nor racist, save that today’s thought police consider any mention of the riots and turmoil in the streets to be prima facie evidence of divisive racism.  It is people like me, and those who counsel the inevitable Great Divide as an alternative to tyranny, who may be accused of being judiciously divisive.  (more here)

Western academe’s sunset years

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 July 2020.]

The current insanity sweeping the western world that started with the George Floyd killing is now way past that outrage and moved on to much bigger objectives.  The event served as a trigger to launch the ready and waiting socialist and anti-capitalist factions to start their push toward a global collectivist world by first weakening or doing away with sovereign nation-states that have cultures built up over the centuries which today are the glue that unify their populations.  The socialist elites and their fielded militants in the streets have identified several critical weak points in the ties that bind nations.  One of them involves the flawed histories that each developed western nation has, which includes their role in colonizing the third world and fighting religious wars among themselves.

All of these pursuits are ample demonstrations that violate today’s standards of political correctness, social mores and values, treating all peoples and races equally and with appropriate respect for their indigenous cultures.  Western nations did little of that when they conquered and colonized the more backward civilizations of Africa, the Americas, and southern Asia.  All of that history is used by the global Left to indict today’s mostly white and European-derived countries of everything ranging from ‘cultural appropriation’ to genocide.

The west’s public educational systems have long been co-opted by progressive cadres injecting leftist principles at all levels of curriculum.  The generations of the so-educated are now primed as they doubt their own worth to humanity, and are ready to adopt a more virtuous course forward that demands fundamental changes in each nation’s basic and foundational institutions.  The ‘evidence’ for this ongoing stratagem overwhelms us daily every time we tune into mainstream media outlets.

Cultural cohesion, it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letters from the Revolution – 27jun20 (updated)

'Can the country confront its current problems with its traditional can-do spirit?  We have barely four months to figure out how.'  A.H.A.

George Rebane

‘America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution’, so argues Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (married to Niall Ferguson, internationally prominent socio-political historian not to be confused with the recently notorious epidemiologist of C19 fame, Neil Ferguson).  We have twice before met this brave and eloquent lady in these pages (here and here).

In her timely essay she brings together many of the ideas promoted in these pages for years, and which also adorn the corpus of my credo and form major tenets of Rebane Doctrine – all of which are anathema to our command/control collectivists now carefully coordinating their socio-political assets as they foment the coming revolution.

An alarming report in her piece is the confirmation of the absolute volatility of public opinion and its being totally unmoored from reason and critical thought. (see also here)  Recounting the rush of politicians and corporatists to join the rioting revolutionaries Ms Ali recounts –

By the middle of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public figures who had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Please reread the assessment of a thoroughly politicized scientist, who today abound in the public forum.

She goes on to view the changes in what may be termed the aggregate American mind.  We used to be a nation that prided and practiced distributed self-government at the local level, solving our own problems as they arose with our own solutions.  This seminal and differentiating characteristic of Americans was noticed as early as in the 1830s by European visitors.

This country is only 244 years old, but it may be showing signs of age. Time was, Americans were renowned for their can-do, problem-solving attitude. Europeans, as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were inclined to leave problems to central authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans traditionally solved problems locally, sitting together in town halls and voluntary associations. Some of that spirit still exists, even if we now have to meet on Zoom. But the old question—“How can we figure this out?”—is threatened with replacement by “Why can’t the government figure this out for us?”

That last appeal is the common denominator that gathers all of our leftists who then also grouse when their problems are not solved by technocrats in some distant capital.  Furthest from their minds, and now from the minds of the mostly mindless masses is the fundamental tenet that government itself is the most likely, if not certain, first cause and/or amplifier of the problem.  Today von Mises’ counsel to government – ‘First, do nothing!’ – is considered a reprehensible expression of lese majeste to big government socialists.

More sinister and on the mark is Ms Ali’s fearless finger when she asserts, “The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power.”  According to Rebane Doctrine, this forms one of the many accessible litmus tests to identify corrupt and evil politicians and their fielded demogauges.

Right now the biggest danger to our republic lies in the leftward rush of the Democrat Party, and their unquestioned embrace of socialism as the stepping stone to a more perfect world.  In this regard Ali expresses our common hope –

One way or another, the Democratic Party has to find a way of throwing out the socialists who are destroying it. … The Republicans, too, have to change their ways. They have to reconnect with young people. They have to address the concerns of Hispanics. And they have to listen to African-Americans, who most certainly do not want to see the police in their neighborhoods replaced by woke community organizers.

