Rebane's Ruminations

Quo tendimus? (updated 20apr21)

George Rebane

[My ‘Farewell Unity’ commentary was also published in the 3apr21 Union (here). Its lengthy comment stream made clear again that most liberals had trouble understanding my proposition for finding common ground.  Nevertheless, the piece has since then garnered considerable interest.  This week the newspaper printed on separate days not one, not two, but three op-ed columns by liberals delivering most revealing critiques of the future Americas desired by both sides – ‘Path to unity in America’(13apr21) by Elliot Schneiderman, ‘A point of near unity’(15apr21) by Paul Hauck, and ‘Finding Unity in America’(16apr21) by Nory Fussel.  When “retired scientist” Schneiderman took me to task, I responded with the piece below, prematurely, it turned out, since I was not aware of the subsequent op-eds by Hauck and Fussel.  I address the latter two in the addendum to this post.  Perhaps all this interest provides hope that the conversation toward unity, which I outline below, will start here or elsewhere.  20apr21 update - an edited form of this commentary was published here in the 20apr21 Union.  More here.]

I was halfway heartened to read ‘left-leaning neighbor’ Elliot Schneiderman’s 12apr21 ‘Path to unity in America’ response to my 3ap21 ‘Farewell Unity’ column.  It appears both of us support a future America that is persistently hailed by our Right, and seldom if ever described by our Left.  In fact, Elliot takes exception to the neo-Marxist future that I describe, and the one to which the current administration and the Democrat leadership publicly subscribe.  These disparate visions of America are well documented by the commentariats of both sides.  Elliot writes -

George quite wrongly states that “our neighbors on the left work feverishly for” this Marxist global government world view. I’m on our country’s left and will have none of it, I don’t personally know a single American that would ascribe (sic) to it, and I am convinced that the vast majority of our country’s left do not ascribe (sic) to it.

This remarkable view from the Left is easily explained by the recorded half-century decline of our progressive schools that have assiduously omitted any mention of such historic realities.  And it is easily confirmed through conversations with a sampling of your left-leaning neighbors, especially the ones cited by Elliot.

Working the Unity Myth (updated 25mar21)

George Rebane

Today’s Left seeks to suppress and supplant the legacy, history, and practice of Western culture as an evil instantiation of racism and white supremacy.

One of Jo Ann’s recent Union articles (here) addressed the futile attempts in the Left’s ongoing calls for unity, supposedly addressed to people like her – conservative, Christian women who pay very close attention to national affairs and are active in their communities. (more here)  The piece garnered a record reader response in print, online, and snail-mailed letters.  One heartfelt, well-written and long letter from a liberal woman gave Jo Ann kudos and concluded with a strong appeal for all of us to come together.  It is the ongoing flood of appeals like that, appeals that imply coming together is something as simple as throwing an attitudinal switch, that motivates the present reflection.

Scattershots – 2mar21 (updated 5mar21)

George Rebane

Those who judge the past in terms of the here and now are doing a great disservice through their ignorance of the then and there.

The Left’s promotion of America’s new cancel culture is in full swing.  We now have full scale censoring of politically incorrect content on our mass media – broadcast, internet, print, entertainment, … .  This incorporates the modern version of book burning.  The latest volumes to be ‘digitally burned’ and no longer available from major outlets include Justice Clarence Thomas’s ‘Created Equal’ video and , and now Dr Seuss.  Dr Seuss has been an icon of Americana and children’s literature for a couple of generations now.  Even an annual children’s reading day (2 March) was ensconced to recognize the birthday of Theodor Seuss ‘Ted’ Geisel (1904-1991).  But today our commissars of correct culture have deemed many of his works to racist and contain “crude and offensive stereotypes in several drawings of blacks and Asian-Americans.”  But those well-read in the country’s leftward lurch will recognize that such book burnings are nothing more than pages out of Stalin’s and Hitler’s playbooks to erase the old culture in order to make room for instilling their brave new world.  It was ever thus. (more here)

