Rebane's Ruminations

Place your Trump/Harris bets

George Rebane – 28aug24

Suppose parties A, favoring Trump, and B, favoring Harris want to bet on the election.  And to add spice to the affair, suppose A has made known his assessed probability P_A that Trump will win, but all that B has done so far is to assure everyone that Harris has the election in the bag.  However, B has yet to reveal his assessed probability P_B that Harris will win.  How can such a bet be negotiated so that B’s real belief in Harris’ victory becomes known.  Perhaps, we can let money do the talking, and see where that takes us.

Let’s say after some dickering, A and B agree in principle that the cash bet should result in the expected winnings of both parties be equal – what could be more fair than that?  As usual, both parties calculate their expected winnings by multiplying their cash payoffs by their belief (probability) of their candidate’s victory.  But no matter whether both use their probabilities or not, the dollar amounts of the bet are agreed on – A bets C_A that B will win with Kamala’s victory, and B bets C_B that A will win with Trump’s victory.  The relative sizes of the amounts reflect the odds of the bet.  So in principle the bet reflects the equality of expected payoffs for each party.

                                    For party A:                P_AC_B = (1 – P_A)C_A

                                    For party B:                P_BC_A = (1 – P_B)C_B

From these two relations we can immediately estimate each party’s belief probability.

To obtain the resulting odds of the bet we solve for the ratio, say, C_A/C_B from each party’s perspective.

Suppose now that A has already declared his belief at P_A = 0.2, indicating that Trump will probably not win.  Substituting this in the above equation calculates the minimum odds A will accept at C_A/C_B = 0.2/(1-0.2) = 1/4.  So A should be willing to accept any bet where C_A ≤ 4C_B. 

Since it is clear from B’s ample display of TDS in which he claims that Trump will surely lose, we can safely assume that P_B > P_A = 0.2.  So let’s say that the bet amounts were negotiated to be C_A = $100 and C_B  = $500.  This most certainly satisfies A’s required odds, and yields the pro forma estimate of P_B ≥ 500/(500+100) = 0.833.  From this we can conclude that B’s odds calculate to C_A/C_B = (1-0.833)/0.833 = 1/5, and that he will most likely not accept C_B > 5C_A.  The negotiated amounts satisfy all these conditions, so it appears that we have a satisfactory bet and in the process have ferreted out that B’s belief in Kamala’s victory is at most 5/6 since he will not give A better odds than 5:1.  Now go forth and wager prudently.

'Democrats’ Deception May Win the Presidential Election Again'

[This commentary by Gerard Baker, former editor and now editor-at-large of the WSJ, appears in the 27aug24 edition of the newspaper’s op-ed pages.  It succinctly nails a fundamental tenet of Rebane Doctrine numerously repeated in these pages over the years.  (“…, you can fool all the people all the time.”)  Since the publisher invites it to be shared on Facebook, I offer this respectfully purloined version below in its entirety; the original may be read here. gjr]

Gerard Baker

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo’s adage has been updated and adapted by his successors in the modern Democratic Party. The duality they present to voters either side of an election is a deception that has defined American politics and culture for the past 20 years.

As they campaign for office, they present a kind of idealized version of themselves to the electorate as mainstream Americans, seeking merely to bring a little unity and compassion to a fundamentally great country in need of reform. Once in office they act as if they have a mandate to remake a benighted country, to reorder an unjust system, to replace American exceptionalism with European social democracy, and to rewrite the nation’s values with the precepts of their cultural Marxism.

They campaign, to borrow the late governor’s taxonomy, in the poetry of Robert Frost. They govern in the prose of Herbert Marcuse.

Last week in Chicago we got the poetry, a Frostian pastoral of Democrats posing as regular Americans, honest toilers in a darkening landscape (of their own making, as they didn’t tell us). They propose only to enlighten with their benevolence.

I don’t mean poetry in the literal sense. With a few exceptions the quality of our political oratory is dire—and plumbed the usual depths last week. We have reached the point where even the actual poetry is prosaic, as the left’s unofficial poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, demonstrated with another of her recitations of platitudinous banalities and leaden progressive nostrums delivered in her trademark phony iambic meter.

The “poetry,” such as it was—Michelle Obama’s speech was the only moment of the week when the oratory came close to matching the ambition—was figurative, an attempt to paint colorful images of the promise of another Democratic presidency.

Its centerpiece was the semifictional self portrait of the presidential candidate herself. In her own biography-heavy, substance-light acceptance speech, Kamala Harris presented herself as that familiar image from popular story telling—“the happy warrior,” the all-American fighter for our nation’s finest objectives—the tough prosecutor who waged war on crime just as she will wage war on illegal immigration; the proud patriot, product of a classically diverse, American, immigrant family; the commander in chief, ready to face down America’s enemies abroad; the staunch friend of America’s allies—Israel, especially—unafraid to use the military’s “lethal” force in their support, as she explicitly reminded us.

This verbal illusion of American iconography was reinforced by the crowd’s chants of “USA! USA!” like ecstatic fans at the Olympics, and a waving sea of red white and blue “USA” placards.

But the poetry last week came also in the constantly retold personal narrative that was the real theme of the convention. The winsome second gentleman telling cute stories about gawky first dates and tasty brisket like something from the pages of a 1950s yearbook; saccharine testimonies to Ms. Harris’s innate goodness from childhood friends and professional acquaintances; above all, that Giant Middle American Cliché made flesh himself—Gov., sorry Coach, Tim Walz—practically pulling the high-school football playbook out of his back pocket and urging the nation to vote for him so he could go out there one more time and win just one for the Grifter.

Is anyone fooled?

The answer, I am afraid, is yes. Every time.

President Biden is only the most recent example. The lifelong centrist Democrat who campaigned as a regular Joe promising to do his best to heal a divided and damaged country in 2020, promptly became the vessel for a Bernie Sanders policy agenda, splurged trillions in expansive government spending and championed the left’s continuing cultural reformation of America. He prepares to leave office apparently convinced he belongs in the pantheon of great social reformers next to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Barack Obama reminded us in his speech how successful his own self-portrayal was in 2008 as the unifying figure who could bring cohesion and order to a nation battered from the chaos of war and financial crisis, but who again governed, thanks to rigid internal party discipline, to implement an agenda that produced seemingly irreversible shifts in the economic and social fabric.

Above all we were reminded how far Democrats managed to move the needle in government in their direction along the political spectrum by the appearance of those two aging icons from another epoch—Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Clinton’s presidency, which ended a little more than two decades ago, now looks to most Democratic activists like an exercise in political reaction. If many of its ideas were preached on a university campus today, they would probably get the speaker canceled.

