Rebane's Ruminations

A Progressive’s ‘Common Ground’

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

George Rebane

Sierra Business Council CEO Steven Frisch took to task my criticism of Terry McAteer’s Union column (here) in which he glossed over the real problems that California has under Democrat leadership.  Along with McAteer, Frisch also appears to be blind to California socialists’ homegrown catastrophes, and counsels those who would point them out to “stop acting like a bunch of babies and work together."

A Different and Dangerous Impeachment

George Rebane

‘This Impeachment Is Different – and More Dangerous’ writes Lawrence Lessig in Politico.  He is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and according to my lights tilts a bit to the left.  But he has penned an insightful piece that more or less flies in formation and abets Rebane Doctrine on the Great Divide (you know, confirmation bias and all that).

Lessig correctly argues that the current impeachment imbroglio is not a rehash of America’s past impeachments.  Today, the plethora of politically polarizing media have so divided the country that both sides are totally sustained in their beliefs without even considering whether there is any middle ground remaining, and, if so, should we seek it out.  He points out that past impeachments were carried out by elite cadres operating, more or less, out of the public glare.  The impeachers were not pored over by the public, whose changing attitudes were not constantly apparent to the impeachers.  Today, Americans have a choice on how to view the impeachment process, and their attitudinal temperature is taken multiple times a day by countless polls.

Democrats’ Big Lie #4687

George Rebane

That Republicans suppress minority voter turnouts continues as the perennial Big Lie by the Left, and forms a staple of how Democrats maintain their minority plantations, especially in the blighted urban areas they have controlled for decades.  Today’s election hysteria is based on the blatant lie that in Georgia “it was the voter suppression, particularly of African-American communities, that prevented us from having a (black) Governor Stacey Abrams right now” according to Corey Booker.  Fellow demogauges Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg piled on with equivalent statements – “partisan voter suppression … dictates the outcome of elections before the voting even begins.” 

Now these are the kind of real Big Lies that actually do impact peoples’ behavior, in this case convincing minorities that their votes won’t matter because the Republicans have already stolen the election.  The facts, suppressed by the lamestream, are exactly the opposite – “… Black and Latino turnout nationwide last year hit a record high for a midterm election despite voter ID requirements, registration checks, and limits on early voting in some states. Turnout increased 13.4 percentage points for Hispanics (40.4%), 11.4 percentage points for blacks (51.1%), and 11.7 percentage points for whites (57.5%) from 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

And in Georgia the purposely hidden count was shouted down by charges that qualified minority voters were “purged” from the rolls.  Another lie which “had scant impact on minority turnout: A larger share of blacks (59.6%) voted than whites (56.1%) last year. Black turnout in Georgia increased 16.6 percentage points from 2014 versus 11.3 percentage points for whites, and Ms. Abrams received 90% more votes in Atlanta’s Fulton County than the Democrat did four years earlier.”

When it comes to lying to the American public, the Left has dominated that turf for decades for the simple reason that they represent themselves as the voice of the aggrieved and wanting, defending those who can’t or won’t from those who can and do.  Therefore people must be told they are aggrieved, and public policies must fashioned to keep them wanting.  It was ever thus.  (more here)

 

‘From Racism to Culturism’ (updated 18oct19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Marginal Revolutionaries’

George Rebane

George Melloan, former deputy editor of WSJ’s editorial page and now syndicated columnist, has written an excellent review (here) in the 5oct19 WSJ of The Marginal Revolutionaries – How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (2019) by historian Janek Wasserman.  This is an extensively researched “group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party.”  From Melloan’s review, replete with lavish quotes from the book, it is clear that Wasserman’s work corroborates Der Führer (1944), Konrad Heiden’s first-hand history of the rise of Hitler, and the international and national brands of socialism during the first half of the 20^th century.

(I insert the following thoughts into the record because, as the astute reader has gleaned over the years, I am a student of the Austrian School which most closely represents my desiderata for economic order that is beneficial to a society.  This major segment of my belief system (credo) forms the foundation of my profound differences with and opposition to collectivism and its current resurgent socialist/communist forms in America and the EU.  Some of my previous commentaries on the above can be found here and here, expanded in their comment streams)

The Austrian School was founded by economists Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek who met regularly in a little Vienna coffee house early in the 20^th century.  Their nascent revolution was marginal in the sense that during that same epoch that included the Great War (WW1) more formidable revolutionaries were also plotting and scheming in other Vienna coffee houses.  Communist regulars plotting the Marxist revolution were Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.  Excluded from international socialists to form national socialism were Hitler who met with a variously attended group of the disaffected jobless, and after the war with a rapidly growing cohort of disaffected jobless veterans.  The Nazis and communists fought pitched battles and murdered each other in the night until Hitler’s side won, and the communists went underground in the west while Lenin et al were building the USSR in Russia.  Both forms of socialism would come to kill millions of their own citizens for various reasons that ranged from race to redundancy.