Common culture counts.  That has been a fundamental tenet of RR, and is now being adopted by many other national voices to counter the Left’s all-out assault on America’s traditional culture.  Six former US education secretaries co-authored ‘America Needs History and Civics Education to Promote Unity’ (2mar21 WSJ).  In there they cogently argue for a national education plan “to help teachers instill an understanding that is complete and honest but not cynical.”  The 6jan21 frustration that was expressed by Americans on the Mall and in the Capitol is a harbinger that the country’s political leaders, those who truly want to promote unity, should take careful note of and respond with appropriate legislation and regulatory relief for our public schools.  It’s a tall order the chances of success for which are not high given the entrenched collectivists in politics and the teachers unions.  Nevertheless, the authors cite the ‘Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy’, the culmination of a 19-month project by 300+ “scholars, educators, practitioners, and students from diverse backgrounds.” (more here) In sum, a minimally common culture for a constitutional democracy “requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively, as well as the knowledge and skills to act for the common good.”  The Roadmap provides the guidance for the several states to develop curricula that can provide such an understanding.

Joe Biden puts all his credibility chips on a Big Lie, and takes a page of bombast from Trump’s playbook.  He and Team Biden, echoed in the lamestream, now trumpet the claim that he is the nation’s savior from Covid-19.  Specifically, “he is staking his legacy on the lie that the pandemic was out of control until the day of his inauguration.”  And a more comprehensive segue to the old days of ‘journalism’ was made possible by the former president’s CPAC speech.  The hiatus is over, we can now stop having to explain (or avoid) Biden, and shift back to coverage of Trump topics that fit like an old shoe.  Gerard Baker says it best (here) –

The return to the limelight of a certain former president has triggered an unfortunate but probably inevitable relapse for the Trump addicts of our news-gathering class.  They’d gone cold turkey for a whole month and there were tentative, encouraging signs that the cure might be taking. Deprived of their favorite drug, some were gingerly discovering other, more wholesome pursuits: tackling the mountain of evidence that Andrew Cuomo might be a mendacious, incompetent, bullying sex pest; investigating the slight but tantalizing possibility that not all of America’s social and economic woes can be attributed to white supremacy; slowly weaning themselves off the urge to ask penetrating questions of the White House about Joe Biden’s rescue dog.

What must ol’ Bumblebrain do now to get back into an adult-level news cycle?  After all, he’s still the president.  Isn’t he?

[4mar21 update]  A CPAC puzzle?  A straw poll was taken at the recent CPAC conference at which many Republican luminaries – including former President Trump – spoke.  The poll indicated that 68% wanted to see Trump run for president in 2024, and only 55% wanted to see him nominated for the office.  This conservetarian doesn’t understand how the excess of the 68% would have him become a Republican candidate in 2024 without first being nominated – especially after he made clear that he would not support or start a third party.  From my perch it looks like a collective brain fart.  Other solutions most welcome.

The Capitol Fortress.  Thousands of troops remain guarding our razor wire wrapped Capitol.  Why?  The Dems insist on fake intelligence reports of another imminent attempt at a rightwing ‘insurrection’ (when there never was one in the first place).  The disorganized and frustrated mob that charged the Capitol on 6 January had no idea what they were doing or were supposed to do.  They got in only because the on-duty Capitol police were incompetent in every aspect of operational planning and execution, or ordered to allow a politically useful penetration of the building.  And the mob had nothing to do with the deaths that day, that was another fabrication by the Dems and their lamestream media.  So, the whole thing today was a set-up for the Dems kabuki security theater to defend against a supposed repeat today of 6jan21.  This attack was supposed to occur according to some unknown advisory from an unknown agency in our intelligence community – perhaps the FBI.  In spite of today’s nothing burger, the military will continue to occupy DD for another two months – to defend against some unknown threat - at which time another fake intelligence advisory will launch the next phase of political histrionics to keep the public apprised of their assigned place under the heel of the state.

[5mar21 update]  ‘A Compromise on Creationism’ – in this little 5mar21 WSJ essay (here) physician/scientist Dr Joshua Swamidass calls for reaccreditation of colleges that teach creationism as long as they also permit discussion of and courses in evolution, along with some other provisions about the transfer of creationism course credits.  (He misses the reciprocal call for accredited secular colleges to also welcome speakers who counter theistically progressive narratives.) What again astounded me was the citing of a 2019 Gallup poll that “showed that 40% of American adults ‘ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.’” (more here)  Interesting to note is that 40% with college degrees believe that the evolution of Man was guided by God, which indicates a belief in Intelligent Design (here, here, and here) that for obvious reasons is purposely confused with and perfidiously equated to Creationism by our secular humanists.  My own concern is that these ‘strictly creationists’ reject most of what science teaches about how we and universe function, knowledge that is also the basis for the politics of public policies.  How do these religionists vote?