Republicans also pitch themselves in campaigns as unifying centrists but in office they have too often lacked the ambition or determination actually to govern as Republicans. It is to his credit—and a reason he is widely loathed—that Donald Trump bucked that trend.

Does anyone doubt that a Harris presidency would continue the Democratic pattern of divergent pre-election promise and postelection reality? Will a President Harris more closely resemble Candidate Harris from last week’s convention than Vice President Harris from the last four years or Candidate Harris from 2019? If you think she will, then it isn’t poetry you’ve been reading. It’s a fairy tale.

Scattershots – 25aug24 (updated 28aug24)

George Rebane

62 since ’62.  We’re happy to report that today my sweetie-pie and I celebrate having been married since 25 August 1962.  We were both then undergrads (seniors) at UCLA.  Now it’s two children, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren later after a long and wonderful road with some inevitable miles unpaved.  Gott sei Dank.

Lies, more lies, and blatant lies.  Among other things, these campaigns will be remembered by all as having issue debates with little basis in reality.  The Repubs are still not weaned of their bombast and bravura when describing their own accomplishments, and the Dems are simply over the top.  Not a single one of their characterization of Trump’s and their own administrations comes anywhere near being factual when compared to the historical record published by the several federal agencies.  Voters who care are left to dig out their own takes on reality and the possible promised futures.  To this degree was it ever thus?  Not in my lifetime. (We await the debates.)

[28aug24 update]  Funny business in the polls.  Rasmussen reports (here) that the nation’s pollsters are exposing their leftward tilt by holding back recent polling data that shows Kamala’s convention bounce waning.  Their leftward lurch is such that “people are holding data or not releasing polls to leave Harris-favorable polling alive in the aggregate.  Why put a new poll out if you like the results you got last time?" 

Scattershots – 16aug24 (updated)

George Rebane

The UK is on the threshold of totalitarianism.  To illustrate the devastating slippery slide that comes with socialism, one of Europe’s oldest democracies has now descended into prosecuting its citizens on the basis of thought control.  Not only is free speech in Great Britain’s past, but their hubristic bureaucrats promise to threaten foreigners outside their borders with extradition is they overstep the new restrictions on newly disallowed publicly expressed opinions. (here, here, and here)

‘Islam and the Future of the West’.  Islamophobia is a clearly warranted reaction to the long-standing writings and recently reinforced statements by leaders of trans-national Islam.  “Any reading of the Koran, as Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Sina, Ibn Warrak, Rebecca Bynum, and a host of other excellent scholars make abundantly clear, will reveal ayah after ayah commanding acts of grotesque violence against unbelievers. The reward for the martyrs who have been slain in service to Allah will be peace, loveliness, and virgins with pear-shaped breasts, as stipulated variously in Sura 44:45-55 and 78:31-36 of the Koran.” (more here) According to our neo-Marxists defending your culture against the promised and ongoing Muslim onslaught is ignorant and despicable racism.

“Inflation is down!” trumpet our lamestream media outlets.  NPR even coordinates its ‘news’ items with featured programming subjects in promoting this jaundiced view of the nation’s economy.  In their coordinated support of the Democrats’ campaign talking points, the Left’s lightly-read legions are spared the difference between ‘inflation level’ and ‘inflation rate’ in the constant cacophony they consume daily.  Contrary to what they experience in their wallets, they are led to believe that prices are actually going down in this Biden/Harris economy.

[16aug24 update] Dems move to red states.  The conspiracy to soil the remaining states not embracing socialism is in full swing.  There is now an organization called MoveIndigo -  MoveIndigo encourages Democratic flight to swing districts with Republican congressmen, often in swing states. Its goal is to “reset the balance in our country” and elect a more “representative” government. That’s doublespeak, but the group has also put it plainly: “It only takes a few Democrats moving to crucial toss-up districts . . . to take control of the House”—even to have “a profound impact on the Presidential race. (more here)  None of the migrating progressives are smart enough to ask what has made their selected red state so desirable compared to the shithole state they are abandoning, and moreover, what makes these leftwing double dummies think that the arrival  of more like them will not turn their new home also into the same kind of socialist quagmire they abandoned.

[update]  Georgia non-citizens registered to vote.  The Heritage Oversight project interviewed residents of a large apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia asking its residents 1) were they registered to vote, and 2) were they citizens.  14% answered that they were non-citizens who were already registered to vote. (more here)  With this kind of evidence of what is most likely happening to some extent all over the land, it was a very reasonable and legitimate request to Georgia SecState Brad Raffensberger by Trump to have their vote counts checked to discover more legal votes that may favor him.  There was never any demand to “overturn” the Georgia election.  Restricting voting to America’s legal voters is trumpeted as ‘voter suppression’ by our leftwing sleazebags, and their lightly read constituents lap up this ongoing lie.

Trump’s November Chances – 11aug24 update

George Rebane

This is a lament.  From his statements and recent – post Tim Walz – behavior it looks to me that Donald Trump has really gone off the rails and is headed for a massive defeat in November.  As the record of these pages confirms and given the available choices, I have been a qualified Trump supporter ever since he became the Republican nominee in 2016.  During the entire time I have been chagrined at his tendency for bombast, bravura, and exaggeration, especially when on the campaign trail.

Today, when finally presented with an ideal pair of very vulnerable opponents, and eight years of experience under his belt in how his off-track shooting from the lip has been received, he still pays no mind to the harm he does to himself and the Republican party by continuing on the same path.  And he is doing it proudly as he has declared to his audiences that he has no intention of changing his gratuitous personal attacks on anyone that happens to cross his mind while on the podium.

So now the country’s conservatives, capitalists, and small government devotees have to suffer through daily doses of free leftwing talking points served up to the lamestream media by Trump.  Their news stories and commentaries almost write themselves from the copy spouted by our former president.  Instead of focusing on the rich trove of Democrats’ lies and policy screw-ups from the Obama and Biden/Harris administrations, Trump continues to be the petulant third grader on the playground focusing on lurid descriptions of his opponents’ real and imagined personal shortcomings.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of his campaign is that he has no strong adult advisors in his inner circle who can tell him daily when he needs zip his lip.  It’s hard for me to believe he doesn’t have a cadre or even a small clutch of such people in his inner circle.  But it is clear that he is flying blind without the aid of such critical navigators.  Were such people to exist, we would by now have seen them resigning one-by-one as Trump continued to ignore their counsel.

Given this ongoing travail, my own assessment of his probability of winning in November started with a paltry 0.45 and eked up to 0.48 (here) after the assassination attempt.  But taking into account what has happened since, my belief in his chances for regaining the White House has plummeted to 0.22, or a bit more than one in five.  This new assessment accurately represents the dour mood that the Trump campaign has me in.