An Illustration of Liberal Ethics, Morals, Logic, …

George Rebane

The 22aug19 Union has a prominent column by Ms Susan Rogers, a very liberal member of the newspaper’s editorial board.  There in ‘Plenty of shame to go around’ she equates the thuggish behavior of county Democrats at Representative LaMalfa’s recent town hall, with the congressman’s socio-political ideology as expressed through his legislative work.  There is no doubt that the much-reported misbehavior of our local liberals seeking to disrupt a public meeting was something in which no American should take pride.  However, to diminish the louts at the meeting by impugning that LaMalfa shared an equal if not greater blame for the encounter is a down-home illustration of how far beyond the tipping point has progressed our national polarization.

In her column, Ms Rogers lists a litany of the congressman’s legislative actions and policy positions each of which she peremptorily labels as “shameful”.  We are not here confusing ‘shameful’ with, say, ‘erroneous’ or ‘misguided’ or even ‘ignorant’.  The woman illustrates how the liberals’ worldview puts people with whom they disagree onto a morally lower level of human beings – people who purposely behave in a manner that is shameful in our society.  And the basis on which makes such a comparison of bad public behavior at an event with a politician's longstanding ideology defies logic.

In our culture, shame is lavished on people who have purposely done something dishonorable, improper, illegal, etc.  The so accused is then supposed to respond to such a judgment by exhibiting some form of contrition in the attempt to make amends.  Attacking a politician on moral grounds for expressing his beliefs through his work, beliefs of which voters who put him in office were aware, is beyond the pale of political discourse, save the kind that is meant to further divide us.  And it does confirm our divisions since she means to put the rest of us who support congressman LaMalfa into an equivalent condition of shame.  I, for one, reject both her accusations and her hubris in ascending to heights from which she dispenses such lofty, unexamined, and perfunctory judgments.

Happy Fourth, if you can (updated)

George Rebane

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

Ruminations – 31may19 (updated 5jun19)

George Rebane

 “The American people, right now, do not support (impeachment) because they do not know the story. They don’t know the facts.” Congressman Nadler (D-NY).  So WTF has been holding up the facts for the last two years????  If you got ‘em, let us see them - now!

Tariffs on all Mexican goods is not my favorite idea to get Mexico to stop and not encourage the transit of central American migrants across their country.  Nothing else has worked to date, and Einstein’s dictum demands we try something new.  So, for all you worthies out there with better ideas, let’s have them.

[1jun19 update]  The RL Crabb cartoon below was filched from the 1jun19 Union.  Here Bob cleverly captures the obvious in our local state senate special election.  The unfortunate part illustrated is California’s so-called “Jungle Primary” law that lands the top two vote-getters from the primary in the final election.  In highly lopsided jurisdictions this means that the top two may be from the same party, therefore denying a voice to the minority to express their desire for other policies or even make known their numbers.  This is what happens when legislative pinheads give little thought to ‘Democracy über alles’.

[2jun19 update] As long argued here, our two ideological poles interpret about every aspect of the realworld from significantly different or even disjoint perspectives.  Three Columbia Law School mavens acknowledge and examine this phenomenon in ‘Republicans and Democrats Are Describing Two Different Constitutions’ published in the current edition of The Atlantic.  The closer we all look at our belief systems (aka ontologies), the wider the chasm between us appears.

Climate Change Cacophony – Russ Steele points us to ‘The Stunning Statistical Fraud Behind The Global Warming Scare’.  And in conjunction I again ask readers to consider this chain of chances (probabilities) before mindlessly promoting public policies – each successive chance is conditioned on the previous ones being true.  So, what’s the chance that climate varies over time, that a long-term warming trend continues, that current warming is overwhelmingly manmade, that the warming trend is catastrophic, that the warming trend can be halted by some means, that we know how to halt warming, that we can afford to halt warming without destroying the economies that provide the wealth to terminate global warming???  Now multiply all those probabilities together to assess your support of climate hysteria.

[5jun19 update]  HOT FLASH!  Speaker Pelosi again confirms (the RR assertion) that the Dems’ constituency is overwhelmingly challenged in the intellectual acumen department.  She made great effort yesterday to 1) acknowledge that the Left’s voters do not grasp the meaning of ‘impeachment’, thinking that once impeached then you’re out.  And 2) explained in detail that impeachment is like indictment, and that a guilty verdict from a trial in the Senate is needed to oust an impeached official.  Of course, she had to negotiate these semantic hurdles while carefully omitting mention of the illustrative example of Sweet Willie being impeached yet remaining in office.  Now methinks she’s worried that her voters are equally clueless about what ‘indictment’ means.

