Rebane's Ruminations

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.

An evening with Victor Davis Hanson (updated 10oct18)

George Rebane

Last Saturday evening we loaded some friends in the car and headed for the Grand Sheraton in Sacramento to attend a fundraiser for Congressman Tom McClintock.  We’ve known Tom for years and continue to support him in our neighboring congressional district.  The evening featured a talk and Q&A with Victor Davis Hanson.  Professor Hanson is “an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets.”  He is also an award-winning, endowed senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

I have been a student of VDH for many years, and along with our friends, we were not going to pass up this opportunity to hear him in person.  Well, the lavishly catered evening turned out even better than expected.  We got there early and ran into the congressman in the hall, and after greetings and conversation who should walk up but Prof Hanson.  Tom greeted him warmly, graciously introduced me, and then left the two of us to chat.  We had a wonderful one-on-one for almost thirty minutes as we and the gathering crowd waited for the ballroom doors to be opened.

McClintock called the event to order, gave one of the best introductions that I have heard from a politician at his own fundraiser – a concise but warm welcome, proper summary of his guest's vitae, and mercifully short thank-yous to the event’s sponsors.  The good professor took to the podium and delivered a 30-45 minute talk that framed today’s national politics from an historical perspective, and then detailed the events and political tactics that have so split the country into factions that share few social objectives and no longer effectively communicate with each other.  After that, he took questions for about an equal period of time.  No one felt rushed, and there was plenty of time to delve deeper into the issues - a wonderfully cordial and informative evening.

It was no surprise to me from our private conversation and his invited talk, that the good professor’s historical interpretations and political observations flew in fairly tight formation with the Rebane Doctrine tenets published in these pages.  (In other words, we are both “alt-right” birds of a feather according to the local lefties who disparage yet track every word in these pages.)  I’ll conclude this report with a selection of Dr Hanson’s observations and talking points.

1. Obama’s administration was the most scandalized administration in recent memory.
2. Judge Kavanaugh’s rebuttal of Judiciary Committee Dems was on the mark, and of better ‘temperament’ than shown by Justice Ginsburg viz the Trump election.
3. The right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty has been thrown out by the Dems and the media with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
4. CA is now an Orwellian state in which the middle-class has the nation’s highest tax rate, 20% of Californians live in (official) poverty, with one-third of the nation’s poverty stricken taking up residence in CA.
5. “Those who rule in California are never subject to their own ideology.” (e.g. Pelosi, Feinstein, Newsom, …)  “They can afford to be liberal at someone else’s expense.”
6. “Fences work and have always worked.” Examples – Israel today, Great Wall of China, Maginot Line, Zuckerberg’s private residence, … .  (Fences are militarily known as fixed field fortifications, they are cost-effective and work only to the extent that they are also manned.  They are NOT a ‘build and forget’ part of any defensive infrastructure.)
7. CA has the best natural water resources, and has had the best waterworks in the world, which began deteriorating and proving insufficient for California’s growth in 1983 when further expansion was halted.
8. President Trump has “restored the idea of deterrence” and put in place the best foreign policy and team in recent memory.
9. The US is becoming, or has already become a tribal nation.
10. The new “Socialist Democratic Party” has replaced the former Democratic Party.
11. There no longer exists any visible ‘common ground’ in the national debate between the global socialists and nationalistic capitalists – i.e. the Great Divide is already forming.
12. There is a very slim chance that our electorate will see the light in time to pull the nation out of its death spiral into global socialism.

[10oct18 update]  VDH has summarized the Kavanaugh confirmation affair that also gives lie to the charge that President Trump somehow dissed Dr Ford in his speech recounting the distressed lady's dreadfully fractured testimony to the Judiciary Committee.  His piece - 'One Ford Narrative Too Many' - examines the entire episode from a larger perspective and is worth a read.

Mine eyes have seen the gory … (updated 21sep18)

‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Mr Seeman, my sixth-grade teacher at Ben Davis Elementary School in Indianapolis, motivated his class to take an interest in the 1952 election pitting Eisenhower against Stevenson for president.  He did this by promising to vote for the candidate that received the best presentation from his roomful of charges – there were about 33 of us.  It was September and time enough to form up a couple of committees to start researching and preparing the presentation.  The Rebanes weren’t even citizens then, but my mom and dad had always been keen followers of the political scene since Estonia.

So, all of us went home to consult our parents as to which candidate was the best one to vote for and why.  Since Estonia, where my father the electrician ran a small electrical contracting business and both sets of grandparents were farmers (mom’s dad even ran the local flour mill), my forebears had been entrepreneurial, self-reliant, hardworking individualists – in short, they were capitalists.  The upshot was that I got a snootful of pro-Eisenhower propaganda from both parents and was told to start reading the op-ed pages of the Indianapolis News, which was the newspaper I delivered six evenings a week on my paper route.  They pointed out that I too was an entrepreneur businessman, since I bought the newspapers from the News every week, and had to market and sell them in my territory at a profit or not, with no recourse if I couldn’t collect enough from some low-life customers who endlessly delayed payment or simply stiffed the kid.

Quo Vadis Democrats? (updated 31aug18)

George Rebane

It turns out that my ongoing assessments of our Great Divide have been in error – the gulf between America’s Left and Right is significantly wider than what I have been reporting.  This latest epiphany came to me as I was perusing ‘Another Day of Conflicting Realities’, Bob Crabb’s latest post and comment stream in which he takes me to task for my posting “left/right polarization will make a quantum leap to a much higher level in the next twelve months, exceeding by far anything we have witnessed to date” (here), and then goes on to verify this assertion.

Today’s Employment and Entrepreneurship

George Rebane

So here’s the drill.  In our risibly insane land we have the following three factors in some kind of convoluted and crazy collision when it comes to work and making workplaces.

In today’s economy unfilled jobs abound by the millions.  Construction jobs not requiring a college education are near the top of the list, and would be an ideal place for young people to get into the workplace and even make an excellent career of it.  But our young have been rejecting these opportunities at ever greater rates.  Laura Kusisto tells us that “Disinterest in construction work is contributing to a labor shortage that has meant fewer homes built and rising prices—possibly for years to come” in her 31jul18 piece ‘Young People Don’t Want Construction Jobs. That’s a Problem for the Housing Market’.   The numbers tell the story – “nationally, the share of young construction workers declined nearly 30% from 2005 through 2016”.

Then we have progressives in urban areas doing all they can to raise minimum wages in their cynical campaign to keep their constituents on the plantation.  It has been known for over half-century that raising minimum wages destroys exactly the jobs that allow the young and poor to enter the workforce and/or start climbing out of poverty.  But today where in the Trump economy the unemployment rates for minorities are at historical lows, liberal politicians are even invoking the Constitution to provide the fundamental argument for raising minimum wages.  Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute explains the matter in his ‘Does the Constitution Mandate Minimum Wage Hikes?’, as he describes “a misguided court ruling (that) ignores the history of labor laws intended to keep blacks from working.”

And finally, we have to consider the best part of our overall immigration problem.  Professor Edward Lazear of Stanford looks at what kind of immigrants benefit America the most and serve our country’s national interests.  The answer, he presents with numbers to match, are the young and educated who are standing in line for legal immigration into the US.  These are the people who overwhelmingly will fill valuable jobs to keep America competitive, and these are the same future Americans who will start the businesses and enterprises to keep the country prosperous and generate jobs for us natives who are not so prone to undertake the risks of entrepreneurship.  In his ‘Send Us Your Young, Your Educated’ Lazear argues that “there is an excess supply of potential immigrants.  The US should be smart about whom it chooses.”