Right Wing Watchers

George Rebane

For some time now a hard-left commenter signing himself as ‘Nevada County Right Wing Watch’ has been visiting these pages and leaving a trail of his intelligence, understanding, and thoughts.  He claims to be part of an extensive organization, apparently one of several reported in the news that are doing their best to intimidate and shut down all wrong thought in the country.  It’s hard to tell how authentic all this is.  But it’s very easy to tell from both the news and as corroborated on this blog, that the communication between the polarized sides is extremely asymmetrical.  The Left wants to silence the Right.  The Right wants an open forum debate on ideas, happenings, history, economics, etc.

A microcosm of this activity has been recorded in RR’s comment streams for the last 14 years, and in recent years the exchange has become more intense.  During this time the leftwingers come here to repeatedly tell us that our views are grossly in error, evil, and that no one cares what we think – and yet they come.  All of them appear to think that the conservetarian ideas promoted by me and others are unique, constrained to a tiny group in these foothills, and only represent fringe far-right thought.  They have no idea of the existence of the tens of millions of every-day Americans with whom we are ideological soulmates.  From the content of their comments, it’s clear they think that if only they could silence RR, then such wrong thinking would be eliminated from the land.

In the following I present a couple of extracted comment threads from recent posts to give readers a clearer picture of the virulence experienced here and, no doubt, elsewhere.  We start with the contribution of our ever-vigilant Right Wing Watcher in a comment thread under ‘$15/hr Dumbth on the March’.

‘Luxury Floating Real Estate’

George Rebane

Living on a huge manmade island may be the thing of the future for those who can afford it and want to escape from the ever more contested and politically roiling lands that cover about 29% of the Earth’s 197,000,000 sq mi surface.  The first of these islands is being built off the Bahamas by an outfit that calls itself The Blue Estate (here).  Multiples of such islands are planned to reside off Dubai in the Persian Gulf which are advertised to be miniature havens of German, Swiss, Italian, and Swedish culture.  The Blue Estate plan envisions an island measuring 1,500 by 1,000 meters as shown below.

The island’s size, modular construction, and high (130ft) free board, augmented by another 100+ foot extendable windwalls, we are told will assure the structure’s calm survival in the roughest of hurricanes.  The island will also have propulsion and guidance so that it can transit open ocean areas to avoid storms.

Yet to be explained is to what extent the island will be energy self-sufficient using solar, wind, and wave energy extraction technologies.  Its home area will be in international waters, minutes by air away from Miami and Bahamian towns.  Apparently, food and other consumables will be imported.

The community will also be economically self-sufficient by being home to clean commercial enterprises and the successfully retired.  The commercial activities will be heavily IT oriented with ample satellite connectivity.  I can envision that it might also be home to small R&D firms engaged in computer science, genomics, and similar areas.  Located in a tropical sea with abundant (300+ days/yr) sunshine, the island can also operate a sizeable nearby sea farm containing various flora supported by an underwater matrix which will give rise to a whole new ecosystem of rich sea life similar to what exist around oil drilling platforms and the Navy’s ‘kelp farm’ (off San Clemente Island) on which I worked years ago.

One of the potential attractions of such seaborne communities may be their ability to provide social stability through a discriminative selection of residents.  It is clear to me that some such island communities will emphasize cultural cohesion of their residents.  Offering such cohesive environments seems to be the goal of the planned Persian Gulf islands that will focus on providing culture-specific resort living and holidays.

As an entrepreneur and systems nerd, I am drawn to the dreaming and planning of such habitats, and in the present case could go on for pages contemplating different concepts and their supporting technical, commercial, environmental, educational, cultural, … support systems and institutions.  But to me the problem of having the seas support a considerable population of such islands in different parts of the world will come down to the solution of the inevitable political problems that will arise and need solutions that can be implemented globally.