Neither Biden nor Warren know the difference between an objective and a plan to achieve the objective.  Both have now disclosed their “plans” to solve their climate change catastrophe which consist overwhelmingly of just throwing more money at ‘global warming R&D’ and praying fervently (to the extent permitted in the liberal liturgy) that something good will come out of that before the world ends.  Oh yeah, each also intends to pass some more laws and regs to make sure that the economy will not be able to afford achieving the R&D objectives.

Like likes Likes - once more (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruminations – 30apr19 (updated 3may19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-citizenship America (updated 28apr19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 April 2019.  A slightly edited version also appears in the 27apr19 issue of The Union.]

Perhaps no recent issue of national contention illustrates the differences of how our two polarized sides see the future direction of America than does the debate about whether the 2020 census should include the citizenship question.  The original intent of the census had to do with redistricting and reapportionment.  That intent was carried out with our census from 1820 to 1950 by counting American citizens, which then determined membership in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College for the several states.  In the 20^th century an accurate citizen count provided by the census was also used to determine the allocation of federal dollars back to the states under various programs that Congress legislated.

The Mueller Report – some early takes (updated 20apr19)

George Rebane

The long-awaited report from special counsel Robert Mueller has turned out to be a disappointment on all counts to all sides.  The following summarize my initial take on it.

1. From a legal perspective, the report is an iconic nothing-burger. A 400-page embarrassment that documents the failure to conclude anything definite about the commissioned purpose for the drawn-out investigation.  It is a collection of legal pabulum as a CYA disguise for spending tens of millions over two years to no avail.
2. From the gitgo the Mueller investigation was an obviously composed effort to nail the president and derail his administration. The composition of the investigative team and its flailing, off-the-mark, subsequent indictments gave evidence that it really was a desperate witch hunt which had to fire off a few legal pyrotechnics now and then to keep the effort looking credible to the light thinkers.
3. From a political perspective, the report is a success. Since there was no credible prosecutorial evidence for either ‘collusion’ or ‘obstruction’, the investigation’s redoubt terminus was always to deliver a product that would dissemble its conclusions so as to invite and enable follow-on probes which the Democrats took every opportunity to specify during the 22-month fiasco.  Team Muller got its marching orders early and often from the Left and its lamestream.
4. President Trump and his administration have been isolated, perhaps, like no other administration in our history. The Dems could never accept the election results, and the Repubs have carried on a feckless relationship with a president who obviously was not their first choice from their retinue of available candidates.  And Trump’s incurable foot-in-mouth disease did not endear him to anyone in the Washington political establishment.  Mueller’s investigation was drawn out for the obvious collateral damage it was inflicting by hobbling and diverting Team Trump from governing.
5. Mueller’s work has also served 1) to firmly entrench the public’s longstanding opinion of the dodgy legal profession and our convoluted and corrupt justice system in which it operates, and 2) to highlight and further widen our country’s ideological divide. The report’s dearth of evidence and painfully wordsmithed syntax made sure that it would change no minds already secure in their beliefs about Trump’s guilt or innocence.  All sides can now put their own particular spin on it, and never look back.

WSJ Washington columnist Kim Strassel adds more meat to these points in her ‘Mueller’s Report Speaks Volumes’.

[20apr19 update]  Upon reflection on Volume 2 of the report dealing with obstruction, it strikes me as more than utter bullshit that would be below the standards of any other profession other than those populated mostly by sleazebag lawyers.  I add point #6.

6. “… while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” A little thought immediately causes one to ask, ‘is there ANY investigation that cannot have such a codicil appended to its conclusion, should the investigator desire to leave a cloud over the individual investigated without the finding of any illegality or indictable criminality??’ To conclude with such an unnecessary assertion is an act of desperation which confirms that the investigation was carried out with an agenda unfulfilled.  Such a dangling innuendo strongly implies that guilt could yet be uncovered with more effort, and forces the so accused into having to prove his own innocence – not exactly the way our system of jurisprudence was intended to operate.  (That is one of the many reasons I assess our judicial system to be invitingly corrupt.)

In Mueller’s case he was not able to indict someone for not obstructing an unobstructed investigation that terminated without finding any evidence of an indictable crime.  About that the Dems are pissed to the gills, and will now do everything to correct the situation.  Go figger.

Ruminations – 13apr2019 (updated 16apr19)

George Rebane

AG Barr will finally seek to hold the FBI accountable for their Obama era corruptions.  This has the Democrats screeching bloody murder for what they know will be revealed on the road to the 2020 elections.  WSJ’s Kim Strassel lays it all out – ‘Barr Brings Accountability’.