Scattershots – 4aug24

George Rebane

Kamala Harris is a DEI VP and now is a DEI candidate.  That was made clear when Joe Biden told the nation that his VP pick would be a “black woman”.  The lamestream media has now added that to their repertoire of Trump attacks for reminding the country of her qualifications for making Biden’s cut.  Of course, she was also a DEI office holder for all her previous positions before being anointed VP.  But now that progressive attribute has suddenly become tabu even as formerly compliant corporations are dropping DEI among their criteria for employment. The hypocrisy of the leftwing media is both unfathomable and unending.

The Project 2025 policy book was composed by Heritage authors many of whom were Trump cabinet members and advisors.  It mostly contains policy recommendations that conservatives believe.  One of Trump’s recent bevy of mixed messages – another one of his lipshots - is that he rejects P2025 in toto.  That is plainly not true, but it is just more grist for the Democrats’ mill in mischaracterizing what Trump proposes and what the document contains.  For example, being purveyed on the lamestream is the report that ‘90% of Americans’ are opposed to it.  That is a specious argument instigated by the Left’s media mouthpieces.  Ninety percent of Americans don’t know what P2025 is and much less what it contains; they are again just mouthing what the lying liberal outlets are telling them.

Vance’s cat lady remark - In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." (more here)  On its face the statement is true, and it’s also true upon deeper examination.  The lamestream’s actual attribution to Vance is that he claimed women and couples who have children are ‘worth more’ (to society) than those who are childless.  Well of course.  All other things being equal when comparing such cohorts, it’s not rocket science to acknowledge that our species would come to an end were it not for children being conceived, brought to term, and raised to adulthood, if for nothing else than to provide humankind continuity.  But such arguments are too deep to be pondered in the public square, and again advantage Left.

Trumps November Chances – 25jul24 update

George Rebane

The Lip from the Hip has done it again.  With his 18jul24 convention acceptance speech he took a cinched November win and threw it back into a campaign maelstrom welcomed only by Kamala Harris and the Dems (and Putin and Xi).  My own immediate reaction to his convention performance was posted here, and since then literally every left and right commentator has agreed that Trump blew it.

Trump’s self-declared return to a barroom brawl mode of campaigning has put his road to the White House back in play, even with the likes of an unaccomplished opponent and grifter like Kamala as his opponent.  WSJ’s Dan Henninger summarizes her chances in today’s paper (here).

With a flawed candidate like Trump already problematic when he was running against Bumblebrain, on 15 June I did a little work in extracting my own assessment of Trump’s probability of winning in November (described here).  The result (0.45) was not promising.  Given all that has happened since – assassination attempt, enthusiastic Republican convention, reversion to rambling stump speeches, … - I redid my probability assessment, hoping against hope for a better outcome.  The resulting probability came in at slightly north of 0.48, not much of an improvement when considering the woulda/coulda/shouldas.

Given her documented far left ideology and promised public policy initiatives a Kamala Harris presidency would be cataclysmic for our republic.  And Trump’s loose cannon tactics promise to make the interval to November a real nailbiter.  Is there no one on his team of advisors with the courage and gravitas who can tell him to stuff a sock in it and give acting presidential a try?

Scattershots – 21jul24 (updated 22jul24)

George Rebane

Given the nature and extent of America’s ideological schism, all effective public policies should be made in the anticipation that this schism will endure.  Existentially we are no longer one nation.  Rebane Doctrine, 2024.

The mentality of collectivists – progressives, liberals, wokes, socialists, communists, neo-Marxists, … - ranges within a space anchored by insanity, cynicism, and evil. The evidence continues to pour in.  Today we hear leftwing commentators on lamestream media attempting to foster doubt that there was an actual assassination attempt on Donald Trump.  Their cynical cum evil proposals to their ill-informed audiences are that the blood letting was staged and/or was caused by some mysterious shards of broken glass exploding out of somewhere.

As expected, Bumblebrain is out and an even worse choice in Kamala Harris is now undemocratically foisted by the Dem elites as their new standard bearer. (more here)  But everyone knows Kamala will just be the next empty pipe to power for those who have been acting as the administration’s Star Chamber.  She will be a compliant conduit between the leftwing power brokers and the public policies they intend to implement, much like Joe Biden has been during his term.  From my perch I see the political landscape between now and November as a minefield for Republicans, especially Donald Trump.  There will be an opportunity to make countless politically destructive gaffs when shooting from the lip as the campaign really heats up.

[22jul24 update]  POTUS is NOT the hardest job in the world as any casual perusal of history will confirm.  In fact, POTUS may be the most fault tolerant job ever.  For how else do people with no executive experience and a woefully limited knowledge base perform more or less adequately – i.e. they didn’t start WW3?  Almost anyone who reads English can assume the position and make it through with on-the-job training that is amply available to a president.  Since FDR, consider the tenures of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Obama, and now Biden.

PJ Media is not a credible source of news and information due to its conservative outlook – so again posits one of our leftwing commenters after I cited it above in reference to the ‘undemocratic’ way that the Dems have hoisted Kamala to be their standard bearer.  What I always ask these liberal critics is for the evidence they have to support their assertion.  They can never provide any such backing for their gratuitous conclusion.  This is in opposition to conservatives dunning liberal outlets like NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS as willing shills of the Democratic Party publishing years of unrecanted lies to their audiences.  As evidence just consider their years of ongoing reporting on the Russian election interference, that the border is secure, onset of inflation, Trump instigating insurrection, FBI doctoring FISA evidence, Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation, Hillary’s paying for generating the infamous Trump memo, and on and on.  And now we know that the whole cadre of the country’s Left has been covering up and lying about the cognitive breakdown of Joe Biden which has been obvious to Americans during his entire term as POTUS.

Those Pesky Estonians

[Living under the armpit of Russia (czarist, communist, thugocracy), its perennial nemesis, Estonia is and has been an enthusiastic member of NATO.  As a small yet leading high-tech country it spends more than its required 2% of GDP on defense, and has been the first to respond with men and weapons in the fight against the traditional enemies of western culture.  Its latest venture has been to develop an AI-based family of combat drones that cost up to an order of magnitude less than those supplied by the big guys like the US et al.  The defense news periodical Defense One has published the following here.   gjr]

How Estonia is becoming a hotbed for drone warfare

Projects include experimental loitering munitions that cost a fraction of U.S. equivalents.