But half of our country is either too cynical or lacks understanding of why America should continue to grow and prosper as the world’s font of capitalism and free enterprise.  Their progressive narrative calls first and foremost for admitting immigrants who will become reliable leftwing voters and dilute extant American culture on the way to something economically and socially more like the country from which they chose to flee.  And the last thing these same socialists wish to promote are public policies that shrink the plantation by enabling more people, especially minorities, to lead lives that don’t depend on regular checks from the government.

Scattershots – 6jul18 (updated 8jul18)

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. - Bertrand De Jouvenel

George Rebane

Liberal logic juries.  Reviewing some of the ‘Russian interference’ comment streams to confirm the kind of logic our leftwing readers accept and present as evidence that Russia did indeed throw the 2016 election to assure Trump’s victory, it occurs to me that many, probably most, of our empaneled juries across the country enjoy a majority of liberals.  Their thought processes and ability to think critically are not lost on lawyers.  We already have long years of evidence that our judicial system suffers from significant corruption by legal professionals implementing jurisprudence to solicit erroneous verdicts by playing games with both process and evidence.  Now I wonder how much of the justice system mess is contributed by juries whose ability to reason and understand evidence is similar to what we often witness in these pages.

Left/Right civility side-by-side in the 5jul18 Union op-ed page.  Take a look at the Other Voices ‘Vote Blue in November’ by a Ms Betsy Wobus who simply exudes raw hatred of President Trump as a reason to vote Democrat, and then compare that to the neighboring column ‘A Threat to One Person’s Free Speech is a Threat to All’ by Ms Terry McLaughlin.  One contains only baseless vituperation, and the other a reasoned presentation of government’s ideology-based impact on First Amendment rights.  A more vivid example of the people on either side of our widening political gulf would be hard to find.

For all the fans of Single Payer (Socialized) Medicine, we have the latest report – ‘Reform the NHS before it kills again’ - about the UK’s much-vaunted National Health Service.  Researcher and author Rupert Darwall runs through a toe-curling litany of recent evidence and ongoing investigations of how the NHS has for years conducted a quiet policy of euthanasia on its patients.  As we have pointed out here, and Mr Darwall reinforces – for government-run health services, especially the de facto monopolistic kind like the NHS, patients are a cost to be minimized.  The obverse is true for private (for-profit) health care services for whom patients are the revenue source to be kept alive, cared for, and cured so that more patients will select the services of such enterprises.  (To confirm such a difference here in the US, revisit the evidence about the healthcare that our VA provides veterans.)

Our country’s multiple identity-based cultures are diverging (becoming more “heterogeneous”). Researchers Klaus Desmet and Romain Wacziarg at the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research have completed “a systematic quantitative study of cultural convergence and divergence in the United States over time” to “assess whether cultural values have grown more or less heterogeneous”.  Among a lot of other things, in their jun2018 paper ‘Cultural Divide’ they conclude that the cultures of 11 distinct groups, into which they divided the American population, became more homogeneous from 1972 to the late 1990s, and then reversed and started becoming more heterogeneous thereafter.  In short, our various identity group cultures have now been diverging for the last 20 years or so.  This, of course, does help explain why we are having more difficulty in communicating and accepting each other’s public policy solutions.  Whoulda thought?

Earth during last half of June 2018.  This YouTube video was sent to me by Russ Steele, RR reader and fellow blogger (here) who closely follows and compares the global warming hysteria to what is actually happening but missing in the lamestream media reports.

[7jul18 update]  ‘If America Is Divided, So Is Europe’, so argues Tunku Varadarajan in a revealing WSJ essay.  Their divisions are similar to ours, with their Left also working feverishly to bury western civilization by any and all means in order to create the chaotic change, as necessary, from which a new global collective may arise to the carefully managed, compliant, and approving cries of their great unwashed, amply augmented by hordes of Islamic and sub-Saharan migrants.

[8jul18 update]  Agenda21 alive and well and advancing.  A reader sent me this update on the implementation and progress of A21 that was posted on Anthony Watts’ ubiquitous blog – ‘Whatever happened to Agenda 21 and Climate Change Policy?’  There Dr Tim Ball writes -

It’s alive and well in your backyard. The entire policy of using anthropogenic global warming as a false front to implement global governance and impose how we will all live is working with remarkable success. The plan was set out by Maurice Strong as Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams because the people he arranged to implement it are unaccountable to anyone.

In ‘History’s Bad Ideas are an Inspiration for Progressives’ Victor Davis Hanson describes “the new illiberal ethos” that we witness in our daily round and on these pages.  In there he details the Left’s hubristic asymmetry in public life and our nation’s affairs.  VDH even explains why “supposed liberals keep revisiting discredited illiberal practices from the nation’s past.”

Scattershots – 29may18 (updated)

George Rebane

The Great Divide debate continues as muddled as ever.  We refer to leftwing commenter jon smith’s 134pm re my 1104am in the 26may18 Sandbox.  The man(?) is apparently not aware of the years-long Great Divide debate in these pages and in the national dialogue (also referenced here, see RR’s ‘Great Divide’ category).  In this debate the Left has always taken the position that the country is to remain unified and continue its progress toward a socialist state.  The Right’s position has been to acknowledge the growing and irreversible ideological chasm, and therefore counsels adoption of a new form of republic to keep alive the Founders’ idea that the US would go forward as a multitude of ‘laboratories of democracy’, each governing according to their interpretation of the Constitution, and each implementing ‘best practices’ from other states as needed.

The Right has suggested various solutions for the Great Divide that range from partitioning existing states (e.g. SoJ movement) to forming coalitions of states into a confederacy of like-minded regions.  The Left, as also witnessed here, has always been in vehement denial of such peaceful solutions, claiming that these are treasonous, and retorting with the dictum, ‘My way, or the highway’ for those opposing their promotion of Agenda21 collectivism.  Well, at least that was so until alt-Left Californians recently started floating the idea of the state’s secession from the Union.

What one can draw from these lopsided opposing attitudes is that the Right would very much like to be relieved of those Americans who embrace the Left’s insane public policies that are leading us to tyranny through an economic morass and growing autocracy.  And conversely, we see the Left rejecting any such separation and/or change in direction, seeking instead to keep the wealth producing Americans under their heel while denying the ideological leaning of the these wealth producers.  What gives lie to their demogauging is that, if they really believed the Right to be an economic burden that is being shouldered by the Left, they would be more than happy to relieve themselves of such a burden through a Great Divide that provides appropriate economic isolation of the two schools of economics.  In short, we would be happy to be rid of them, but they don’t want to be rid of us.

California’s education woes continue.  The 29may18 SacBee reports (here) that more primary and secondary school teachers left the state (most to Texas) than we were able to attract and/or graduate from our colleges.  Census data shows that in the 2003-16 interval California lost a net of 18,000 teachers in such an out-migration.  All of this, of course, makes no nevermind to Sacramento’s collectivist chorus and their local lackeys who just continue singing ‘All is Well, All is Well’ louder than ever.  Those of us who point out our educational calamity are simply dismissed as ‘gripers’.  (H/T to reader for the heads up on this report.)

[update] On Bob Crabb’s blog I responded to Steve Frisch’s under the ‘History Regrets Itself’ post as follows – “Well, here's a revelation.  I didn't know that the Left considered Trump and Hitler to be so much alike that it would take "mental gymnastics to differentiate Trump from Hitler."  And the chasm continues to grow.”