Because these island communities will attract (and be limited to) the smart, productive, and ‘financially capable’ people, they will naturally become hotbeds of wealth generation.  And they will therefore become tax and tariff prey for the land-based political grifters who maintain their collectivist regimes by bamboozling their poor and huddled masses yearning to be free.  These people need state supplied succor that their political leaders will not allow them to generate for all the reasons we have discussed in these pages.

In such political landscapes those who can will escape to available locales with lower taxes, regulations, and abundant liberties.  This we see happening in today’s American migrations, and have witnessed for decades (centuries?) in Europe and Asia where the productive congregate in enclaves such as Singapore, Taiwan, and formerly Hong Kong.  Therefore, new political paradigms need to be discovered if the financially and culturally attractive island communities are to thrive and multiply.  Else the early ones will just be economically harvested to oblivion by the land-based stifling autocracies that see such free and enterprising enclaves as low-hanging fruit.

Much more to be said about all this.

States Galore – it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

After three weeks into the Biden administration and Democrat congressional majorities, we have all noticed the latest facet of how the evil party operates.  As Bill McGurn observes in the 9feb21 WSJ (here), “Democrats are happy to throw over any rule, custom, or convention that gets in their way.”  In these short weeks the examples of their modus operandi are legion and growing.  The biggest hoax pushed by Biden in his inauguration speech was that he would be “the unifier”.  Well, that turned out to be the biggest load of crap right out the gate.

These changes reach all the way from the vindictive second impeachment, through partisan ramming through of the humongous $1.9T ‘relief package’, to the butt stupid repeal of and effective EO to successfully fight the country’s other pandemic – our ongoing and tragic opioid addiction.  In the latter case Biden revoked Trump’s waiver of physicians having to get some extraneous training before being able to prescribe buprenorphine – an enormously effective treatment for opioid addiction that has demonstrated itself in several other countries, e.g. France, where it is widely dispensed to addicts.  To reinstate and expand the use of this therapeutic will require navigating a bureaucratic morass while people continue to die. (more here)

But in addition to violating the Byrd Rule that prevents packing budget ‘reconciliation’ with non-budget items that could not pass on their own merits, and moving toward eliminating the 60-vote filibuster, and eliminating the Electoral College, the biggest Democrat travesty is their intention to ideologically pack not only SCOTUS, but also the Senate.  The latter ploy would be achieved by making Washington DC into our 51^st state, guaranteeing the addition of two more perennially progressive leftwing senators.

What no one seems to understand yet is that this can of worms, once opened, can be enjoyed by both sides.  If politically proven partisan cities can easily be made into states by the party in power, then what will prevent the Republicans from doing the same when they again become top dogs in DC?  Why can they not then pick a city or two in America’s heartland that are reliably Republican, and make them into our newest states?  There must be some Democrat with a 3-digit IQ who has thought of that possibility.

So, if the Dems go ahead with this, the biggest rule change of all, then they must strongly believe that they are on the cusp of making the United States into a permanent one-party state, as we have long surmised in these pages.  Then today’s visibly burgeoning autocracies in the leftwing controlled federal government, heavily populated states (led, of course, by California), and large urban centers will compliantly meld into the national tyranny that half the country has feared during recent decades.

And the alternative to one-party tyranny will then be a destabilizing binge of making states galore until the whole thing collapses.

The Biden Bamboozle Begins

George Rebane

Actually, bamboozle is way too gentle of a descriptive for what was launched yesterday.  This commentary would actually find a better home on the next entry into our Dark Days Diary, nevertheless … .  Our new president spoke of stopping the lies inundating the nation, all the while heaping on new ones while bringing up old ones for another pass over the country’s psyche so that we could all unify in the glow of an inaugural speech that drove so many to tears, albeit for markedly different reasons.

While Seattle again enjoys Antifa’s tender mercies – this time at the state’s Democratic HQ – the Left’s nationwide destructive and murderous riots of last year are either forgotten or repainted with a fresh new coat of lies, Biden’s lamestream (yes, it’s his now) plays the 6jan21 Capitol assault video over and over again as undisputable proof of where lies the real danger to America and democracy.  In his laughable attempt to focus on unifying the country, our new president is characterizing the country as in ruins and continuing crisis, all due to the mismanagement of his predecessor, who is the nation’s Supremacista Blanca El Primero.