California’s critical 4^th grade academic rankings are in the toilet – 47^th in math, 46^th in reading, 46^th in science.  Assemblyman Kevin Kiley was punished in the California Assembly for making public the latest progressive follies in screwing the state’s school kids.  The bottom line is that progressives are lunatics when it comes to governance as they demonstrate total ignorance of how humans work – their needs and behaviors.  The only policies they propose, promote, and pass are those designed to enlarge government and give the Left ever more power over our lives.  (more here)

Reconquista Revisited

George Rebane

Last night on FN, Tucker Carlson interviewed Juan Hernandez, a Mexican government official currently serving as the Guanajuato Secretary of Migration, on Mexico’s policy of permitting central American trans-migration through their country to the US border.  The official pointedly avoided addressing the harm that Mexico’s official behavior does to the United States.  (more here) The part of the interview that was most revealing concerned Reconquista – the return of lands that Mexico lost to the United States in 1848.  In the 20^th century Mexico and pro-Mexican politicians in this country have openly declared that the lands will be returned bloodlessly by immigration and out-breeding our European descended whites.  In recent decades they have added cross-border migration of illegal aliens to their plan to enlarge and spread insular and non-assimilating latino communities in the US.  (Google also Mexifornia and other writings by Victor Davis Hanson.)

Tucker Carlson reminded Mr Hernandez of some of his past statements on the matter.

“We are betting Mexican-Americans will think ‘Mexico first,’ even unto the seventh generation.”

“Mexican immigrants to the United States are going to keep one foot in Mexico. They are not going to assimilate in the sense of not being Mexican.”

“We recognize the Mexican population is 100 million in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States. We are a united nation.”

RR has covered Reconquista in these pages for over a decade, presenting concordant views by other commentators, academics, and politicians expressed through print and the media.  The Left, especially its local light-readers, have vehemently denied that any of this is happening.  Their main argument has been that there is nothing to worry about because all Mexicans – no matter how arrived – will quickly assimilate into ordinary Americans holding the same loyal sentiments with the rest of us.  The visible evidence does not support that argument.  The overwhelming share of American latinos vote with and for the anti-American leftwing, promoting policies and initiatives to diminish the sovereignty of the US.  Today’s initiatives focus on keeping borders porous, amnesty to all illegals, and voting rights for all US residents.

Given the ongoing flow of supporting evidence and the vigorous denials by our Left, it is not unreasonable to conclude that for all intents and purposes, Reconquista has been the national policy of Mexican governments since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on 2 February 1848.  However, never until the globalist tilt of the anti-American Left in recent decades have the Mexicans had a strong ally working in their behalf in the United States.

Two Americas - A National Emergency on Steroids (Addended)

George Rebane

A couple of mornings ago NPR’s Morning Edition reported that the illegal entrant rate across our southern border has exceeded over a million per year, and that the border security and illegal alien handling facilities are overwhelmed.  Overwhelmed, the Border Patrol has now abrogated the role of the US Customs and Border Protection agency in turning the illegals loose into our society with minimal or no ability to track their identity, origin, or intentions.  All we know is that they will quickly disperse and emerge in ‘sanctuary’ communities where all manner of public doles to succor them await.

The national border crisis is daily attested by the reports from the border and testimony from homeland security and border control officials past and present.  Recently they were joined by several Obama era higher-ups including former Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson who testified that there is indeed a border crisis in progress.

In the face of this, the country’s anti-American political faction continues to celebrate, promote, and sustain this deluge of indigents, the human trafficked, criminals, diseased, and economic opportunists that are now pouring across our southern border.  They also communicate their welcoming message in the “shithole countries” of Central America, well-funded messages that induce desperate people and dubious opportunists to undertake the long and dangerous journey north through Mexico.  Our progressives don’t care for the migrants’ welfare or risk involved during the journey.  Their only objective is to maximize the number of illegals who successfully penetrate our border, who then become political fodder within a byzantine and broken immigration system.  Ultimately their presence and large numbers will serve anti-American ends one way or another.

Astoundingly, there are even many pro-American light thinkers who cannot understand the necessity for and cost-effectiveness of an improved and extended physical barrier to span critical sections of the border.  They swallow the argument of the anti-Americans that what we really need is to greatly expand and improve the welcoming facilities to house, feed, care for, and relocate the arriving hordes.  All such responses will do everything to increase the flow and nothing to stem it.  It is the analog of calling for more bailing buckets instead of patching the hole in a sinking boat.  There is no public awareness or discussion of the longer-term impact that these indigents and their now accelerating arrival rates will have on our institutions, economy, and citizens.  The existential goal of the anti-Americans is to simply keep the ingress rate high and increasing.  No one has asked, ‘How and when will this massive migration of illegal aliens stop?’

NZ Massacre – the Left’s new perfect storm

“Conservatism is corporatism in disguise.  I want no part of it. … The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China. … Conservatism is dead, thank God.”  Australian Brenton Tarrant, NZ shooter

George Rebane

The Christchurch massacre has been covered extensively and also received an initial go-through by RR commenters.  As always happens in the coverage of such massacres, they are characterized as ‘insane’, ‘the acts of a deranged person’, and ‘senseless killings’.  I have always thought that we’re missing something significant about these mass killings when we dismiss them as such.  Years ago, I gave my own take on these killers of the Islamic persuasion in ‘Of Ragheads and Racism’.  However, it should be clear that those sentiments are not restricted to terrorists of only one persuasion; there is a lot happening in this world which requires a wider and more detailed look.