What no one, including Ms Ali, wants to address is how the Republicans can penetrate three generations of anti-American, anti-capitalist indoctrination of our young and younger cohort that is daily reinforced by the lamestream media.  But making headway in that quarter they must, for the fraction of young people currently attracted toward conservetarian ideals is too small to make a significant impact in the voting booth.  Meanwhile, the ranks of today’s young social-luddites swell and sway with every new serving of misguided bombast from the White House.  Nevertheless, the Great Divide, with or without a revolution, it’s a’comin’.

[update]  Appealing to the reasonable middle in America continues to be a fool’s errand still promoted by the intellectual Right (and on which I find myself).  The Left knows better.  That cohort of middle-roaders that so enamors our lightly read, good-hearted neighbors is almost non-existent.  Good estimates seeking out these people are able to calculate that they number at most about 6% of American adults.  The remainder of the permanently polarized, mostly leftwingers and their gimme constituents, significantly outnumber the rightwing true believers.  “In April, the Washington Post published an article titled ‘The Coming Republican Demographic Disaster’ (where it) discusses one of the most notable trends in American politics over the past decade: Republican candidates do consistently worse with people of color, and the proportion of non-white voters in the American electorate is increasing. This could be bad news for the Republican party. If its candidates do not improve their appeal among non-white voters, their chances of winning future elections will decline sharply in the coming decades.”  These non-whites have demonstrated for decades that they are politically beyond any reasonable reach.  I find it sad to see that nationally prominent talking heads, such as those like Dan Henninger at the WSJ, continue to spout hopeful platitudes claiming that if the Republicans can only reach the middle, then they will prevail.  Not even close.  The real question is ‘what does it take to piss off a Democrat voter?’  No one knows.  (more here)

Scattershots – 25jun20 (updated 27jun20)

"Black people are being murdered and brutalized by police with near impunity." ACLU manifesto

George Rebane

Big Lies.  The demonic Democrats are hands down the purveyors of significant and impactive big lies that are issued daily by their political leadership and their lamestream media.  (see above tagline)  When lies in the public forum are considered, the attributes of ‘significance’ and ‘impactive’ should be paramount in assessing their belonging in the Big Lie category.  Significance describes the ability of the lie to grasp the public’s attention, and impactive describes the lie’s ability to affect public behavior and/or attitudes, e.g. voting, demonstrating, rioting, polling responses, … .  Using these criteria for a Big Lie, the ones told by Trump are few and far in between (as opposed to the almost 20K counted by TDS sufferers).  However, those issuing under the various banners of the Left are literally a daily occurrence (e.g. yesterday’s whopper by Pelosi that Republicans are guilty of George Floyd’s death).

‘Time to examine the entire police culture’ proposes David Davidson-Methot in the 25jun20 Union.  He makes a quiet and compelling argument that bad apples in police departments come about in two ways.  First, through faulty screening processes and police union induced departmental omerta, we let innately bad people wear a badge.  But perhaps more importantly, the environment, defined by its leadership and culture, in which people work (the ‘barrel’) is often the wholesale producer of bad apples.  Mr Davidson-Methot cites ‘The Stanford Experiment’ conducted by Dr Philip Zimbardo that launched an entire field of behavioral research yielding results with impressive predictive power of how good apples turn into bad apples in bad barrels – e.g. the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal.  Bottom line here is that to fix real incidences of police brutality, don’t defund or abolish police departments, examine and fix departmental cultures and replace leaderships where necessary.  It’s an approach worthy of public debate as Congress continues in deadlock on the issue.  In the meantime, ‘No, Police Racism Isn’t an Epidemic’ as correctly argues Jason Riley in the 23jun20 WSJ.

No country had an effective and anticipatory pandemic response plan to combat the C19 virus.  So documents Holman Jenkins (here) in the 23jun20 WSJ, that summarizes evidence now gathered from all over the world.  I include this here as more examples of Democrat Big Lies claiming that President Trump uniquely mishandled America’s response and caused the avoidable loss of tens of thousands of lives.  That just ain’t so, no matter how often and intensely Team Pelosi and her lamestream trumpets repeat the lie, and thereby making it a Big Lie due to its clearly significant and impactive effect, as is evident in the polls of respondents many (most?) of whom know nothing of viral infections, epidemic spreading, transmission vectors, herd immunity, … , or simpler put, can’t reliably identify the Atlantic Ocean on a map.  And the demonic Dems count on it.