Attempting to post my comment, I ran into a new feature of the Security Question that compels the commenter to answer a simple arithmetic problem – in my case it was supplying the answer to 10+8 – before the comment is accepted.  Instead of being able to type in the answer as usual, the site now supplies a list of possible answers from which, presumably, the commenter is to select the correct one.  In my case the supplied list contained only the numbers 12, 10, 15, 6, and allowed no other direct entry.  Since my education in this case was demonstrably deficient, I couldn’t post my comment, and am here reduced to lamenting that I may have run into a sample of Common Core math on a liberal site that would put so many of us at a disadvantage.  I assume Mr Crabb’s regular readers have no problem with this new challenge.

When will Mueller’s criminal collusion investigation (aka “witch hunt”) end?  The Left’s answer has been the easy one – it will end when Mueller finds something from which he can make a criminal case against President Trump, and not a day before.  The rest of us are hoping for a more reasonable termination the time of which we can only guess.  But it turns out that we can do better than that if we appeal to a method published way back in 1993 by Professor J. Richard Gott.  Gott applied what we in these pages may term ‘Copernican reasoning’ to derive a formula that calculates the probability that a minimally known process will terminate between now and a specified future time.  Here the minimal knowledge required is only the age of the process, or how long it has been in operation.  I have used Gott’s result and expanded on it in my work over the years – a version of it is summarized in ‘… and this too shall pass’.  (and more here)

So, what are the chances (probability) that Mueller’s investigation will stop in the next month, four months from now, before the election in November (in the next 5 months), …?  Accepting 20 months as the acknowledged duration of the ongoing investigation, we can use the appropriate Gott-Rebane formula to compute the following graph of the increasing probability of termination over the numbered future months.  As we see, the chances are one out of five that Mueller will hang it up before the election.  Now you can make book.

Ruminations – 27feb18 (updated 3mar18)

‘Remember, the government cannot give anything to anyone that they have not first taken away from someone else.’ Anonymous

George Rebane

The Democratic Party’s sharp move to the left during the last ten years is now visible to all save only the most politically myopic among us.  Daily dunnings of fellow Democrats (especially in California) for not being sufficiently progressive or socialistic are now common.  The dismal dumbth of Millennials has given impetus to the Left’s elites to strike now before life’s experiences start creating doubts in those numbed minds.  This ideological migration has caused the so-called middle to also move leftward. (more here)

California has already started implementing the Great Divide as our vanguard proto-socialist 'nation' that today exercises its newfound sovereignty by choosing which federal laws to follow.  According to the one-party legislature in Sacramento, there are more initiatives on the way to maintain the state’s headlong rush into collectivism.  It is has been clear for years that in Sacramento, the interests of Republicans and conservatives in general have not been represented, and today are being actively rolled back as fast as the state's bureaucracies can act.

Echoing RR, William McGurn in the 27feb18 WSJ writes in ‘Our Childish Gun Debate’ – “… the public debate about how Congress ought to respond to this latest mass shooting is guided by two broad principles. Dubious on their own, they are even more witless when combined. The first is the idea that the most important thing is to 'do something'. The second is that we ought to look to high-schoolers for the answer.”

Hillary and Barack are fawning acolytes of Saul Alinsky, the communist who is finally recognized as the father of America’s political schism that has now morphed into the country writhing with tectonic tenets like the Great Divide.

On the tenth anniversary of W.F. Buckley’s death (27 February 2008), we remember that he “wanted American institutions to affirm capitalism on the grounds that it created more wealth and higher civilization than any alternative. He wanted them to acknowledge that not all cultures were equal and that the Judeo-Christian creed was superior because it recognized that man was created in the image of God. That premise, he held, was the source of all liberty, justice and law.” (more here)

[update]  Snowstorm of the century or not is expected to start tomorrow night.  The meleagris manning our weather guessing agencies are all over the map.  As opposed to forecasting 2-4 ft of snow at 3,000 ft, we have others guessing that it will be only rain and slush.  I guess diversity has struck the meteorological industry, today you can select the forecast most commensurate with your needs.  I’m worried about how all this diversity will affect people’s decisions to attend Friday night’s MIM Amaral Center concert at the fairgrounds featuring the Sacramento Philharmonic (more here).

Speaking of weather predictions that feature probabilities from 0% to 100%, all of them effectively insane (in the technical sense) and changing daily, RR is willing to hold a seminar for the more mindful meleagris currently engaged in such futile pursuits - they know not what they know not.  During the seminar we will cover the correct way to analyze and report probabilistic events yet to emerge from complex stochastic processes.  As a sidebar and to inject some levity into an otherwise technically intense presentation, we will also discuss the hubristic aspects of general circulation models as used to predict water levels and temperatures a century from now.

Festung Academe - governors are planning to fortify their states’ schools with barbed wire, metal detector entry points, steel doors, bullet-proof glass, and armed sworn LE officers, but all of these worthies are against any trained teachers and staff with CCWs.  That is supposed to send a wrong message to kids who will also be encouraged to show up in Kevlar vests and helmets.  Even Florida governor and Republican Rick Scott has had a generous draught of that Kool-Aid.

The nation’s critical thinkers have concluded that the NRA was responsible for Parkland and all the other school shootings.  In the next phase of the nation’s schism companies will declare themselves either conservative or liberal by their silence or vociferous opposition to and severing ties with the NRA.  It seems that the fault really lies with all of us millions of NRA members who need an extra layer of public punishment, such as Delta’s decision to discontinue giving NRA members discounted fares they also give to many other affinity groups and organization members.  I’m not sure that these businesses want to jump into politics with both feet.

[1mar18 update]  Gag orders.  Are there any legal mavens around here who could explain to us the origin of gag orders and their legal basis for suppressing the First Amendment rights of people who have not been convicted of anything, and whose subsequent speech would not affect national security.  I can't find any support for gag orders in the US Constitution; where is it hiding?

[3mar18 update]  How do we evaluate the wisdom of California’s public opinion polls on new public policies given that almost 40% of the state’s residents depend on a government check to maintain their quality of life?  I throw this out as another point of discussion in light of the last such enquiry (above) to our RR readership having gone over like a turd in the punchbowl.  I guess circling familiar barns is a lot more fun.

Deep State’s Rogue Roots (3feb18 update)

George Rebane

In a republic the only government oversight the people have is through their elected representatives, and that is necessarily political.

The 2feb18 release of the Nunes memo underscores a serious concern that has arisen among most Americans since the Obama era national elections, and now heightened by the suspicious goings on during and after the 2016 presidential campaign and election.  Major federal agencies such as the IRS, EPA, VA, NLRB, CFPB, FBI, and DoJ have all been exposed as behaving in the interest of its bureaucrat managers, and against the interests of Americans whom they were established to serve.  It is not necessary to go through the litany of the specific corruptions both revealed, alleged, and buried.  Anyone can resurrect them by just typing in the agency’s initials along with ‘corruption’ to get a laundry list of historical and current malfeasances.

The barely visible and totally invisible machinations of the federal departments we now label as happening in the ‘Deep State’.  And most Americans understand from the news and government reports that the Deep State may best be viewed as the secretive and mostly hidden fourth branch of government that is nowhere called for in our founding documents, but, putatively under the President, is supposed to implement the laws, regulations, executive orders, and rulings handed down from the three constitutional federal government arms.  Of the three, Congress has the additional job of oversight, to make sure that these bureaus, departments, and agencies are acting according to the intent and prescriptions of their enabling legislation.