Sam Skove

Staff Writer

JUNE 11, 2024 12:59 PM ET

TALLINN—With a close eye on Ukraine’s use of drones, Estonians are fielding new kit, changing doctrine, and revamping training for unmanned systems in case they also have to repel a Russian invasion one day. 

Estonia — a country with a population of just 1.3 million — is also being uniquely thrifty, working to field systems whose price is often orders of magnitude cheaper than similar U.S. systems. Defense One got a close-up look at these efforts on a trip funded by the Estonian ministry of defense. 

At the center of many of these efforts is Aivar Hanniotti, the military’s point man for everything related to drone technology and development. He took the job in January, and is already well known in Estonia’s bustling drone industry. 

Hanniotti’s team is working on a long list of updates to Estonia’s drone and counter-drone tools. Much of the work is done by members of Estonia’s Defense League, a part-time volunteer organization that serves as a military auxiliary force. Hanniotti himself is a member. 

Estonian civil society is heavily engaged in supporting Ukraine, and many Estonian Defense League members help Ukrainian units by delivering supplies to them, like drones. This puts them in touch with Ukrainian troops, who pass on information, said Hanniotti, and this access to battlefield experience helps drive innovation.  

Among the projects linked to Ukraine is the “Angry Hedgehog,” a plan to field a domestically produced short-range loitering munition similar to Ukraine’s first-person-view drones.

The drones will have a custom warhead and a range of up to nine miles, said Hanniotti. They will be equipped with artificial intelligence to guide them the last mile to a target, an increasingly popular countermeasure against Russian jamming. 

Hanniotti said the drone will cost under 1,000 euros, and use European-manufactured components. It will undergo further tests in June 2024, and Estonia also aims to deliver 1,000 of them to Ukraine to test their use in combat. Formal fielding may occur next year.

The price is far less than similar short-range loitering munitions, like the $94,000 Rogue One. Hanniotti said the aim was to have a drone that was “good enough,” rather than one tricked out with the latest in tech. 

Other projects include a Estonian-made hand-held drone detection system, which Hanniottii is working to field to every squad starting sometime next year, he said. Such systems are widely used in Ukraine, and are also coming to the U.S. Marine Corps. 

Yet another project seeks to develop a cheap missile for taking out drones. One missile, which so far exists only as a concept, has a theoretical price of 2,000 euros. The price is one-tenth the cost of the APKWS missile, one of the cheapest anti-drone missiles. The planned missile, which is to rely on commercially available parts, will be tested at the end of this year, Hanniotti said. 

Other projects are virtually free, such as an Estonian Defense League-designed tool that takes the inputs from passive radio-detection systems and plots them on a map to identify probable enemy locations. 

The Estonian drone push isn’t all low-cost initiatives. Between 2024 and 2027, Estonia will spend 220 million euros (about $238 million) on loitering munitions, out of a total outlay of 529 million euros for indirect fire systems, according to a briefing by Oliver Tüür, director of the Defence Planning Department at the Estonian Defense Ministry.  

Estonia is planning a special unit to operate loitering munitions, Maj. Andrei Šlabovitš told Defense One last year, in what may be the first dedicated loitering-munition unit fielded in a NATO army. 

New technology brings new questions, from what tactics to use to what units should use them. Estonian infantry squads, for example, have begun experimenting with drone operators who scout ahead for hidden enemies. 

The Estonian army is also testing how to use drones to support its artillery. Hanniotti said that they are experimenting with linking artillery fire control officers with drone units to reduce the time it takes to target enemy formations. Estonia’s dense forests, however, pose a problem by blocking drone signals, Hanniotti said. 

Hanniotti said other experiments have included using the Android Tactical Awareness Kit to mark targets for artillery, but the system—like many sent to Ukraine—has proven vulnerable to GPS jamming. 

Hanniotti is also involved in developing a designated unit for operating short-range surveillance and attack drones. Ukraine operates these types of units in large numbers, but the concept is still new for NATO militaries. The U.S. does not operate short-range drone units, although Army experiments have tested the concept informally. 

New tech also needs new training, and Estonia plans to launch a drone training center this year. The center will also serve as a test range for new electronic warfare technologies. 

Many U.S. efforts parallel Estonia’s, including an Army initiative that aims to  field a short-range loitering munition by 2026. U.S. plans, though, generally move slower than Estonia. The Army, for example, will allocate just ten hand-held drone detectors to a division, according to a 2025 budget request, while Estonia is aiming to give one to every squad. 

One explanation may be the quasi-civilian nature of the Estonian Defense League, Hanniotti said. 

“In the Defense League, we are used to getting by with small funding,” he said. “We are all motivated—and we would like to have fast results.” 

Scattershots – 10jun24 (updated 20jun24)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terry McLaughlin: A better policy on homelessness

[Ms Terry McLaughlin is a longtime regular columnist for The Union and contributes well researched and written reports on current issues and happenings (quite often vocally proscribed by our local liberal contingent).  Her columns are always factual exhibiting high journalistic standards now mostly lost from the industry.  Recently she attended an important town forum on the homelessness problem focused on Nevada County and contributed an excellent report to Barry Pruett’s Sierra Thread blog (here).  However, she seldom if ever injects her own opinions into her reporting.  As her friend I know that her perspectives are well thought out, and I requested she write a follow-on piece in which she would state her own perspectives on this important issue.  She kindly submitted the following.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Despite enormous sums of tax money being provided to “solve the homeless problem”, the size of the unhoused population is only growing and increasing.  How that tax money is being spent and who is benefiting from it is an issue for another discussion, but it appears that we, as taxpayers, are not getting any “bang for our buck”, and those who are homeless are not getting the help they need.

A very small subset of the homeless population is the “working poor” who have truly hit upon a serious economic problem, either because of employment layoffs, large unpaid medical bills that have saddled them with debt from which they cannot recover, or other similar experiences.  People in these situations, who do not suffer from mental illness or substance addiction, will most likely transition out of homelessness successfully, either because they were able to find new employment, family or friends offered temporary housing, government benefits allowed them to find reduced-rate housing, non-profit organizations came to the rescue with temporary aid, or other similar methods of assistance.   A very small number of those who are homeless fall into this category.

As discussed by both Nevada City Police Chief Dan Foss and Grass Valley Police Chief Alex Gammelgard during the community forum sponsored by the Sierra College Foundation, the main causes of homelessness are mental illness and substance abuse and addiction, whether it be drugs or alcohol.   Both chiefs agreed that the problem of homelessness will never be solved until we deal with the underlying causes that created the situation in the first place.