And all 75+ million of us who voted for him, and at least that many more of our families, all of whom supported his policies and accomplishments, these now also carry the scarlet letters that label us all as white supremacists, racists, nazis (small n), and incipient domestic terrorists.  For the Left we have become the country’s number one enemy to be sought out, identified, watched, isolated, and dealt with accordingly.  Apparently, we have always been there (as RR comment streams attest), but now Donald J Trump has outed us by rising up as our leader so that the politically proper and prudent could finally see those around them who visibly rose up to support and cheer him on.

By continually citing their carefully formulated versions of our pernicious beliefs in an historically false America and our ongoing unabashed public behavior, the new administration will be free to fumble forth with all of its failures pre-attributed to the disastrous legacy of Trump abetted by his minions, still free to roam the countryside perpetuating perfidy and lies to counter socially just progressive programs and initiatives.  This cannot and will not go on unanswered.

Of course, given the recent tendentious behavior of our Hispanics and blacks, even their own traditional constituencies are not to be completely trusted.  The Left knows that these folks have been successfully bamboozled for years, and the possibility that they may now subscribe to a new pied piper is not to be discounted.

But the 800lbs gorilla in the room remains the November election which more than half of Americans have beliefs ranging from its having unexplained irregularities to outright ballot stuffing fraud.  And all these feelings have been and continue to be reinforced by the establishment, first refusing to look at and substantively refute the presented evidence, and second then upping the ante to launch a national vilifying campaign against everyone who continues expressing concerns and thinks that the conduct of the 2020 election should get at least a small fraction of the kind of attention the Democrats mandated for the 2016 election in terms of countless congressional investigations, the involvement of DoJ and the FBI and its fraudulent use of FISA, various IGs looking into their spheres of purview, the Mueller special prosecutor investigation, and the still ongoing Durham probe.

All we hear from the Dems and their nascent Biden administration is that only racists, insurrectionists, and seditious domestic terrorists remain interested in having a transparent examination of the evidence.  And, of course, no correctly thinking American should be beholden to such an irredeemable cohort of deplorables, no matter how many tens of millions they number.  The Democrats demonstrated that they can roll out a couple of divisions of armed National Guard troops at a moment’s notice if there is even a faint (unfounded?) hint of public opposition to their new power structure.  And in the meanwhile, as our liberal commenters remind us today, they will be taking our names and making lists for when the reckoning comes.  That is who they are and have always been, now it’s their time to flex some muscle and really kick ass.  This is their 'unification' program which will continue until we all unite to 'Sieg heil!' the victory of our new masters.

‘The Sovietization of California’

George Rebane

We have covered this dreadful progress to autocracy for years from a number of perspectives.  In my lifetime California has descended from its Olympian perch as the planet’s jeweled jurisdiction, to one that today competes with second and third world countries in governance, infrastructure maintenance, husbanding its natural resources, extracting tribute from its citizens, and daily ratcheting down more of their freedoms.

Longtime California resident and national columnist Dennis Prager in Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal gives a summation (here) of how the Left has tattered the once golden state.  Prager describes California as “a state where corruption reigns (one of the leading Democrats of the last half-century told me years ago that politicians in California are window dressing; the real power in California is wielded by unions) and where, for nine months, normal life has been shut down, schools have been closed, and small businesses.”

As a celebrated national leader in everything from technology to ideology, the state has worked hard to fundamentally transform America into its own declining state of collectivism.  As one of its leading bamboozles, California has convinced the nation’s light thinkers that the Left follows the science, when demonstrably “the left’s claim to ‘follow the science’ is a lie. The left does not follow science; it follows scientists it agrees with and dismisses all other scientists as ‘anti-science’.”  And then doubles down with the bigger lie that science speaks unambiguously with a single voice, which for some mystical reason only those of the Left are able to hear and understand.

Given our state’s lead, “there is no question that America is becoming, if it hasn’t already become, two countries: one that values liberty, from small businesses being allowed to operate to people being allowed to say what they believe, and one that has contempt for liberty, from eating in restaurants to free speech.”  And more differences between us are legion.  De facto, the Great Divide is already here, and, as observed in these pages, awaits only its de juris resolution.

The fat lady has sung, off key (Addended and updated)

George Rebane

[This is the addended, edited, and updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 December 2020.]