Republicans suppress votes is another Democrat Big Lie that flies in the face of data unreported in the lamestream.  This Big Lie forms an important barricade to keep the country’s African-Americans on the Democrat plantation.  Karl Rove’s ‘Botch the Vote, Then Cry Suppression’ in the 25jun20 WSJ details the vote tallies and jurisdictional political leaderships of the ‘suppressed areas’ claimed by Democrats and their platoons of black demogauges.  The bottom line is that, contrary to votes being suppressed, blacks voted in record numbers in the cited counties all run by Democrats for years.  What the Big Lie fails to tell people is that voting procedures and processes (many of them botched) are run locally at the county level, and their allegations of suppression occurred in Democrat led counties.  Instead, the Big Lie consumer is supposed to walk away with the belief that Republicans at both federal and local levels have successfully conspired to keep blacks from voting.

[update]  ... and the beat goes on.  " 'Today, it seems there is less of a bias against conservatives and rather a bias for conservatives.'  During the course of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on consumer protection and commerce, Chairwoman Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) actually claimed that Facebook and Twitter favor conservatives, despite mountains of evidence that conservatives are more likely to get banned, flagged, or 'fact checked' by the social media giants." (more here)

[27jun20 update]  Commenter ‘Robert Cross’ in his 236pm comment below (I had to dig it out of Typepad’s spam folder) does a marvelous job illustrating how we talk past each other.  He opens his screed with the claim that I’m “deflecting” the Left’s count of 20K Trump lies, when I directly address it and compare these to the Dems’ Big Lies, which comparison he neither acknowledges nor addresses.  And his piece de resistance is that my pointing out the difference between the types of Trump’s v the Dems’ lies is a prime cause of and my contribution to the country’s polarization.  He thus once again reinforces the Left’s looming march toward censorship and 1A abrogation, in that only one side’s interpretation should be heard in the public forum, and all other opinions are deplorably divisive and therefore should be either withheld or suppressed.

Letters from the Revolution – 23jun20

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rig for ram.

Reflections on Racism – no time to decide (updated)

George Rebane

A barren desert is now the middle ground separating Americans from their woke and fundamentally transformed brethren.

Racism has been an enduring theme on RR for years – e.g. back in 2010, through the years, and a more recent commentary in 2019.  With readers we have dissected it 20 ways from Sunday.  Even liberals have joined in.  Unfortunately, their contributions have been limited to calling the rest of us ‘racists’ without being able to even define the word.  From Lewis Carroll we read once again –

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

I recently visited Bob Crabb’s site to pay homage to his excellent cartoon (here) and return the favor of his visits to RR.  What caught my eye was Bob’s brief but meaningful commentary posted below his cartoon –

We are reaching the tipping point, and I don’t mean just tipping old confederate statues. Our competing ideologies have retreated to the far ends of the spectrum where any kind of compromise is seen as treachery. … Can cooler heads prevail? I’d like to think so, but when the extremes are obsessed with winning it all, it seems unlikely. … As I have said here before, it’s too bad that we are bent on destroying such a nice country.

Bob now perceives the tipping point that in my Great Divide screeds I claim we passed long ago.  But what I took to task was his claim that both “extremes are obsessed with winning it all”, which on its face is not true.  I then entered into a dialogue with some liberal worthies that turned out to be predictably unproductive, save that it illustrated the barren desert of our middle ground.  As I’ve mentioned before, and with no apologies to the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sides can and do have their own distinct and widely varying opinions, facts, histories, morals, ethics, systems of logic, and desiderata for the future.

Scattershots – 19jun20

“Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property.  Instead, if flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property.”  Yuval Noah Hariri

George Rebane

Sweden’s death committees have been working overtime.  Under their nationalized healthcare hordes of seniors diagnosed with C19 have been automatically consigned to “palliative care” – aka pump ‘em full of morphine until they die.  This little revelation comes out in conjunction with a heartfelt success story of a son who fought for his father’s life in the clutches of a calculating state (more here).  In our discussion of the ‘value of human life’ our leftwingers are in terminal denial that it is they and theirs who have always devalued human life, consigning lives to abortion (including post-partum), mental hospitals, eugenics experiments, gas chambers, and boxcars to faraway final solutions.  This is what we have to look forward if/when Democrats sweep the field.