‘The End is Near’

George Rebane

Were we to discuss really serious topics beyond Trump’s trials and Biden’s lies, I can think of one no more important than that brought up by Victor Davis Hanson in a recent interview (here).  We have extensively covered the various national and geo-strategic factors that portend to end America’s run as the world's leading democratic republic, economy, and white hat world hegemon.  However, most of our neighbors neither care nor are aware of what’s happening.  As witnessed on these pages, if anything, they are more interested in Stormy Daniel’s testimony and various topical policy atrocities launched by our doddering idiot for president and Democrats at all levels of government (especially California).

This is not to say that there is no traction to the warnings issued by our more thoughtful political leaders and commentators (e.g. here) – so far, a sparsely populated bunch.  Today more people are starting to take notice that there is now in the offing a likely “extinction” of the United States we have known.  Letter writers (here) to serious publications like the WSJ acknowledge the current deterioration of America’s defense posture and industrial might, and are showing concern.

Material arguments summarize as follows –

• The US industrial base to make things from ships to medicines to machine tools is essentially gone.
• Our military is tragically under-manned and woke-corrupted with traditional cadres of enlistees no longer willing to join, let alone make military their career. Our country can no longer find enough people willing to fight for it.
• Our unimaginable national debt and reckless social spending programs are destroying the dollar and unseating it as the preferred currency for international commerce.
• Our open borders and illegal alien import policies are destroying the remnants of America’s public cultural cohesion with new levels of unassimilating multi-culturality never before witnessed in a sustainable and geographically compact jurisdiction.
• Our traditional allies in Europe and Asia are aware of America’s weak (non-existent?) leadership and feckless foreign policy, and are seeking alternative geo-strategic relationships that serve their national interests.
• Our electorate is split and largely ignorant of the issues facing the nation; and are in no shape to unify and support reasonably coherent policies to attempt a return to a usefully educated, economically healthy, fiscally sound, geographically secure, and culturally unified sovereign nation-state. Over half of us don’t care and want an autocratic global government run by elites, and the remainder want to return to a liberal constitutional government based on free-market capitalism.
• By passing laws, regulations, and prohibitive tax rates in a transforming neo-Marxist society, we no longer educate a sufficient cadre of high-end (STEM) workers with needed skillsets or provide them the means to produce wealth in an open-market capitalist economy.

So instead –

   

Scattershots – 22apr24 (updated 5may24)

George Rebane

The worldwide climate ruse continues.  Now it’s come out that for years NOAA has been reporting and continues to report bogus temperatures from non-existent “ghost” recording stations.  For its nationally accepted temp data NOAA relies on published reports from the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) that operates the stations.  “NOAA fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 USHCN reporting stations that no longer exist. … They are physically gone—but still report data—like magic.”  Anyone who cares to look under the hood of the ongoing climate change hysteria would see countless holes in the reported ‘science’ and the legions of just plain lies broadcast daily about a non-existent catastrophe intended to more firmly establish the control of the elites both nationally and globally.  (more here and here)

“There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy,” advised Trump lawyer Todd Blanche. (here) That should be obvious to anyone with even a room-temp IQ – but apparently it is not.  This little item came up about the 2016 election during Trump’s hush money trial.  The entire purpose of election campaigning is the attempt to influence voters to vote for this rather than that; it was ever thus.  But not according to the Democrat pinheads prosecuting the former president.  And while we’re at it, can anyone really make a reasonable case against confidential agreements between private individuals concerning their private relationships that don’t violate any laws and don’t injure third parties?  If Trump reported the hush money payment as a legal expense, then that frequently encountered ‘error’ should be the concern of the IRS and so adjudicated, instead of making it an obviously trumped up felony prosecution.  The only more stupid and vindictive prosecution would involve parties, all of whom were willing and profiting participants, in which no one was harmed.  (Oh yes, Trump has one of those going on also.)

California’s plunge to authoritarian destitution continues.  This morning I had a blood test with a phlebotomist; a very nice young lady, native of Nevada County, loves what she does, and a lifelong happy camper in California.  But now she is moving to Colorado because, as she tells it, even though single, she can no longer afford to live in our socialist state.  Certified phlebotomists in California make $35K-53K a year.  These are hardworking, lower-tier, middle-class people, who constitute part of our ‘makers’, who contribute to the hoard of taxes and fees that the state and its local minions extract from citizens.  It’s been the oft-told story of upper and middle class exodus from the once golden state – they are the job-makers and those trying to build a nest egg for retirement.  We have become blasé about those folks turning tail for greener pastures.  But now the gun-toting government grifters are reaching down to people on the lower economic rungs who remain here trying to build careers.  Even for the Sacramento socialists that is a new low.  I can still hear her plaintive “Would you believe I had to pay $5.46 for a gallon of gas yesterday?!”

[24apr24 update]  Biden had his SecDHS Mayorkas divert congressionally approved border wall construction funds to do environmental studies and mitigation on the harm caused by the already built wall sections, instead of continuing to secure the border.  Meanwhile the SOS (sack of …) kept lying to the public at every chance that the “border is secure” as millions of illegal aliens used their Biden free-pass to invade the country.  (here)

Criminal campaign conspiracies exposed.  David Pecker (yes, that’s his real name), chief exec of American Media, testified that he agreed to publish only good stuff about Trump and bury the bad stuff (‘Catch and Kill’) during the former president’s 2016 campaign.  The hush-money trial prosecutor claims that this was a “criminal conspiracy” designed to influence the election’s outcome.  Well, no sh!t Red Ryder.  Thanks for that epiphany on a practice that the lamestream media has practiced for years using fabricated lies and paid pejorative sources against Trump while backing every leftwing candidate.  Showing media bias for your candidate is only allowed for Democrats, for others today such longstanding campaign practices are considered criminal conspiracies.  (more here and here)

[1may24 update]  Developing: Russia is jamming the heck out of GPS around the Baltic Sea, the Financial Times reported Sunday, citing the foreign ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The jamming, which seems to have escalated since December, is so disruptive that two Finnish airliners en route to the Estonian city of Tartu were forced to turn around on Thursday and Friday last week. 

The jamming is also affecting boats in the region, “leading to warnings from the Swedish navy about the safety of shipping,” FT reported. Unnamed experts told the outlet they believe there to be possibly three different sources for the jamming, “with one seemingly based in Kaliningrad, another responsible for the disturbances in Estonia and Finland, and a separate source affecting the far north of Norway and Finland.”

This was sent to me by a longtime friend and correspondent.  It is remarkable that such ongoing aggressive electronic warfare by Putin has not been part of the daily news about the thug’s plans to expand Russia’s control of its near-abroad lands.   NATO, with US leadership, needs to respond; isolationism is not a long-term solution for peace.