Last Monday the Electoral College elected Joe Biden to be the 46^th president of the United States.  The election was heavily contested for two distinct reasons, but to no avail.  Let me be clear from the start, I am a conservetarian and therefore not happy with the election’s outcome – also for two distinct reasons to which we’ll get directly.

This election is unique in our country’s history for a few significant reasons.  One of them being in the number of people who decided to get off their duffs and vote.  Another, and perhaps more important, is that this election was fraught with an enormous number of irregularities - procedural, legal, and criminally fraudulent.  Each of these categories contained enough incidents, not only to give credibility as to their witnessed occurrences, but also of the types that should have led to annulment or at least a redo of the cited precincts’ work to correctly qualify and count the ballots.  An alarming number of states violated their own laws, constitutions, and the US Constitution in the manner they conducted their elections prior to and in the aftermath of November 3^rd.  These violations are a matter of record, and they overwhelmingly favored one candidate over the other – always the same candidate.

Then we come to the criminally fraudulent incidents.  These again were reported by witnesses putting themselves at substantial risk of committing felonies, as they filed affidavits that attested to what they saw and heard.  And again, such sworn affidavits, which are accepted as evidence in all courts, numbered in the tens (hundreds?) across the land and described incidents of ballots handling that could have plausibly affected the election’s outcome had they been allowed to be corroborated by the authorities.

From Fox News to …? (updated 14nov20)

George Rebane

OK boys and girls, things have gotten rotten in the Murdoch media empire.  I’ve been pissing and moaning about Fox News for months now (always did have my gimlet eye trained on them) as their news coverage and copy kept drifting, now visibly sliding, toward lamestream journalism.  Their ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ has always brought out a chuckle in me and mine, but today the ‘unafraid’ part is an out-and-out farce – they are very afraid of straying too far from the progressive narrative.  (As I’ve noted many times before, ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ has always been a fool’s errand that only convinces the naïfs.)  For lack of a better target, I blame the entire transformation on Rupert’s liberal son Lachlan now in charge of their news outlets.  The even more liberal son James has already departed Fox because it still wouldn’t follow the leftwing narrative well enough, especially the coverage and promotion of climate change (i.e. preventable manmade global warming).  So now the cat is out of the bag.  Once daddy left the business to his sons, things immediately started listing to port.

FN’s and FB’s stalwarts like Bret Baier and Neil Cavuto have already tossed in the towel and joined their liberal colleague Chris Wallace and former colleague Shepard Smith in how they select and wordsmith their news reports and interviews – today the prematurely departed Smith would feel very much at home at FN.  But the real canaries in the Murdoch media mine are conservative stalwarts like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham (and maybe even Jesse Watters).  If any of them start leaving FN, then that network’s turn to the dark side is a done deal.

It would be interesting to see where such conservative commentarians would take their established brands.  Newsmax is an obvious destination.  And there are more conservative streaming news outlets available like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly’s new homes that would get a tremendous viewership boost if they garnered any of FN’s big three.  And now we’re starting to hear rumors that a former president Donald Trump may again be in the business of starting his own news network or buying into an existing one and turning it into Trump TV (more here).

To all this I will add our country’s losing fight with the First Amendment as the forces of darkness continue to throttle free speech and religious liberties.  A significant telltale about the ‘progress’ of progressives in this arena was SCOTUS Justice Alito’s recent speech to the Federalist Society on these topics of America’s freedoms. (more here, here, here, and here)

Exciting times ahead as the nation starts its foreplay with socialism after Biden’s inauguration.  I’m hoping that our intrepid RR readers, who seem to know all that’s happening on the web, will keep the rest of us informed as to the best post-Fox destinations on cable or online.

[14nov20 update]  Bill Whittle at Instapundit.com delivers the first of a multi-part series (here) on the downfall of America’s media and the particulars of how the election was impacted by their fake news and daily streams of lies.  (H/T to reader)

I fear for our beloved Republic (updated 7nov20)

George Rebane

With the election over and unknown thousands of votes yet to be discovered, counted, and adjudicated, we have entered a virgin and wild land untrammeled in our history.  Having arrived therein, today we are literally a polarized population of pioneers who see the other as savages to be subdued.  Common ground for launching a healing dialogue was forsaken long ago.