One can argue that the Deep State has always been with us, because it comes alive naturally when growing organizations spawn departments whose continued existence, growth, and influence does not depend on the quality of service they provide their designated clients.  But its existence becomes toxic when it comes to be used as a tool for meting out rewards and punishments to satisfy the needs of their sponsors.  In government these sponsors are its politically controlled branches and sub-branches – e.g. Congress and its various committees.

Before the days of radically polarized political parties, oversight of the Deep State had a chance of working because its operating units had a more unified direction, and operating according to its rule book was the safest route for Deep State managers – both parties wanted more or less of the same future for the country.  Such a common vision has now been eroding for the last fifty years, and today our political factions have publicly declared their diametrically opposite futures for America.  As political scientists and historians have concluded, today the two major parties are really in mortal combat, each seeking advantage to completely destroy their opponent.

With this mindset, the party in power naturally resorts to weaponizing the Deep State against the party out of power.  In this enterprise the Left has had a distinct and demonstrated advantage, since its goal is to establish a national collective based on central planning and control by the elites, which fosters the sustenance and growth of government as embodied in the components of its Deep State.  In short, the Deep State is already staffed and operating with the mindset that fosters one party’s objectives and modus operandi.

It is then not a large step from the installation of people such as Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, John Koskinen,  … under whom the likes of ‘career managers’ like James Comey, Lois Lerner, Bruce Ohr, and Andrew McCabe were inspired to initiate and carry out actions that were definitely in the agenda-driven and often intentionally illegal service of their political betters.

When the inevitable scandals do emerge and there is opportunity to shed light and hold accountable those responsible, then it is always the political beneficiaries of the Deep State who leap to the defense and seek to seal the shutters.  They use scurrilous exhortations against the truth seekers, such as transforming the investigation of the rotten managements into unwarranted attacks against the department’s “thousands of hardworking men and women”, when there is no intent or evidence of the investigation or its reporting to impugn their labors.  Such responses are nothing short of political lies intended to pluck the heartstrings of the ignorant and unread.  This kind of lie is often accompanied by more direct and easily detectable lies.  In the Nunes memo case, some opponents of its release told the nation that the memo’s contents would reveal highly secret sources and methods which would compromise our nation’s security.  As is now evident even for the fourth-grade level reader, the memo contains no such revelations.

The fundamental arguments for the release of sanitized reports of investigations into the corrupt activities of the Deep State all rest on the necessary prerequisite, that if we as a people are to govern ourselves, in the manner of The Great Experiment bequeathed by our Founders, then we must see things for ourselves to the maximum extent possible.  And for the part that prudent maintenance of national security - and only national security - requires, then there we must trust the reports and decisions of our elected representatives since we are not a democracy with oversight by the national committee of the whole.

My representatives argued persuasively for the release of this memo to shed light on some of the most recent perversions of the Deep State, and I am grateful that they had the courage to follow through and give us the appropriate information.  I only trust that this is not the only burst of sanitizing sunshine that we see during the coming months, because clearly there is more, much more.

[3feb18 update]  A better example of Deep State’s rogue roots than Hillary’s corrupt international escapades is hard to find.  And even there we must limit our attention to only one of her many – space and time don’t allow a full discussion that is better suited for a large volume or perhaps an anthology.  Here I want us to focus on her uranium dealings with Russia as a real example of collusion corrosive to our nation.  Investigative journalist Anne Williamson has assembled this story – ‘Beyond Imagination: Uranium One’ - in the Jan2018 issue of Chronicles.  I suggest reading it to get a better perspective on our Deep State’s international tentacles, and what yet could and should come out from both Mueller’s investigative wanderings, and in subsequent House Intelligence Committee memos.

‘Truth Decay’ (updated 23jan18)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 January 2018.  A slightly edited version of the broadcast commentary appears here in the 20jan18 Union.]

We are now such a tragically polarized nation that almost all of us believe we are being misled through the various media.  We believe that disinformation and ‘fake news’ make up the major fare we are exposed to, and its source is, of course, from the other side.  Observing this growing socio-political crisis over the recent years, the well-respected and non-partisan Rand Corporation has launched a research program to discover the nature, extent, causes, and possible solutions to what it calls ‘Truth Decay’.  They recently published a report, actually a 326-page book, that describes the problem along with an outline for future research.

The Rand authors, Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich, start by giving a working definition of Truth Decay.  Its four dominant trends are –

1. increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data;

2. a blurring of the line between opinion and fact;

3. the increasing relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact;

4. declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.

Our idiots write

[The letters from two local progressive worthies appeared in the 24nov17 Union.  They are published here as a part of the public service component of RR.  My commentaries on the liberal mind pale when compared to the real things.  You really can’t make this stuff up.  gjr]

Trump-Republican gun culture and gun violence

When will the 300 million Americans take a stand against these few hundred GOP House and Senate politicians who continue to block any meaningful gun control?

How many more children, students, family and friends have to die at the hands of guns?

A few hundred Republican politicians are holding the American population hostage to a NRA mandate. Are you going to take action only after your sons and daughters and loved ones lay buried six feet under the ground?

Ban weapons of war from our streets and throw the Republican politicians out of office in 2018.

Ron Lowe, Nevada City

 

Multiculturism is a beautiful thing

It's quite clear to me that those pressing for "non-sanctuary" status for Nevada County live in a bubble narrated by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other right-wing extremists.

I suggest that they broaden their horizons.

I know some of these folks and I know that they have no firsthand knowledge of the ambitions of immigrants. Said immigrants are keenly interested in participating fully in the American experience. Their biggest obstacles are bigoted attitudes regarding brown skins and foreign accents.

Multiculturalism is a beautiful thing. Get a passport and learn a little something for yourself.

The only agenda I see here is fear everything non-white, stoked by inexperience, ignorance, and bigotry.

Jon Peck, Grass Valley

 

Democratic Socialists of America (updated 14nov17)

Lord, give me coffee to change things I can change, wine to accept the things I cannot change, and bourbon to forget about the whole mess.

George Rebane

DSA candidates running openly as socialists under the Democrat banner now have 35 seats in the country’s state legislatures.  “Tuesday's election night gains for the group were fairly substantial. The Democratic Socialists picked up a historic 15 seats across the country, adding to the 20 members they already have in office.” (more here)  Make no mistake about the staging of their socialist ideology as nothing but communism resurgent.  The DSA got an enormous boost from socialist Bernie’s candidacy and the fact that he was screwed by the DNC – DSA’s membership surged sixfold over the last few years and it is the fastest growing political organization in the country, primarily abetted by the know-nothing Millennials who now poll around 50% saying they’d rather live under communism than capitalism.

This is part of the extreme or alt-left direction the Democrats have taken under Obama’s reign while telling all their Alinsky lie that it was everyone else that moved to the right while they stood still.  Their and the Democrats’ successes (e.g. Virginia and New Jersey) now have openly declared the true nature of the long-sought fundamental transformation.  The Republicans are abetting the whole movement by not being able to execute the promised legislative program that got them elected.  Formerly right-leaning news outfits like Fox are daily slanting their reports toward the Left’s interpretation of events and history.  For example, in recounting the murderous communist century (more here), they include the term ‘Red Scare’ without qualification describing the 1950s, allowing the history-innocent viewer to continue believing that such a post-WW2 fear of communism’s expansion was an unfounded hysteria against just another method of governance.  The times they are a’changin’, and a good part of that impetus is powered by Republican impotence.