The Niagara of evil and dumb Democrat policies keeps washing over the country.  Jason Riley outlines Gavin Newsom’s California idiocies that inevitably go on to infect our land (here and here), and now we hear that Bumblebrain has been sneaking illegal aliens into the country via a taxpayer sponsored airlift directly from their countries of origin.  But the latest is that our excuse for president is also planning on importing America-hating Palestinian Arabs in a program that will guarantee them a fast track to citizenship.  It’s hard to come up with more destructive ideas for our country than those proposed daily by the woke and progressive Democratic left.

[5may24 update] Christian Nationalism – The Left’s new target.  “The label is ‘assigned’ to Americans who believe there is a link between faith and freedom.” (here and here)  It is a historical fact that our Founders forged a specific form of republican democracy that would only endure with a citizenry that is educated and shares a common culture of morality.  At the time (ca 1790s) they thought they were on firm ground with that prescription since the country was in-the-large uniformly Christian.  But even then they had some apprehensions – witness Benjamin Franklin’s “A republic, if you can keep it" response to “What kind of government have you given us Dr Franklin?”.  The last fifty years have clearly demonstrated that in America’s ideologically fragmented multi-cultural society we no longer enjoy such a common morality, and require more and more the presence of laws, regulations, and the government gun in the attempt to keep the peace.

Scattershots – 31mar24

George Rebane

‘The Rise of Third-World U.S.A: An Immigrant’s View’  The rapid and visible decline of America under the ministrations of the nation’s socialists (aka Democrats) has long been an alarming theme of these pages.  Now this tarnishing of our shining city on a hill is even apparent to immigrants, at least of the legal variety.  Even Bumblebrain has had to relabel our land as one of “possibility” from its historical land of opportunity.  One immigrant observes –

“This demotion of America doesn’t happen all at once. Like the frog slowly boiled in water, we mistake the new conditions as tolerable. Creeping socialist policies in economics that fuel inflation, increase government control and misallocation of capital; the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents; the decline of law and order, from the border to our cities; the lowering of standards and enabling of bad behavior—it all looks too familiar to a third-world nation. It’s tragic because, after America, there is nowhere else to go.”

The rise of the burger flippers.  $20/hr is the new minimum wage mandated by Sacramento’s butt-stupidos.  The dictum goes into effect tomorrow in California’s fast food outlets, and promises to reduce employment while not decreasing poverty by one whit – oh yes, and you’ll be paying more for your Big Mac. (more here)

Scattershots – 6mar24 (updated 8mar24)

George Rebane

The specter of California’s AB5, and raising the state’s minimum wage to $20/hr, are again and predictably wreaking more havoc in our small business community and providing another shot in the shorts for consumers.  A shot close to home arrived yesterday in a letter from our beloved Union.  On 2 April next, the newspaper will cease morning delivery of its pulp edition and start using snail mail instead.  Why?  Because AB5 and $20/hr will “restructure our ability to use carriers to deliver the newspaper.”  Note the compliant and uncomplaining manner in which this latest action of California’s butt-stupid government is described by a compliant and well-behaved leftwing business.

‘The rate of inflation is decreasing’ is today’s celebratory trumpet from the Biden campaign.  The message is perfectly designed to keep the nation’s marginally informed in perpetual ignorance about the impact of Bidenomics.  What these folks totally miss is that Biden’s inflation has already increased the prices that we pay every day, and these are not going down.  Slowly decreasing inflation will not fix another full-fledged feature of Bumblebrain’s economy – that wages have not kept pace with the baked-in inflation, and the buying power of all Americans has gone down under this administration, that in total contrast to what they did under Trump’s stewardship.  This adds to the Democrats’ lies that Trump’s reduction of regulations and taxes only benefitted ‘the rich’.  Exactly opposite of what government data shows happened – businesses prospered, middle and low income taxes were reduced, upper income people continued to pay more, and government revenues increased.  (Can everyone spell ‘Laffer’?)  And then came Biden.

[7mar24 update] 'Why Black Voters are Ditching Democrats'  Had lunch with a liberal friend who unsurprisingly was not aware that not only blacks but also other non-white voters - Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc - are realizing that life has been bad under Democrats, and has gotten worse under Joe Biden.  Basketball great Charles Barkley explains the matter to those who will listen (here).

[8mar24 update]  Re last night’s SOTU – the corrupt sumbich just can’t stop lying every time he opens his mouth.  Check out ‘Fact-Checking Biden’s State of the Union Address’.

Lamestream Media’s New ‘Unprecedented’ Low

George Rebane

Catherine Herridge, the nationally acclaimed and respected investigative reporter formerly with Fox News, was fired by her current employer CBS News who also seized her confidential files (more here and here).  This move is unprecedented in the journalistic industry for all the obvious reasons.  The dismissal and seizure of materials is pursuant to her current investigation of the Hunter laptop scandal, and it has the Oval Office fingerprints all over it.  Formerly a respected national news organization, CBS has now become another lamestream corporatist hack with plummeting ratings.  But it does know on which side its bread is buttered.  In the interval, The Daily Mail reports (here) that CBS claims it has returned the stuff it seized upon her dismissal and denies firing her because of her current work.

As expected, the other lamestream outlets (e.g. MSNBC) remain silent on the matter.  Even outlets like Fox, for some mysterious reason is silent and forfeits its “…, and still unafraid” tagline.  One thing unreported but certain is that all heads-up journalists will remove their remaining confidential source files from their corporate workplaces.  The CBS action will now have a chilling effect not only on what topics and issues journalists will cover, but also on the willingness of important news sources to come forward with the assurance that their identities will be kept confidential by reporters they formerly trusted.  And all this promises to add another layer of implicit censorship on honest and impartial reporting to an industry already in disrepute.

They are VERY different from us

George Rebane

I view with reinvigorated alarm today’s broadcast joys of socialists, wokesters, liberals, and leftwingers in general celebrating the $400M+ fine demanded of Trump for what is termed his  committing ‘civil fraud’.  They uniformly and unanimously agree with the ‘legal basis’ on which the New York attorney general prosecuted and the judge adjudicated the Trump trial.  All these people look forward to a totalitarian state in which capitalism is banned, the beneficial mechanisms of market pricing, and the ownership of private property are dispensed with.  That is exactly the harbinger that letting the verdict stand will foster across the land.  (And students of our Founders and Bastiat know that the fundamental rights upon which our personal security and manifold liberties are based will also disappear.)

The other cohort of people celebrating Trump’s fine are those too stupid to think through these ramifications.  All their little TDS sotted pea brains can muster up is that if it hurts Trump, it must be good.