Reminding readers that these pages contain ‘Observations and Interpretations from the Last Great Century of Man’, we now begin in earnest to witness and partake in our country’s dissolution – the Great Divide has arrived, what remains is how we can go forward to a mutually satisfactory political solution that describes the form and functions of a newly divided continent.  If we cannot resolve this peacefully, then we may have our country’s first true civil war in which both sides wish to take over and rule the entire land.

History students understand that the conflagration of 1860-65 was not a civil war, as it is erroneously described today.  In reality it was a War for Southern Independence launched by secessionist states that had no desire to ‘take over’ the United States of America.  Were violence to be our fate, then one can foresee a similarly purposed conflict with the Right wanting to secede, and the Left opposing secession with the force of arms.  That is a political asymmetry the Left has refused to acknowledge, as it vigorously opposes its natural outcome.

The Right wants to live in a land where it can practice its values of liberty, freedom, enterprise, and capitalism.  The Right has no desire to force other people to adopt their values and mores.  The Left, as the perpetual hatchery of totalitarian regimes, will force everyone it can control to adopt and practice its ideology, even if that necessitates a vast gulag and re-education camps.  The Left has demonstrated again its perennial practice of soiling its existing nests, and then emigrating to unspoiled regions and communities to repeat the process.  There is no evidence of emigrations in the opposite direction; the people of the Right continue to escape to a shrinking collection of unspoiled pastures with the vain hope that they will not be followed.  It is anyone’s guess how long this pattern of migrations can continue.

The election of 2020 is yet to be decided, but the outlook for Republicans does not look good.  I assess President Trump’s chance of being re-elected at less than 5%.  The only hope for America dodging the fundamental transformation bullet for the near term is that Republicans retain the Senate, and that SCOTUS will revert to a strong constitutionalist bench in adjudicating the blizzard of cases it will encounter.  With a Republican Senate under Majority Leader Mitch, we can hope for blockage of the most egregious socialist GND legislation that will issue from Speaker Pelosi’s House.  Under the Harris/Biden administration gridlock will be good.

What disturbs (terrifies?) me the most is the fraction of the electorate that support a fundamental transformation of our Republic from the historical country of Makers to a country of government promoted Takers.  This is the key attribute that illustrates our divided house, and therefore portends the Great Divide.  None of our leading thinkers ensconced in their Institutions of Thinking has a clue on how to stop the ever-widening chasm so well illustrated this week, let alone providing even a rough outline for bringing us back close enough to preserve the Union.  I say this because the Takers have been taught to believe that the only means to reduce their pain – real, imagined, or self-inflicted – is to have government take more from the Makers.  As has been shown in so many other countries passing through socialism, there always comes a time when the Makers quit making.

The 2022 election will respond to whatever pain the Democrats inflict on the country.  Even though fewer Republican Senate seats will be up for grabs, the solution of inducing more Makers to make more is not on any progressive horizon.  If the Senate flips to the dark side, then Nellie bar the door; even a conservative SCOTUS on the way to the packing house will be of no help.  This election, now going for the bumblebrain and socialist-in-waiting, demonstrates that we Americans no longer have the collective wisdom to preserve our liberties or our land of the free.  Once a political monopoly is established at the federal level, it will take the country down the trail so visibly blazed by California and its like-minded coastal calamities.  What happens then is anyone’s guess, but for sure it will not be pretty.

During this tendentious week, my final wish is that President Trump will act presidential when this election’s dust settles.  And if he must depart, that he does so with newfound dignity and decorum, that were it practiced more frequently during his years in office would have guaranteed him a second term.

[7nov20 update]  "Joe Biden is Elected the 46th U.S. President"

Scattershots – 4sep20 (updated 9sep20)

The most important goal of the leftist project is to use the twin 2020 tragedies to alter the very storyline of America. – Mike Gonzales

George Rebane

The Great Divide draws nigh.  One of our astute readers highlighted ‘The Revolution is Upon Us’ by Mike Gonzales in the comment stream of the last Sandbox.  It is in an important essay that correctly highlights much of what is going on in America today as we approach the most contentious and possibly disastrous presidential election in our country’s history.  Read it.