Thomas Sowell writes ‘Charter Schools’ Enemies Block Black Success’ in which he outlines the outright evil wrought by leftwing politicians in denying blacks sure-fire ways to escape the carefully constructed leftwing plantations in America’s urban ghettos.  Charter schools have been enormously successful in closing the black-white academic gaps, and not because they “skim the cream” of the students as another one of the Democrats’ Big Lies that really impact the nation.  Admission to these schools in poor areas is by lottery, so Lady Luck draws a cross section of applicants who come from ALL segments of the black and brown communities.  NYC spends more than $20K (including federal monies paid by you) per student annually to deliver one of the nation’s worst educational products.  And union-funded lickspittle politicians are doing all they can to keep minority children under incompetent, uncaring teachers, crammed into classrooms in schools suffering from years of deferred maintenance under Democrat administrations.  And these idiots still claim the moral highground!

“The U.S. made outrage a form of social currency. Now we’re in the hyperinflationary phase.”. so argues Joseph Sternberg in his ‘A Wheelbarrow Full of Outrage’.  Sternberg correctly equates today’s ever-increasing demands of wokeness for more and more outrage, “outrage (that) has rapidly become so devalued that ordinary members of society can no longer leverage it for that most important good of all: social peace. A conspicuous feature of the recent protests in the U.S. is that no policy reform, no corporate initiative, no individual action is enough. Employers no longer know what form of progressive activism constitutes the “right” level of compensation for their idealistic employees. Commentators and academics no longer know which contributions to important public debates—which expenditures of their professional expertise and social capital—will be deemed acceptable.”  In this piece Sternberg also gives an operational definition of ‘wokeness’ which is a “type of performative progressive outrage used to boost one’s capital in the political marketplace.”

Corporations are not treating their employees fairly, so maintains the US senator from Ohio.  This leftist’s epiphany is that “The pandemic has laid bare how corporations treat employees not as essential to their success but as a cost to be minimized. One grocery store worker in Ohio told me recently, ‘I don’t feel essential. I feel expendable.’”  It’s heartwarming to see Sen Sherrod Brown glean an understanding that corporations have always viewed labor as a cost to be minimized.  Had not the Henry Fords of America realized and put this into practice, not very many people could afford cars, or vacuum cleaners, or toasters, or movies, or supermarkets, or … .  And yes Virginia, when you are working for someone else, you are exchanging the value of your labor for your wages.  And competition in America’s labor markets should always make workers feel expendable (as our product/services markets make their employers feel expendable).  That’s why you work more diligently, learn a more valuable skill, start a business, and in general not become incompetent in what you do, as we see demonstrated daily by public employees. (more here)

Springtime for our Great Divide

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2020.]

Where were you and what did you do in the spring of 2020?  The world has changed much during the last three months.  When we look back, we will remember this spring as the historical milestone when Americans finally realized that they are no longer one reconcilable people.  Where next we go from here is uncertain and up for grabs.  The only certainty we have going forward is the coming Great Divide.

Our country has been subjected to a perfect trifecta of national crises, all layered onto an ongoing campaign to discredit and destroy the duly elected president of our democratic republic.  Along with the rest of the world, we were blindsided by a viral pandemic which no one understood and for which no one had prepared.  America, along with most other developed countries, initiated a lockdown mandating that people not travel, stay home, and not work.  In consumer driven economies like ours, this caused economic collapse.  And while we were sequestered, hearing reports of Covid-19 deaths, and wondering how we would pay our rent and bills, we witnessed three separate killings of black persons by incompetent, inept, and poorly trained police.  And all of this during the most contentious presidential election year in living memory.

Hunker Down Diary – 16jun20

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  A. Lincoln

George Rebane

Yesterday was HD100 for the Rebanes, and Jo Ann announced that we are done hunkering down.  Truth be known, this will not be a sudden change in our collective behviors, we’ve been kinda easing out of our lockdown over the last few weeks.  And what’s more noteworthy is the historical change our country has embarked on since the killing of George Floyd.  We all will have a lot more to say about that as we witness the Antifa/BLM riots continue to be spawned from the many ‘peaceful protests’ that now fill the land.

The above timely graphic by RL ‘Bob’ Crabb, filched from the pages of the 16jun20 Union, is in my humble opinion, the pointedly most significant political cartoon that our own iconic observer of the country’s feats and follies has submitted.  I believe it qualifies for a Pulitzer.