Nevertheless, some on the Right still believe that we can find common ground to reunite as the America of yesteryear – this even though no such path has been identified.  RR invites these worthies to step forward and illuminate us with their vision of how we regain E Pluribus Unum.  (And here is info on a related and contributing problem in our land.)

Scattershots – 9feb24 (updated 17feb24)

George Rebane

KJP, Biden’s excuse for a press secretary, defended the president’s dementia – attested to in the recent special prosecutor Robert Hur report about his mishandling classified documents - by reading from a desperately compiled list of Republicans who have misspoken in the past.  That tack further illustrates how intellectually challenged are most members of Team Biden by confusing the constant stream of forgetfulness, mistakes, and malaprops that come out of our sitting president’s mouth with the one-offs that most mentally healthy people make now and then.  One can also counter this argument by pointing out that it isn’t ignorance about Joe’s condition at all, but intimate knowledge of the man’s incapability of handling spontaneous communications in the public forum.  Therefore, his exposure to such ‘opportunities’ must be minimized at all times during this election year.  Half the country’s consumers of lamestream media are also clueless about this aspect of the man they voted for.

Another vast area of ignorance cum imbecility is shared by leftwing Californians who have no idea about the sources of the state’s tax revenues.  Over the years RR has contained numerous reports of the outlandish fraction of such revenues paid by ‘the rich’.  (e.g. 1% of top earning taxpayers pay 42% of our taxes while the bottom 70% pay just 11%.)  And most recently a column by Thea Hood in the 12jan24 Union (here) detailed the percentages as reported by various state agencies.  She was immediately attacked by local socialists who would have none of it, claiming that such numbers are nothing but rightwing propaganda, proving again that not only can you have your own opinions, but also your own convenient facts.  And some call this the information age?

“Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI.  OpenAI chief pursues investors including the U.A.E. for a project possibly requiring up to $7 trillion.” (more here)  All of this is due to the massive processing and storage requirements needed for training large language models (LLMs), today’s epitomy of machine intelligence that has the potential to surpass humans in every conceivable task and will create markets for microchips and energy that cannot be supplied by today’s industry and infrastructure.  Altman is attempting to prepare for those days, and wants most of the new chip plants to be built in the US.  But I predict that our anti-American socialists will do all that they can to throw sand in those gears like they are already doing in Arizona to slow progress on the new big chip factory being built there.  For global collectivists America cannot remain the world's hegemon.

[11feb24 update] Review time.  A conspiracy is usually defined as “an unlawful, harmful, or evil plan formulated in secret by two or more persons.”  In actuality the conspiracy need not have a dark side, but could also be something benevolent that is planned in secret by two or more persons.  And labeling something as a ‘conspiracy theory’ does not necessarily mean that it is false.

Maintaining our open southern border has been planned and perpetrated as an anti-American conspiracy by the Left.  Inviting millions of illegal aliens to irretrievably spread themselves across our land is in fact unlawful, harmful, and evil to the extent that it foments the destruction of our culture and political structure, to replace it by a governance that promotes globalism through the destruction of the United States into a powerless second-world socialist country.  The lamestream media deny this conspiracy; and even Fox News is afraid to explain it to their audiences, leaving that to individual commentators who are then labeled ‘far right’ and ‘radical’.  This goes on as the Biden administration has no better explanation for their unconstitutional conspiracy other than repeatedly parroting the blatant lie that “the border is secure.”

[14feb24 update]  A couple of climate scumbags were arrested in the National Archives for throwing pink powder on the protected display of the US Constitution.  These people confirm daily the many ways they hate America.  Do not be fooled that the climate activists among us are loyal Americans.  The evidence against that notion abounds.  (more here)

[17feb24 update]  FCC bans AI-voiced robocalls in wake of ‘Biden’ calls to NH residents.  Well, it’s started.  Scammers have begun using the new AI-voicing technology to convince consumers, voters, et al of thins being true that really aren’t.  And the voice over their telephones sounds very convincing.  It will be interesting to see how the FCC and the states’ attorney generals are able to enforce such censorship.  When this technology is combined with already existing video synthesizing real people saying wrong things, then the media consumers are really flummoxed because the scam messages will be marbled in with the authentic video and audio segments, and no one will be able to tell the difference.  News outlets will have a new challenge in vetting such media and convincing their audiences of the authenticity of what they broadcast. (more here)

Border Bill Smoke and Mirrors

George Rebane

The ongoing debate in the Swamp about how to fix the border comes down to two competing bills – HR2 and the Senate's ‘bipartisan’ travesty being foisted on the unknowing.  The only true border security bill is HR2 as illustrated in the graphic comparison below provided by the Heritage Foundation.

Iran still gets a pass

George Rebane

Our cowardly president gives us more reasons daily to loath him and fear his administration.  Among his ongoing tsunami of lies is the blatant whopper that he has done all he can to secure our borders, confident that his ignorant constituents know nothing about how President Trump implemented his border policy with illegal entry rates that were more than an order of magnitude lower than what Bumblebrain has foisted on the country during his watch.  Now he is fearful of starting a war with Iran after that country has been at war with us for years, and has been freely attacking our ships, bases, and killing our troops.

As noted previously in these pages, Rebane Doctrine has called for the destruction of Iran's infrastructure that generates terror supporting revenues in violation of established but unenforced sanctions, and lets it now direct attacks on American bases, naval forces, and international shipping.  The idiot does not understand that in warfare it only takes one to tango.

Scattershots – 25jan24 (updated 4feb24)

George Rebane

Evidence of the impassable gulf between the minds of dedicated collectivists (leftists, progressives, Marxists, wokes, …) and forms or reasoning/logic that work.  From that tribe a local worthy (Richard Howell here) contends that California’s offering free health care to illegal aliens does not impact their decisions to make our state their new home.  His understanding of human nature is that offering more benefit for some behavior does NOT encourage more of such behavior (Pavlov and Skinner call your office).  This fundamental chasm of ignorance is shared by members of our one-party state legislature who continue to make the public policies that power the Great California Exodus.