Great Divide – it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

The Democrats have re-outed themselves as the resurrection of the Socialist Party of America, now with detailed near-term policy objectives to make the country into a socialist state over the next two decades.  To achieve this, their plan calls for the certain election of a proto-socialist President in 2020, with a supportive Congress to follow directly.  The only thing standing in the way is the re-election of Donald J Trump, and this possibility has driven the Democrats and their media lackeys into a state of political hysteria not witnessed in the history of our republic.

The Democrats are justifiably convinced that the only way to get one of their own into the White House is to prevent President Trump from completing his first term in office, and to do it in such a way as to deny the country any additional beneficial policies like those he fostered during the last two years.  In the process, perhaps the biggest lie from the Democrats circles around their constant narrative that Main Street and the poor have not benefited at all from Trump’s policies, and only the ‘rich’ have enjoyed this president. 

The Left knows that Americans are very focused on the President’s walk and not his talk.  The other countless lies from the Left maintain that no one likes the man, Americans don’t like what he’s done, and they don’t like what he will do going forward.  Were that really the case, then leftwing politicians such Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Elijah Cummings, Adam Schiff, and Mad Max Waters would not have to continue making fools of themselves every day in front of the cameras; believing their own words, they could just lay low, continue to introduce socialist legislation, and watch The Donald self-destruct.  But that clearly is not the case, and they are all sanitarily scared that the electorate will sense the truth if they tone down their investigative histrionics – no, no, no, the Cavalcade of Diversions must go on.  (BTW, one of RR’s favorite historians and observers of the nation’s churn is coming out (5mar19) with A Case for Trump, his new book that confirms and expands the points made above.)

In the meantime, more and more people today see the fiscal and social havoc that the progressives have created across the country, especially in states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and poster-child California.  Victor Davis Hanson addresses our home state in his 27feb19 ‘California’s Rendezvous With Reality’ that pretty much destroys the la-la land lies with which the state’s progressives are trying to paint over each of the new social, environmental, regulatory, and fiscal cracks that continue to widen.

In concert with this national charade, even some of the more observant on the Left are beginning to understand that our ship of state is no longer holding a steady course into the future.  Even progressive thinkers are beginning to consider new political configurations for the United States.  These governing structures range from new breakaway states, through “mega-regions” based on coherent economies (here), to political units hearkening back to the historical city-states of Europe (here).

However, as we continue to shout past each other in the manner much documented in these commentaries and comment streams, the Great Divide debates are starting to embrace a new and more ominous timbre.  Two WaPo reporters have noticed that pundits from both sides today see the country at loggerheads that have not been witnessed since 1860, the eve of our previous ‘civil war’.  When considering the prospect of a shooting war, a recent poll found that “more than 40 percent of Democrats described such a conflict as "likely," compared with about 25 percent of Republicans.”  Even our venerable VDH has voiced his portents, asking, "How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?" (more here)

(H/T to readers and correspondents who share my concerns.)

Border Security’s True Colors (updated 20feb19)

George Rebane

For some years I have been pointing out to readers that America’s Left has a totally different outlook on the function of US borders, especially the one with Mexico.  I don’t claim to be flying solo in this interpretation, since several nationally prominent commentators of the Right have expressed their similar views and continue to do so today.  The bottom line on this observation, with loads of supporting citations, is that our Left sees the southern border as the perfect political tool for their work in the fundamental transformation of America into the peerage of socialist states preparing for the globalist future.

This objective could not have been more clear than what was reported by host Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  The program regularly presents segments promoting progressive causes and viewpoints.  Today their daily anti-Trump dump featured an interview with Gil Kerlikowske, US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner under President Obama.  The entire message was of a piece in which Mr Kerlikowske strongly maintained that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at our southern border is a gratuitous political stunt to get money to build “his wall” because in reality there is no emergency at our Mexican border. (more here)

Kerlikowske then went on to outline some stats stating that the real emergency existed in 2000 when more than 1.2M crossed the southern border, and today only 400K are coming across annually, thereby making such yearly ingress of illegals most certainly not an emergency but more like business as usual.  He also pointed out that most of our drugs come in surreptitiously through legal ports of entry, and therefore we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the lesser amount of drugs coming in across fences and rivers.

The only problem he saw with today’s border operations is that there are not enough immigration judges to hear all the illegal aliens’ pleas to become permanent US residents.  During the entire course of the interview – one like so many others with leftists – there was not even a hint of hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings being evidence of a border security problem.  The Left’s only existential and acknowledged problem is that these illegal entrants couldn’t be processed fast enough to get their permits to stay here.  In the de juris case then, these people can now be formally designated as ‘illegal immigrants’ because by allowing them (inviting them?) to readily cross our border, the US government has entered into the required, albeit de facto, two-party agreement with them as acknowledged immigrants.