Given California's unabashed embrace of socialism, how long will it be until the state's Democrats hoist their true colors?

[14nov17 update]  The contention by two of our community’s leading progressive intellectuals is that California has gone socialist because the “right wing has pushed their agenda so far off the scale that any socialist bullshit solution looks good in comparison.”  (Presuming, of course, that America’s leftwing has maintained its more reasonable proximity to the center.)  This conclusion in Mr Crabb’s 947am comment below is detailed in Mr Frisch’s 749am, which itemizes the sins of the state’s Republicans.  To wit (item numbers inserted) –

Republican are increasingly irrelevant in California politics because they embraced a political philosophy, largely driven by the national party, that is completely out of step with California residents and voters.

1. They demonized Hispanics when they were the rising demographic in the state and lost their support.
2. They demonized homosexuals when no one below the age of 40 gives a shit if someone is gay.
3. They attack women’s rights to health care when the vast majority of Californians support abortion.
4. They claim climate change is a hoax when the vast majority of Californians see it every day.
5. They stand up for guns when people are crying out to stop the mass killing; they are whores to the NRA.
6. In short, a political party cannot reject the majority of the people and expect to get a majority of the vote.

The above assertions are based on a worldview – which illustrates the two irreconcilable universes in which we live -  and lacks evidence to back up the individual assertions.

1. “demonized Hispanics” – now there is hyperbole for the pre-educated consumption. The only thing that remotely relates here is the Republicans’ support of secure borders and cessation of welfare programs targeting illegal aliens which makes California an inviting destination from their own dysfunctional and corrupt countries.  Republicans have long endorsed guest worker programs that have proven a win-win for alien Hispanics.
2. “demonized homosexuals” – Republicans sought to retain the label ‘marriage’ as identifying the traditional union between one man and one woman. There is no desire or attempt to deny them the legal and functional benefits provided by marriage.  However, Republicans, in general, do oppose public schools teaching that homosexual unions are normative in the affairs of Man; they have never been and are not now.  But that sentiment does not mean that Republicans seek to proscribe, let alone “demonize”, such unions, only that they should be openly recognized as one of several special kinds of socially acceptable relationships that humans have with one another.  (The Left has no problem endorsing Islam, globally and in America, which does not share such beliefs.)
3. Republicans “attack women’s rights to healthcare”, now really. That kind of patronizing pabulum is really a sad commentary on the demonstrated acumen of the Left’s constituency.  First, there is no “right” by women or any other class of people to be provided free healthcare.  Second, Republicans simply don’t want the government to get into the abortion business, since ‘women’s healthcare’ is the accepted dog whistle for the poor and prophylactically challenged to understand what party will give them a free pass from unintended parenthood.
4. Regarding climate change, the “vast majority of Californians see” what they have been propagandized to see by the media and leftwing public schools. There is no science behind their beliefs; most certainly no accessible science, since the issue has been presented to them as a non-falsifiable religion.
5. Yes, Republicans stand up for Second Amendment rights, and continue to pose the question never dealt with in the lamestream and by the local leftwing luminaries. Why pass new and more restrictive gun laws since there is no evidence that the present gun laws don’t work, because these have yet to be either enforced or shown relevant to preventing the “mass killings” which are the claimed objective for constructively denying private ownership of guns in America?  Enforce current laws and show how they are ineffective before seeking more laws that will be subsequently ignored by everyone (law enforcement and criminals) save the law-abiding.
6. Given the above, this statement should read, ‘a political party, successfully portrayed to reject the majority of wealth-recipient people, can expect to be rejected by these same people in the voting booth (for they know from whence comest their largesse).'

But in the final analysis, all of the above is nothing but a carefully crafted and executed smokescreen by the socialists as part of America’s fundamental transformation that calls for calving individual coastal states from the traditionally constitutional parts of the country through their own well-versed and historical means of fomenting class warfare, demonizing the ‘rich’ and redistributing wealth from the taxpayers to the permanently and growing aggrieved classes who willingly vote for politicians and programs promising free money.  It was ever thus.

As an example of a corollary concept, which the Democrat collectivists seek to convince the lightly read, we have their fundamental ideological tenet that tax rates do not affect economic behavior of the wealth producers – i.e. taxpaying workers, entrepreneurs, and businesses.  Giving lie to the Democrats’ contention “that marginal tax rates don’t matter to investment and growth” are the “IRS data (which) show an accelerating flight from high-tax states.”  More detailed data of such state-to-state income transfers is given in ‘The Great Progressive Tax Escape’ which highlights the huge dollar amounts now leaving ‘tax-the-rich’ states for more suitable fiscal climes.  This type of migration hurts most the middle classes of the afflicted states, since it is they, the left behind, whose taxes must subsequently be increased to make up the revenue losses.  Again, this bamboozle is one of the Left’s most successfully smoke-screened secrets.   

Once more, I want to show appreciation for the fervently argued positions of the Left in these pages.  RR welcomes such contention of ideas so as to give readers the opportunity to see for themselves how wide differences in public policies that result from their respective ideological antecedents.  The winners and losers in these debates are determined by the individual readers, who in the end must choose for themselves and their families in what kind of country they wish to live.

 

 

Sandbox - 5nov17

[I think I'll start this sandbox off with another confirmation of the 'two separate worlds' notion that abets our progress toward the Great Divide.  It is always good to climb up the taxonomical tree to see under which branch these individual dust-ups we dissect belong.  

A futile exchange on Bob Crabb’s blog (here).  Mr Crabb accuses Trump administration members of harboring ‘medieval beliefs’ and being “religious fundamentalists” and people who would lock up gays as “deviants”.  Challenging him to provide proof, Bob comes back instead with citations of policies the administration backs as prima facie evidence that such sentiments could only have come from people harboring the detailed medieval beliefs.  When I pointed out the difference between policies and the alleged belief systems, as his repartee I was accused of being just like the other medievals and religious fundamentalists, extremists who are “destroying this nation just as much as the extremists on the other side of the fence.”  In support, this drew in Messrs Frisch and Anderson, two of our local leftwing's intellectuals, who had similar problems setting up the dots and then correctly identifying their connectedness.  In the process I was again accused of being a “traitorous ideologue” who should find a home on other shores.  gjr] 

Racialism Rising

George Rebane

Racialism – the ideology, based on a heightened consciousness of the race of others, that promotes racial divisions and strife to hasten the breakdown of large sovereign nation-states on the road to a unified global world order.

In America there should be as little room for racism as for racialism.  We Americans should equally reject racism and racialism.  In recent years racialism has been on the rise, and is now the new rallying cry for those who want to fundamentally transform America.  In a land as large as ours there will always be some few who will exhibit their racism.  But our overall progress toward racial equality in the last decades has been under-reported as author and Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recently highlighted (here) to counter the current spate of racialist events and lamestream hysteria (see also ‘Kneeing Our National Anthem’).

Most people agree on the various definitions of racism as including “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement”. (more here)

But racialism is a useful term the definition of which is still in flux.  Many/most dictionaries take the lazy way out and define racism and racialism as being synonymous, thus wasting the label for a useful semantic in our language.  Thoughtful authors have attempted to distinguish between the two words without making much headway.  An example of this in a 2015 issue of HuffPost is Peter Schuck’s ‘Racism and Racialism Are Different’.  Therein he does the best he can with the “widespread confusion between racism, which is hostility to blacks based on their supposed inferiority, and what I call racialism, which is a heightened consciousness of the race of others.”