“I am SOMEBODY and I deserve full equality” reads one of the signs held by some of California's universities’ hunger-striking students here illegally.  The Daily Californian describes the participating students’ hope “that the strike will encourage the university to accept a proposal allowing for the hiring of undocumented students. Currently, undocumented students cannot hold any campus job, including research and teaching assistant positions.”  Apparently the plethora of benefits they already receive for being ‘somebody’ able to fog a mirror in California are not sufficient.  Nowhere in this discussion is mentioned the current availability of such jobs for students here legally.  (more here)

[31jan24 update]  The Pentagon prepares its cadres to fight domestic “rightwing terrorism” as one of its high hard operational objectives.  No one knows from what basis the DOD has adopted the suppression of domestic terrorism of any hue as one of its operational mandates.  Here is the latest on its internal efforts to spread the word and alert its cadres to imminent danger.  From their announcement of the meeting we read, “They (… the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol) are the latest flashpoints in a process that has been unfolding for decades, in which vast conspiracy theories and radical ideologies such as white supremacism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and hostility to government converge into a deadly threat to democracy. … This talk, derived from the speakers’ new book, God, Guns, and Sedition (Columbia Univ. Press) discusses the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States, the impact of U.S. domestic terrorism on our foreign policy and our allies, and policy recommendations to counter far-right terrorism.”

[4feb24 update]  Illegals can vote in Arizona, “even though it’s a felony under federal law for an alien to register and vote”.  And then receiving a voter registration card, the illegal alien can use that as a bona fide identity to apply for and qualify for all kinds of additional government goodies.  Anti-American Democrats are, of course, all for it as another of their reliable vote buying gimmicks.  (more here)

Gavin Newsom, the Brylcreem Kid, let slip again how incredibly ignorant he is about almost everything to do with what’s happening in California, and how Democrat policies continue to damage California and its wealth producing citizens.  He was shopping in retail store while it was being openly robbed by a gang of thieves.  When they left, he excoriated the store’s staff for not doing anything to stop them.  His diatribe made it clear that he had no idea that today such thievery is perfectly legal in California, and the store’s employees are legally liable if they do anything to impede the thugs or the robbery in progress.  Police no longer respond to nor do the district attorneys prosecute such obvious criminality.  In response, stores are now moving out of (mostly poor) neighborhoods where such behavior has become the norm.  Another Democratic gift that keeps on giving as our culture spirals into the mud. (more here)

                                                   

A Worthy Extension of Federalism

George Rebane

We see that SCOTUS has given the feds permission to remove some razor wire barricades from federal land on the Mexican border.  This permission enables the anti-American Biden administration to enable more illegals to easily enter the United States.  No consideration was given to national security in the ruling which included two so-called conservative justices. (more here)

Most of us know that the US Constitution primarily limits the powers of the federal government to those specifically delineated in the document.  Powers absent are reserved for the states and its more local jurisdictions.  The federal government is mandated by law to carry out and implement certain specified powers, among the leading is to provide for and maintain national security.  This definitely includes securing the nation’s borders so that only lawful transit is both authorized and made possible.

Unfortunately, the Constitution is silent when it comes to the enforcement and execution of its provisions and derived laws when the federal government cannot or will not carry out its obligations.  According to Rebane Doctrine, in such cases the natural and rational solution is to expand federalism by authorizing the states to fulfill such obligations and implement the functions of the absent federal government.  A corollary to such a ruling would be to then prohibit the federal government from interfering with the states as they fulfill the constitutional obligations abandoned by the feds.

This new protocol could be implemented by a SCOTUS ruling in response to, say, a suit brought by any state harmed by the feds’ delinquent behavior.  The ruling would then set an enduring precedent like other such SCOTUS rulings.  Of course, if it were deemed sufficiently important, then the ruling could be promoted into a constitutional amendment.  According to my lights, recognizing this clarifying extension has become necessary as our country becomes more fractionated with large numbers of states in frequent disagreement with a federal government that often acts unconstitutionally.

AI in the Medium and Message

George Rebane

Argentina’s president Javier Milei delivered an important speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  In it he described the history of Argentina’s tragic descent from being one of the world’s leading developed countries, enjoying the fruits of free market capitalism, to a nation today with a destitute and chaotic economy after it began reorganizing itself under various forms of collectivism centered on socialism.  The speech is an excellent and well-delivered warning to that annual conclave of true-believer globalists.  You can view it here in its entirety – I recommend it.

But perhaps the equally or even more important aspect of the speech was the mode of its delivery.  You see, Milei delivered the speech in Spanish to a live audience who wore ear pieces to get a realtime English translation by a human translator. Yet in the above video of the speech Milei delivered it in perfectly accented English in his own voice.  The video was generated offline by an LLM AI that correctly coded his voice and modified the video image to perfectly synchronize his lips to express the English delivery.  (Here is the follow-up to illustrate the human-translated version of the video.)

The astute reader will instantly understand that this speaker could have been made to deliver any kind of speech desired at that WEF venue.  Such translations will soon become realtime in the sense that the actual speaker speaking in language L3 delivering message M7 will be seen and heard on monitors and/or live broadcasts to speak in language L12 delivering message M5.  For the latter we will need the source file to contain metadata on facial expressions and, perhaps, gestures etc – all in the realm of today’s offline large language AI models.

For good or ill, in these pre-Singularity years this is what we now have to look forward to from here on.  And this election season will no doubt provide us with examples of both.

Ruminations – 17jan24 (updated 21jan24)

George Rebane

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

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

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

Ruminations – 5jan24 (updated 9jan24)

George Rebane

‘DEI’ is now the new politically correct attribute that replaces ‘Section 8’ that we have been using for decades.  Referring to that part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for those reeeinving meritless assignments, promotions, and rewards served us well and irked to no end the liberal sponsors of such fractured public policies.  Now we can use the more acceptable ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ modifiers as in ‘The former Harvard president and plagiarist Claudine Gay got her job as a DEI candidate.’

The recent massacre of Iranians by ISIS demonstrates again that the ragheads love killing each other with perhaps even more gusto than they like to murder Jews.  I think the body counts bear out this conclusion.

The reason there are ‘food deserts’ in US cities was again demonstrated in Compton, CA.  There a mad max gang pillaged Ruben’s Bakery & Mexican Food when “a mob of more than 100 rushed into the store, stealing groceries, lottery tickets, and even meat scales, and causing further damage.”  Who today wants to invest their life savings in a retail business located in a Democrat controlled town where a “local small business that braves a rough neighborhood is rewarded with looting and destruction."

[8jan24 update] 'The Real Story of January 6th' is a 1.5 hour online movie produced by Epoch Times.  It's a bit scary to watch as it shows what our government now does to people whom they consider to be their political enemies.  And more scary to see how obvious self-declared anti-American rioters can loot, rob, burn, and riot in our cities with absolutely no recourse from the established authorities.

[9jan24 update]  Readers familiar with my advocacy of all things Bayesian, especially in the area of decision-making and evolutionary progress, will enjoy reading this piece – ‘Bayesian Inference: A Unified Framework for Perception, Reasoning, and Decision-making’ – in the online magazine Medium.  It provides some additional insights into how we (and other critters) are all basically Bayesian, whether we know it or not.