So think about it.  The Democrats have stepped out with a clear pronouncement that today it should be our accepted policy that 400K unvetted illegal aliens should be able to easily cross our border and enter our broken immigration system which has been purposely maintained only to build and buttress the Dems' voting pool, and, more importantly, increase its immediate representation in Congress.

Few people understand the real reason the Dems oppose an accurate census of US citizens as required by the Constitution.  We have adopted the custom of allocating seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a state’s share of the country’s residents, NOT its citizens – although being a citizen is still a requirement for voting, but the Dems are working hard to also remove that ‘barrier to democracy’.  So grab an envelope and do the numbers.  It’s not hard to see that with concentrations of illegals in big population ‘sanctuary’ states, the number of representatives for already leftist states like California will increase.  And these seats will be filled by leftwingers, voted in by an ever-DECREASING share of franchised Democrat voters from each congressional district.  But no one understands this, the confusion abetted by the lamestream’s narrative that requiring a statement of US citizenship on the census questionnaire will unfairly inhibit the minority vote.

And these, dear readers, are the true colors of the Democrat Party in the early 21^st century, ever more visibly on display with each passing day.

[20feb19 update]  Great Divide reflections: >85% conservatives and Republicans believe there is a national emergency at the border; >65% of liberals and Democrats believe there is no border emergency.  The Right is astounded at this disparity and wonders how a nation with such a polarized outlook on such fundamental matters can continue, let alone function.  On the other hand, with no such concerns the Left believes the Right is just ignorant and evil, and needs to be brought to heel by whatever means it takes.

Idiots (Evil?) on Parade (updated 18feb19)

George Rebane

I claimed that the photo of all the congressional critters who support the Green New Deal will become iconic to both the Left and the Right, of course, for diametrically opposite reasons.  I'm not sure that all of the pictured 40 are demonstrably stupid, such as AOC; no doubt many of them intend to use the GND to fundamentally transform America.  These people I consider somewhere between cynical and just plain evil.  I'll post better images of GND supporters as they become available - these really deserve to be in RR's archive.

[18feb19 update] And the GND supporters in Congress just keep coming.  Besides the major Dem presidential candidates, the count is now up to 64 in House and 9 in the Senate.

 

The Real Issue That Divides Us (updated 27jan19)

George Rebane

Conservetarians believe in global diversity and national cohesion; progressives believe in global conformity and national diversity.  The former resists global autocracy, the latter sustains global autocracy.

Nationally prominent commentator and executive WSJ editor Gerald Seib recently wrote ‘The Wall Marks a Deep Cultural Divide’ (in the 21jan19 WSJ) a piece describing attributes which divide America that focused on “character differences”.  In his piece Seib said, “One question asked whether immigration adds to the character and strength of America by increasing its diversity and bringing in new talent, or detracts from American character by putting burdens on government services and creating language barriers”, and then cited the disparate responses of the Trump and resist-Trump supporters.

While I agreed with Seib’s subsequent analysis, I felt that he did not reach deep enough to a more basic, revelatory, and explanatory level (in the sense of being able to reliably predict derivative attitudes and behaviors).

I emailed Mr Seib a brief explanation of my critique: Mr Seib - Our divide goes much deeper than can be discovered with pabulum questions about “American character”.  If these surveys were structured and administered so as to discover what kind of future world order Americans would like to see the US being a part of (i.e. Westphalian sovereign nation-states vs a peerage of jurisdictional fiefs of a global government), then the answers would be more revealing (and reliably predictive) as to the respondents’ attitudes about border security, immigration policy, cultural diversity, paths to citizenship of illegal aliens, etc, since all these are dependent on how people value culturally cohesive (vs fragmented) nations, and whether/how such a community of nations should continue to organize the world’s peoples.

‘Do We Need Our Country Anymore?’

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 December 2018.]

Dr Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, asks that question in the latest (Dec 2018) issue of the Imprimis.  The answer that our public schools have been teaching for the last half century is NO.  As Arnn points out, “World leaders are now accustomed to call for the subordination of the nation for the good of the globe.”  All in preparation for “the peoples of the world (to) enter a new age of global peace, prosperity, and cooperation.”

The latest to call for the abandonment of sovereign nation-states was French president Macron on the 100^th anniversary of the WW1 armistice.  The embrace of nationalism, he argued, is the cause of wars.  And the solution is to rid ourselves of nationalism, which he defines as a people’s desire to put the interests of their nation first and foremost to a degree that ignores all transnational cooperation with other nations.  On a roll, the French leader went on to claim that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism.”  In other words, if you’re a patriot, you will work to subsume your country into a larger world order, or in essence, to make it disappear.

Macron called for world leaders to “take the UN’s oath to place peace higher than anything.”  To which Dr Arnn then asks, “Higher than freedom?  Higher than justice?  Higher than the lives of our children?”