With my own more robust definition of racialism, I hope to avoid ambiguity and inform my readers of how I will use the term.

Those who keep up with America’s changing socio-political landscape know well that the case against racism has been well made between our shores, yet the case against racialism is muted and has been suppressed.  Actually, more than that; there are prominent political factions for whom racialism is a fundamental component of their political toolkit.

I am of the school that holds former President Barack Obama to be the pre-eminent racialist of our times, a job at which he excels and still champions.  As cultural Marxists (q.v.), he and his already realized at the turn of the millennium that racialism had been a fallow field that needed cultivation.  The history of Obama’s rising to the occasion in the ascent of his own career is meticulously detailed in the recently published dispassionate biography – Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama - by Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Garrow which is competently reviewed (here) by H.A. Scott Trask in the October 2017 issue of Chronicles.  Therein Garrow recounts and documents Obama’s own racial sensitivities in his early desire to be seen as a racially uncompromised black, even to the point of shedding his first true love – Sheila Myoshi, a multi-racial lady deemed too white to support his auto-identified “destiny” to become America’s first ‘black president’. Obama’s subsequent hitching with Michelle, who in her own words is “as black as it gets”, gave him the needed optics to climb the South Chicago political ladder.   (“If I’m going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”)

As Obama was well on his way to the Democratic candidacy and then on to be elected in 2008, prominent politicians of both parties opined that the man’s success was based on the careful nurture of his race and his racialism.  (Democrat Gerraldine Ferraro, a Clinton backer, paid with her political life for stating the obvious, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.  He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”)

That racialism is now the political tool of choice for the Left is also evident on the grassroots level if we can use the recorded sentiments of local liberals.  When I recently brought up Obama’s race-based ascent to the presidency, using the SBA set-aside Section 8 metaphor, I was immediately branded as a racist for that argument in another comment thread debating the qualifications of recent presidents.  A casual perusal of these pages quickly reveals that most leftwing RR readers are racialists, furiously gleaning the ideological harvests for any remnant of potential racial bias, thereby alleging non-existent schisms in the face of the obvious chasm which separates our widely disparate views about the coming world order.

As a coda, I want to point my readers to an excellent Other Voices commentary on racialism – ‘Deliberate Turmoil and Chaos at Every Turn’ – by Frank Chuck in the 30sep17 Union.  The man does a good job reflecting the political sentiments of many of us in this community, and, I suspect, more multitudes across our country.

Scattershots – 26sep17 (updated 1oct17)

Government is a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory. – Max Weber, progressive economist and co-founder of sociology.

George Rebane

In ‘Rule of law or mob rule’, appearing in the 26sep17 Union, Ms Linda Erdmann presents clear and cogent arguments of how ‘presentism’ has uniformly infected the liberal mind in its reinterpretation of history.  In the study of history, presentism is the application of contemporary moral judgments and world views to those of the past.  In her commentary Erdmann correctly and forcefully reminds us that today presentism “is a virus spreading across college campuses and into other areas of society.”

That local liberals are lightly read was again confirmed in an email I received from one of those worthies (an avid RR reader and former commenter) who exhorted KVMR to drop my regular commentary for the reason (gasp!) that I exhibited “mental illness” in again identifying former President Barack Obama as having been elected primarily because of his mixed race.  Apparently this individual’s awareness of national goings on is so limited that the thinks I’m the first person to draw that “disgusting” conclusion, when in fact it has been in the public dialogue since Obama was first elected – so proposed by conservative commentators and strongly rejected by their progressive counterparts.  As evidenced by their comments over the years, our right-leaning readers do not seem to restrict themselves to such narrow channels of input as does our politically correct cohort, many of whom have over the years been equally surprised by RR’s commentaries.

You can go to jail in America for handing out pamphlets, so reports Jacob Sullum in the Nov2017 issue of Reason.  That’s what happened to Keith Wood in Mecosta County, Michigan for peacefully handing out pamphlets on public property that argued “jurors have a right and a responsibility to judge the law as well as the facts, which might lead them to acquit a technically guilty defendant in the interest of justice.”  The man was tried and sent to jail for eight weekends, fined $545, forced to do 120 community service, and spend six months on probation.

[1oct17 update]  According to a Philadelphia elections official, hundreds of individuals who are not U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Philadelphia and nearly half of them voted in past elections. Since 2006, 317 registered voters have contacted the City Commissioners, which oversees Philadelphia elections, asking that their registrations be canceled because they are not citizens. … Philly.com reported that many of them registered while either applying for or renewing their driver’s licenses. All applicants were offered the option to register to vote even after providing documentation to DMV officials that although they were in the country legally, they were not citizens. (more here)

Now if you think that this auto-registration happened only in Philadelphia, I have a great landmark bridge for sale that might interest you.

Kneeing Our National Anthem (updated 27sep17)

George Rebane

More and more NFL players, owners, and managers started showing their disrespect for one of our nation’s most hallowed totems – The Star-Spangled Banner.  They chose to do this for a number of political reasons starting with protesting alleged police brutality.  And in doing so they have the temerity to claim that their acts of disrespect are not unpatriotic but intended to show “unity”.  That’s bullshit.

Whatever their sentiments are about civil rights violations and governments’ overreach, they have many other ways (e.g. a protest patch on their uniforms) to exhibit their feelings that need not desecrate the totems of our unique and special nation; hallowed symbols that have gathered Americans for generations to visibly demonstrate to each other that ‘e pluribus unum’ works and is the underlying rationale for living civil and productive lives together.  And in such unseemly public acts these people also dishonor those many who have given life and limb to defend and preserve those symbols of our nation.

If these people – ungrateful millionaires all - choose such overt and crass actions to demonstrate their unity, then to me and mine they have come together to achieve different ends through means neither of which I condone nor can unite.  When they knee our national anthem, they are simply cranking another notch ratcheting toward our Great Divide.

[27sep17 update]  Jason Riley in the 27sep17 WSJ (here) covers today’s national anthem brouhaha, and brings up a couple of points with which I happened to agree and did not include in the above.  As a youngster, Riley’s Jehovah’s Witness religious teachings did not allow him to salute the flag or honor our national anthem, which he first started doing as a teenager when he left that church.  JWs were often persecuted (beyond shunning) by their neighbors for these omissions which highlighted their different beliefs.

A relevant 1943 SCOTUS ruling stated that government or any of its agencies (e.g. public schools) forcing someone to salute the flag was unconstitutional.  More cogently, the court held that “saluting the flag is a form of utterance and that the right to not speak is as equally protected under the First Amendment as the right to free speech.” (emphasis mine) And “to believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”

Now critical minds will understand the difference between public enforcement and enforcement of private sector policies of which the kneeling athletes are in violation.  And, of course, all of us are free to shun anyone on any grounds as we please.  (At least we had that freedom during the progressives’ bad old days; today things are not so simple anymore.)  We don’t have to watch them play or buy their sponsors’ products.  As I stated above, I and mine are of a mind to do exactly that with anyone who disses the good ol’ US of A.

In the end, “team owners and NFL officials will have to decide whether to continue indulging such behavior on company time, but the larger question is whether what is being protested has some basis in reality beyond anecdotes and viral videos on social media.”  And here Riley points out the most ludicrous part of the current kneeing epidemic – their putative casus belli, as I pointed out above, is existentially bullshit.