Pandemics are a Systems Management Problem

George Rebane

[After working on my epidemic spread and testing models, I cobbled together this structured draft on 7 May 2020, and have put off posting it due to other more compelling analytical problems having to do with the pandemic.  Now that I’m seeing other systems professionals coming to the same conclusion – e.g. ‘How Control Theory Can Help Us Control Covid-19’ in the June issue of the IEEE Spectrum – it’s time to throw out my two cents worth, warts and all.]

Thesis: Managing the response to and recovery from a pandemic is a systems management problem, and NOT a crisis to be managed by healthcare clinicians whose proper role is to provide their specific expertise and counsel on the care of the infected as one element of a much more comprehensive response to an emergency that affects all elements of a society.

1. Pandemics are very complex dynamic processes which are difficult to observe and even more difficult for lay people to grasp. Humans have come to understand natural processes through their synthesis of various systems that contain and also delimit (‘this is not that’) such natural processes – to function, nature does not need to define or compartmentalize itself into systems; however, to understand nature, humans do.
2. Managing pandemics is fundamentally not a medical problem, but instead a problem in the field of systems management and engineering. Devising public policies to control an epidemic within a target population, let alone a pandemic raging among disparate target populations is a problem requiring the use of tools from the systems sciences.
   • A farmer, expert in growing the food grocery stores sell, is not necessarily qualified to run a grocery store, let alone a grocery chain.
   • A CO2-cycle atmospheric scientist or a meteorologist versed in the analysis of weather patterns usually do not have the skills to develop and run climate models.
3. Healthcare professionals, including most epidemiologists, are not trained in the use of the highly math-based tools required to scientifically observe, estimate, identify, control, and optimize feasible public policies to respond to pandemics as cogent systems. Since politicians eschew science and technology for obvious reasons, we find policy decisions at all levels are made like sausages.  A simple yet fundamental example of such deficiencies, few if any healthcare professionals have concepts of error propagation and of system state and its role in grasping the dynamics of a system.
4. Once the health-related parameters of a contagious pathogen and its virulence are established, the healthcare professional joins with experts in other needed fields
   • – logistics, supply, facilities, personnel, manufacturing, transport, data acquisition and handling, decision theory, … - to join the team that provides the systems expert to develop realworld solutions that integrate expertise from multiple knowledge domains.
   • Workable solutions must satisfy multiple constraints and are usually formulated within a set of inter-related subsystem models that then integrate into a total pandemic response system which inputs time-late unreliable data, and outputs information for officials charged with making public policies to fight the pandemic.
   • A jurisdiction’s total response effort to a pandemic should be headed by a systems manager who understands, can structure, and is experienced in leading a multi-function task force.
5. Political jurisdictions, especially small ones, don’t understand this and count on people like county health officers (usually a hubristic physician) to be the prime resource to local electeds and their non-technical staffs, when instead, such healthcare personnel should be one of several sources of input to a systems management team to understand and integrate the incoming streams of disparate input data, and then provide the decision makers an understandable landscape of alternative actions along with their effectiveness and cost estimates.
6. Testing is a key element of C19 response,
   • yet no one, starting with the federal government, has been able to discuss, let alone describe, the decision support functions and processes of infection and immunity testing of target populations during the countless briefings given at all levels of government. Why? 
   • Because useful and effective testing is an element of a higher level estimation process that calls for skill sets that include probabilistics, estimation, and decision theory, skills prominently absent in the hubristic and mistake-prone medical industry.
7. Meanwhile, Nevada County has implemented a plan to loosen the local lockdown. How they will control the different phases of loosening is not known, especially what kind of feedback will they use to update policy decisions.
   • To my knowledge the county government has no internal resources who could counsel them on the critical systems aspects of selecting, let alone managing, a prudent policy to loosen our lockdown. In my years of interacting with and within various county government units (established and ad hoc), I can say unequivocally that I have yet to meet anyone there who is competent in any of the technical skill sets I have outlined above.  
   • This unrecognized deficit is not due to the dearth of appropriate expertise available to our county’s leadership – there is an abundance of it living within minutes of the Rood Center.
8. I am always curious to know the make-up of these local decision-making cadres, and today what factors are being included in the deliberations that represent our understanding the county’s C19 situation, factors upon which to base a plan. Dealing with government officials I have often found myself to be one of the very few burdened by such a curiosity.

Scattershots – 10jun20 (updated 13jun20)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurricane George Floyd

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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