Churchill maintained that, since time immemorial, “the central principle of civilization is the subordination of the ruling authority to the settled customs of the people, and to their will as expressed through (a) constitution.”  That says civilization is constituted by populations of people with shared customs under a constitutional umbrella that explicitly spells out the communal processes and procedures they agree practice in order to form a mutually sustained society.

And for any population this can only take place under a government that has “received the broad assent of large majorities” of its citizens.  Such broad assent can only occur among a population with broadly shared values, mores, and customs.  Then other people, whose values etc differ, will also want to join with their like-minded brethren; and when they do, another political unit is born, identifying itself as a kingdom or nation distinct from all the others.

A civilized people united under a foundational document or constitution enjoys a government that settles affairs by talking things out.  The alternative is a government by force, one which rules over a fragmented and fearful population not permitted or able to talk things out.  A government that uses force to keep the peace in such a population is known as a tyranny.

There is zero chance that all the world’s peoples under a global government will be of a sufficiently like-mind on any given social issue.  Under such a behemoth government, one that preserves itself through the most sophisticated and efficacious technologies, where then can smaller groups of the like-minded go, save to the re-education camps or worse that Leviathan has prepared for such anti-social miscreants?

The clear alternative to such a future is the maintenance of a world order of sovereign nation-states comprised of peoples capable of giving broad assent for common solutions to shared problems.  With this understanding, today’s real question becomes, ‘Is America any longer such a country?’

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  And in this holiday season Jo Ann and I wish you and our entire KVMR family a healthy and productive new year.  Thank you for listening. 

Globalists and Nationalists, oh my!

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 December 2018.]

Have you considered where you stand on the many issues that not only divide us Americans, but also people everywhere, that is everywhere they can freely speak their minds?  Have you really thought it through well enough to sit down and make a list of the issues that concern you, and also your reasoned or even unreasoned, attitude about each such issue?  Most people will have to answer a truthful NO, and admit that they primarily respond to such questions, as they come up, with an unexamined yet readily available emotion.

Today we are becoming more polarized as each day goes by without anyone being able to identify a meaningful patch of common ground on which we can meet and talk.  The old adage of ‘don’t talk politics or religion’, when hoping to remain civil in polite company, has now become a social mandate in the carefully groomed public round.  When at church or at some other club or association meeting, everyone carefully minds their mouths, and holds on patiently until they can leave and get back to more reliably like-minded folks.

While there are many things we all can disagree on – today immigration, climate change, abortion, culture, assimilation, terrorism, … remain high on the list – how we come down on each of them can usually be traced to our overall picture of the kind of world we want our kids and grandkids to inherit.  And for those fortunate enough to be well-read, that almost inevitably brings us to one of two kinds of worlds, which ultimately identify each of us as being in the nationalist or globalist camps.  Moreover, the roads to such diametrically opposite worlds contain all the just-mentioned hurdles about which we, again, are of opposite minds.

Scattershots – 15nov18 (updated 17nov18)

George Rebane

A leftwing Union columnist most recently summarized the huge ideological chasm between the two polarized camps of Americans (see 15nov18 letters).  Writing in response to the Kavanaugh confirmation, the writer unabashedly blurted out a core progressive tenet that was in full display at the congressional hearings – “It is just as bad to assume innocence as it is to assume guilt.”  This violates the very basis of western jurisprudence, and has long been the norm for dictators as they attempt a forged judicial system under their rule.  Nowhere in recent memory have I seen such a stark reminder of how different we are, and how different will be our society were the Left to gain absolute control.

Defense spending and a strong American military has never been in the Left’s desiderata for all the obvious reasons.  Our military has suffered mightily under leftwing administrations, most recently under President Obama.  Today the Democrats continue their anti-military chorus, while they continue to entice their gimme constituencies with promises of more and mightier entitlements, most recently led by their efforts to implant a comprehensive socialized healthcare (“single payer”) program that has yet to demonstrate its sustainability in any land it has been implemented.  Their intended source of insufficient funds for such welfare projects is from our defense budget.  However, our military today has been so weakened that the non-partisan United States Institute for Peace has issued a landmark report ‘Providing for the Common Defense’ (download it here), which goes chapter and verse into the details of what we have let lapse along with the effects it has and will have on world order.  This state of affairs is an ongoing legacy of the Left, a gift that keeps taking.

[16nov18 update]  And then these little tidbits caught my eye this morning.

Khasshoggi’s killers to get the death penalty – well, not all of them, just the poor snuffies tasked to do the dirty work.  Imagine being a highly trained field agent for your country ordered to do a delicate little assassination of some ‘enemy of the state’ in a foreign land.  You go do the job that’s then discovered through no fault of yours, and you get tried and executed while the big kahuna(s) are untouched.  How will that affect your fellow agents as they contemplate their next mission to do the state’s dirty work?  (Work that into the definition of ‘patriotism’.)  But as ever, rank hath its privileges – some people just rank too high to fail, especially those whose enemy is our enemy, and who buy billions of dollars’ worth of guns and grenades from us.