Why?  Because all available data from national and regional police databases show that police-involved shootings have dropped drastically in the last decades while the allegedly afflicted populations have grown enormously.  Riley quotes the relevant stats, and correctly concludes – “An increase in press coverage of police shootings isn’t the same thing as an increase in police shootings.”

Great Divide – Yes Virginia, we really are very different

George Rebane

Today’s headline again corroborates what those who have paid attention have known for some years now.  The latest WSJ/NBC poll out today reports the stark differences between the country’s Right and Left as represented by their respective Republican and Democrat party affiliations.  The important part here is that the “WSJ/NBC News survey indicates a wide (and widening) split on cultural, economic issues.”  The best I can tell is that the only ones who have been in denial for years, and refuse to acknowledge this divide are the lightly read local lefties, which even includes their leading lights.  Limiting your input to the offerings and interpretations of DailyKos, HuffPo, CNN, MSNBC, … leaves a pretty big hole in a person’s understanding of what’s happening now.

The data-filled 6sep17 WSJ report begins with –

Divisions in America reach far beyond Washington into the nation’s culture, economy and social fabric, and the polarization began long before the rise of President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey of social trends has found. … The findings help explain why political divisions are now especially hard to bridge. People who identify with either party increasingly disagree not just on policy; they inhabit separate worlds of differing social and cultural values and even see their economic outlook through a partisan lens.  (emphasis mine)

Among the polls highlights are the drastic drop since Eisenhower of the opposite party’s support of the recently elected president.  That percentage has dropped from Eisenhower’s 60% to 8% for Trump.  The only reversals in the downtrend were for Bush1 and Bush2.

A really significant change of attitudes in how confident Americans are that their children will have better lives than they have.  From August 2010 to August 2017 the Dems’ confidence fell from about 42% to 25%, and the Repubs’ confidence rose sharply from 12% to 48%.  You need to read the article to get the significance of this latest survey on the national attitudes.

And today most of us see only the other party as doing all the bad things for/to the country.  Here’s part of local leftie Ms Nancy Eubanks’ outrage in her 6sep17 letter to The Union.

After Trump's outrageous news conference in the aftermath of Charlottesville, many of you "say" you are against racism and bigotry, that you disavow White Supremacy and Neo-Nazi groups and what they stand for. But actions speak loader than words. You could do several things to show you really can put country above party. Stop voter suppression laws that disenfranchise minority groups. Support a new Voter Rights Act. Stop gerrymandering districts to discriminate against minority voters. In addition, take actions to show you won't compromise principles of openness and fairness. Pass a law requiring all presidents to disclose their income taxes. Require all presidents to divest themselves of any business interest so that presidents can't have any conflicts of interest. Take away the lease on the Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. so Trump can't continue to profit from that enterprise.

You can’t make this stuff up; the schism is really real.

Democrats, as they see themselves (updated)

[This piece of Democrat worldview showcased in their booth at the recent Nevada County fair is both illuminating and informative.  They see and experience not what we see and experience, but tacitly admit that they have no "working Democratic message"   Also note that Republicans have "the power to prevent minorities from voting in more than two dozen Republican controlled states." - can't make this up.  Emphases in the original.  gjr]

IN SEARCH OF A WORKING DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE

Suggestions for Effective Communications @ Fair

“Try to find common ground and emphasize that regardless of differing perspectives, we all want this country to succeed. For example, we all want gun safety, whether we’re NRA members or not; availability to good medical care, whether we support ACA or not; a healthy environment, whether we view the Centennial Dam as the way to go or not. Find terminology that connects rather than separates”.

This quote is from the Directions for Volunteers at the Democratic Booth, and it goes to the core of the dilemma we find ourselves in. Even politically interested people seem unaware of the gradual changes that have turned the Republican Party from a basically positive force since its birth as the anti-slavery party and certainly through the Eisenhower years to a reactionary power committed to rolling back our social safety net and our infrastructure. The Tea-Party/Trump faction has gone even further and seems intent on bringing us back to the time of the robber barons of the 19th century.

It is simply not true to say that the current right-wing Trump Administration wants gun safety, good medical care available for all, and a healthy environment with clean air and water for people as we can see from their actual policy choices.

The facts are that Republican policies over the last decades have been to weaken and work against affordable health-care, a well-functioning social safety net, good environmental policies, infrastructure investments, and have worked on behalf of large corporations and against lower and middle-class Americans, and we need to be steadfast in pointing this out at every turn. We should do this in a factual and controlled manner, but accepting the lies of right-wing wishful/knowingly false thinking puts us at a huge disadvantage where uncommitted voters may conclude that even Democrats believe there is no real difference between the two parties, affirming the general and widespread disinterest for politics by average voters in this country.

Both Democrats and mainstream media have been very neglectful in not seriously challenging the blatant myths and untruths peddled by the right-wing that has taken control of the once decent and honorable Republican Party, and now our beloved country. I believe that our primary message should be that the right-wing now controlling our country is fundamentally different from not only Democrats, but traditional Republicans as well. In fact, many of the main principles from the 1956 Republican Party Platform are remarkably similar to those of Democratic Party Platforms during the last many decades. So when people complain that “we are so far apart” it is not the Democrats that have moved substantially. It is the Republican Party that has been hijacked by forces that are committed to destroying the very fabric of the civilized and advanced society that both parties built up over more than a hundred years, including the Progressive Era, the New Deal Era, and the Civil Rights Era.

I believe this is the message that all Democrats should be able to agree upon, and I also believe it is the one that has the best chance of overcoming the advantages the right-wing currently has with control of all branches of government, unlimited corporate funding at their disposal, and the power to prevent minorities from voting in more than two dozen Republican controlled states.

By Richardt Stormsgaard 

[update] And here’s how the Alt-Left wing of the Democratic Party sees the world.  As made clear by the husband/wife team of Distinguished Professor (I kid you not) Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dhorn, founder of the Weather Underground of the 60s, who are still there in the spirit and enthusiasm of today’s young communists who continue to dream of “free love and free land, free food and free housing, (and) dancing in the street”, and await their opportunity to co-opt or join Antifa to again mount the barricades and make it so.  Here is a snootful for your reading pleasure.

The conundrum of culturally cohesive communities (updated 22aug17)

George Rebane

Cultural cohesion has been the propensity of humans living together for millennia and perhaps longer.  The clear and simple dictum is that people like to live with people who share their social values and view the world pretty much as they themselves do.  The benefits of such communities is both manifest and manifold because it engenders mutual trust and even affection as it lets people work without having to constantly watch their backs, and therefore specialize, knowing that there is a reliable clientele for their product or service.  Promoting this paradigm has been one of the foundations of RR and part of my personal belief system (more here).

People with limited ability to nuance concepts mistake the promotion of cultural cohesion with a childlike understanding of simple black/white alternatives.  For them, if you like cultural cohesion, then you are probably a racist who doesn’t tolerate the existence of other cultures.  It’s as simple as that.

Add to history, and not take from it (updated 17aug17)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 August 2017.]

The Charlottesville clash is metastasizing across the country.  In these look-alike demonstrations, the Civil War and all that it entails has become the latest collision point of several ideological and political agendas.  For those able to handle historical nuances, our Civil War was not a civil war, but a War for Southern Independence, or more neutrally, the War Between the States.  In a real civil war, each side wants to wind up in control of the entire country.  But since time is short, we’ll call it a ‘Civil War’ in the sequel.

That in 1865 the South, among its other objectives, wanted to perpetuate slavery is today enough to charge anyone, who wants to retain reminders of that bloody conflict, with a long list of additional social sins.  For example, to defend the continued acceptance of statuary, paintings, plaques, and other symbols that memorialize that conflict in the South, is to be cast as a white supremacist who longs for the day when the blacks can again be enslaved.  And the promotion of American nationalism immediately equates with the hidden objectives of white nationalism – in short, such people are identified simply as rank racists.

So, to assure that these symbols of social injustice will disappear from our land, our politically correct factions outdo each other to demand removal of all such blatant displays of our despicable past.  Hence, we see statues of Confederate leaders and soldiers being toppled, and hear new cries to take down Civil War paintings in state houses and heroic facades from their exteriors.  And in the exercise of exquisite chutzpah, the Council on American-Islamic Relations joins in the demand that every Confederate memorial in the US be torn down.

The reasonable underpinnings for these progressive and alt-left sentiments are hard to understand.  Where do we stop destroying and removing symbols of past ages that conflict with our revised and ever-changing cultural tenets; where do we stop blotting out reminders of the inconvenient eras that really happened; and with warts and all, that are still a part of our history?

Do we follow the presumably sincere and heartfelt sentiments of ISIS and the Taliban who vandalize and destroy historical artifacts they consider hateful and even blasphemous to their God?  According to the tenets of their culture, such monuments and artifacts are an affront to the very foundation of our universe.  What about removing all evidence of the Roman Empire, a regime that conquered, ravaged, and enslaved so much of the world?  And was it not the Arabs in the first millennium who opened up the African slave trade along that continent’s east coast; do we also tear down the symbols of Arabic faith and glory?  And then throw in the Judeo-Christian scriptures and manifold artifacts abetting slavery.  To complete the job here in our foothills, hydraulic monitors were used in the Sierra to wash away entire mountain sides, polluting rivers and spoiling the livelihood of farmers in the valley below, all in the fevered search for gold.  Should we also remove these proudly-displayed symbols of exploitation and destruction erected in gold country towns that now memorialize that history?

Charlottesville – harbinger or just a temperature reading? [updated 14aug17]

George Rebane

[This post invites the continuation of the lively comment thread on the expression/suppression of ideas that started in the 10aug17 Sandbox.]

So what happened yesterday in Charlottesville?  We know that a coalition of white supremacists got a permit to demonstrate against the relocation of a Confederate statue, and that leftwing counter demonstrators showed up to protest the protest.  Violence ensued – instigation unknown, results tragic.  Megaphones from all sides have now blared into action.  From the Left and lamestream, the answer to all questions is again unimaginably simple – it was once more the fault of the ‘rightwing racists’ who were egged on by Trump.

And the remedy for it all is even simpler – use government force to deny those deemed racist, nationalist, etc the right to demonstrate in public forums.  Even such good Christians such as Dean Ashford at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (here) and rightwing national commentator Erick Erickson (here) promote such a response to outlier thought and speech.

Before any left-leaning readers get their undies in a bundle, let’s first dispose of the race issue – RR, nor any of its readers to my knowledge, espouse the notion that one race or another is superior.  Counter arguments to this – such as ‘yes, but we know what you really think’ - have been made by leftwingers with bankrupt debating skills, and, no doubt, will be made by them again.  However, RR has strongly argued that cultures are not only different, but also of varying nature as to the quality of life they have provided and continue to provide for their adherents.

As stated here many times - I am a child, student, and defender of Western culture.  Western culture is not static, and has benefited greatly through its liberal mien, over the years by adopting ‘best practices’ from other cultures with which it has come into contact.  And I also believe that people all over the world, who have adopted major tenets of western culture, to that extent they have benefited and enriched their lives.  But today Western culture is suffering a purposed collapse, and the reactionary white supremacists are abetting this downward spiral.  Erickson’s wider appraisal is here germane –

The regressive ideas of the white supremacists in Charlottesville have no place in America any more than the censorious totalitarianism on display last week at Google. They are all from the same strain of secular uncertainty rising as Western cultural certainties collapse.

But to be productive, these debates/discussions should attempt to achieve a common understanding of what ideas can be professed, and by whom in public forums (which include the online media) and in the workplace.  To me the First Amendment prohibits the suppression of free speech, especially ‘speech’ deemed unpopular, by the government AND by citizens who are offended by such speech – that is simply the cost of doing the business of maintaining our American republic.

It is through the open competition of ideas that western culture flowered and continues to increase our enlightenment, and the enlightenment of all societies.  And it is through the suppression of peaceful competition of all kinds – including in the arena of ideas - that will sound the death knell of western culture.  (more later)

[update] Well, this little missive has drawn a bit of ire from our neighbors on our left.  I received an email quoting one of their leading intellectual lights demonstrating his knowledge of American history by taking to task the content of my opening paragraphs.   Thereof he claims that I have written “a bunch of alt-right revisionist, great divide driving, bastardization of American history.”  Fortunately, for the sake of expediency, the depth of his reasoning is both flawed and shallow.  Starting with the name of the 1860-65 conflict, the man has little knowledge of the century plus debate in the learned circles of our academe about the true nature of what the various factions of the South and North sought to achieve.  Here is a reference from Wikipedia citing the legion of authors who have discussed and debated the affair.  Given his age and many responsibilities, I really don’t know how to advise the man about remediating his education, especially concerning his views about the bastardization of American history.

[14aug17 update]  ‘Why were the police held back in Chalottesville?’ is being asked by people concerned about the conduct of the authorities during last weekend’s demonstrations.  Actually, there is a large faction in the country that is not asking, does not want to know, and/or already knows.  The answer to the question is not all that hard to puzzle out - just think about who benefitted from the police being ordered to stand down to let the counter demonstrators confront the white nationalist demonstrators.  When this Virginia town’s response is compared to what has happened in other towns like Berkeley, it is clear that Democrat authorities are now basing their use of police intervention on first satisfying their political agendas.  Strongly invite evidence to the contrary.

GOP – Defecate or Relinquish the Receptacle

George Rebane

Were I king, I would order the 52 GOP senators into a big room set up with tables, chairs, cots, and plenty of coffee.  They would be advised to bring their nighties and toothbrushes, and then told to stay in that room until 1) they have hammered out a healthcare bill that ALL 52 could live with and vote for, or 2) they would emerge as members of at least two separate and distinct political parties whose founding documents they had in hand.

Unless they can deliver some major pieces of legislation, given that they have historical control of COTUS, POTUS, and SCOTUS, Republicans are no longer one united political party that can produce enduring public policies which fulfill the longstanding promises that got them elected, and still hew to the principles they have wrapped themselves in for generations.

Political parties are supposed to be composed of people with sufficiently overlapping ideologies that make them politically functional in the public forum, and effective institutions when given the opportunity to govern.  If the opportunity to govern serves only to reveal seminal schisms that constructively paralyze them while in power, then they should partition themselves into more cohesive ideological cohorts and as such represent themselves honestly to the electorate.  Doing otherwise, while displaying a facade of apparent power by their sheer numbers, is to promise a fraudulent hope on which they, as a body, cannot deliver.

So Republicans, find the means to act in unison, or divide yourself into smaller assemblages that can better reflect and represent the fractionation of the country.  BTW, the Democrats are no better in this department, however they were able to put a unified shoulder and a blind eye to the wheel and pass Obamacare in the dark of night, trusting that they would subsequently like whatever they passed.  No one is asking the Republicans to practice the Pelosi Principle.

In sum, get your act together and do what you were elected to do; or, if you can't, strike that so-called ‘big tent’ because what it covers isn’t working.