“Hire sight unseen” is the MO of employers seeking to fill critical jobs in sales and STEM.  In this hot economy, the competition for even tentatively qualified labor is so high that all you need is to submit your creatively wordsmithed resume and pass a 25-minute phone interview (some with a robo-interviewer), and your offer letter appears in your inbox. (more here)  Of course, I assume that if you really bomb on your first day on the job, you’ll be let go equally fast.  I began my career as an aerospace draftsman in exactly the same way.  My phone interview with a job shop lasted less than five minutes during which I was told the address and contact person of my new employer.  Those draftsmen who didn’t make it were out on the street after the morning coffee break.

Woke progressives continue to mangle the language.  The latest casualty to politically correct newspeak is the use of ‘body’.  Humans, people, and persons are now reduced to bodies – e.g. “Bodies that migrate across borders undergo tremendous change.” in the NYT.  The use of ‘body’ joins many other words whose meaning has been folded in with a lot of other meanings, making for ever more murkier communications.  Matthew Hennessey’s piece ‘How to Read ‘Body’ Language’ goes into more detail.  (And in the below comment stream you can see my exchange with a commenter over some silly semantics.)

Migrant caravans made up of almost all military-aged males.  Has anyone else noticed the pictures and videos of the various proto-illegal alien caravans approaching our border through Mexico?  Count the women and children.  And who is paying for all the food, shelter, transportation, and organization to get these thousands of Latinos to their designated destinations?

[17nov18 update]  Ramirez again summarizes it in a manner that is clear, concise, and complete.  (H/T to reader)

Scattershots – 7oct18 (updated 10oct18)

George Rebane

Great Divide pieces are beginning to appear all over the place as a result of what the Left revealed of itself during the Kavanaugh confirmation conflagration.  This alienating trend is some years in development and was picked up early in these pages (much to the denial and denigration of the local know-nothings).  Today we see articles about the socio-political chasm in the country appearing in places like USA Today and WaPo, neither bastions of conservative thought.  The more important aspect of these reports is that they now lament the absence of any plausible common ground on which national healing may begin, and that for the simple reason that there is none if you want to rule out such commonalities as both sides still agreeing to drive on the right side of the road. (more here)

This ‘Quote of the Day’ by columnist Burt Prelutsky from the LA Times was sent to me by a correspondent.  Talk about nailing it.  "Frankly, I don't know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I'm not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we're Number One. There's no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on 'Macbeth'. The five of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don't know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words."

[9oct18 update]  Hallelujah!  California's fiscal condition ranks 42 in the nation.  And here all of you thought the Dems had driven us to the bottom of the barrel.  Looks like there's still room to go, and CA's gimme voters are just the ones to elect the team that will get us there (see also previous entry).  The Mercatus Center of George Mason University gives the particulars here.

[10oct18 update]  Some of us should have no public voice according to an alt-Left commenter in The Union known to us all.  For years my newspaper columns and radio commentaries have been on the local Left’s prohibition list; now since Jo Ann is on the newspaper’s editorial board and one of its regular columnists, she has joined me in the Left’s planned proscription when their power becomes comprehensive.  The comment under her recent column, ‘Oh yes, I believed’, reads, “I'm sad this ran in the town that we now call our home. It's changing, though, which I guess is what leads to stuff like this.”  We note that such attacks have never been on the substance of what was offered, but always the meta-complaint that such alternative viewpoints are still permitted by a community that has not yet completed its mandated transition to a politically correct and uniform mindset.  These are the same people who will then march us to their re-education camps and ‘psychiatric hospitals’ (or worse), as they have done so many times all over the world.

What the Kavanaugh Confirmation has Really Confirmed (updated 7oct18)

George Rebane

By the slimmest margin, this morning the Senate voted cloture – to restrict remaining debate on the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh before the vote to confirm scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.  Odds are that by this time tomorrow Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed as the newest Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Here and elsewhere the road to the confirmation vote has led us through some of the smelliest sewers of our federal government while unambiguously revealing the journalistic corruption of our vaunted Fourth Estate.  For all intents and purposes, what in these pages I have labeled the ‘lamestream media’, the overwhelming membership of that estate has today successfully morphed into the Ministry of Information (aka propaganda arm) of the Democratic Party.

It is turning out that the real collusion in this confirmation drama occurred in the Democrats’ management of the hearing’s witnesses.  The most recent FBI investigation revealed that there was a concerted, coordinated, albeit unsuccessful effort to get Dr Ford to perjure herself on her (lack of) recollection of the facts related to her allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.  The larger dimensions of this sordid side of the sewer has yet to play itself out – stay tuned.