Bumblebrain’s Big Lies continue with his latest claim in Kenosha that it has been President Trump who has divided the country.  In the meantime, more clear-minded commentators from both the Left and Right recognize that it has been America's Left, dragging the Democrat Party with it, that started the quick march to Marxism.  If anything, this leftward lurch has also attracted some spineless Republicans to lean to port in the attempt to keep their elected jobs.  The Republican Party's platform has remained unchanged over the last years, which cannot be said for Team Pelosi et al.

Trump on voting twice.  The president’s words and meaning have been mangled beyond recognition by the lamestream and our desperate Democrats.  (more here and here)

Here are the president’s exact words to Jon Evans of North Carolina’s WECT:  “Well they'll go out and they'll vote, and they're going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way, because if it tabulates, then they won't be able to do that. So, let them send it in and let them go vote, and if the system is as good as they say it is, obviously they won't be able to vote. If it isn't tabulated, they'll be able to vote so that's the way it is. And that's what they should do.”  He repeated a similar message last night in Pennsylvania.

School shutdowns are butt stupid.  Using persuasive, cogent, and technically correct arguments more suitable for polite company, Drs J. Battacharya and M. Kulldorff of Stanford and Harvard Universities respectively,  inform us in ‘The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy’ that – “There is little purpose in using tests to check asymptomatic children to see if it is safe for them to come to school. When children are infected, most are asymptomatic, and the mortality risk is lower than for the flu. While adult-to-adult and adult-to-child transmission is common, child-to-adult transmission isn’t. Children thus pose minimal risk to their teachers. If a child has a cough, a runny nose or other respiratory symptoms, he should stay home. You don’t need a test for that. … Sweden was the only major Western country that kept schools open for kids 15 and younger throughout the pandemic, with no masks or mass testing. How did it turn out? Zero Covid-19 deaths among 1.8 million children attending day care or school. Teachers didn’t have an excess infection risk compared with the average of other professions.”  I want to emphasize that I’m using ‘butt stupid’ as opposed to ‘ignorant’ to describe public policies keeping kids from attending school – ignorance can be corrected by supplying the ignorant with relevant data and information; stupidity refers to the cognitive inability to process, which is a deficit much more resistant to remediation.  Unfortunately, it is the latter that afflicts government bureaucracies far and wide.

[6sep20 update]  We are no longer sufficient unto ourselves.  Foreign worker visas have been hampered by C19 strictures and other prohibitions intended to give a helping hand to the non-existent American worker.  Worker shortages have cropped up everywhere, led by the lack of qualified and willing talent in sectors such as technology, hospitality, recreation, and agriculture. (more here and here)  Equally troubling is the prohibition on academic visas for grad school students studying and researching STEM fields.  Since these resident workers earn and spend the bucks here in this consumer dominated economy, it is not clear where the additional consumer spending will come from to make up for the dear departed or never arrived.  More and more of our fellow Americans continue to get college degrees that require skill sets for which no one is willing to spend their own money to hire – of course, government spending OPM is the ever-present employer of last resort for those know-nothings, for which then the country suffers.  This reliance on legal and illegal foreigners cannot end well for us.

‘America Hit by Roughly 550 Violent Demonstrations in Three Months’  A bit of news totally alien to consumers of lamestream media.  National Propaganda Radio wakes up the country every morning with reports of “protests” against “racial injustice” in our cities, never mentioning the real openly declared aims of the BLM and Antifa rioters, amply funded, supplied, and transported as required to keep the heat on in the cities with incompetent, compliant, and abetting Democratic administrations.  And then, led by Team Pelosi and their lamestream lackeys, the word goes out again that the whole thing is fomented by our divisive President Trump.  And for millions of light readers across this land, this kind of reportage sustains their ground truth about what’s really going on.

China is weaponizing water.  China is the source of major Asian rivers that flow into over ten other Asian countries.  On its rivers China has built over 87,000 dams, and continues to build ever more of these critical infrastructures that create huge reservoirs for in-country irrigation, transportation, and exerting strategic influence on its neighbors.  China can and has created droughts and floods that cause major impacts on the lives and economies of downstream countries.  If you don’t play ball according to China’s rules, your lands may be flooded or crackling dry. (more here) Now China also has dam problems, witness the structural cracks developing in its Three Gorges Dam and others (more here).  Also, dams are very vulnerable to attack during wartime, and many experts predict that in this century the major cause of wars will be over access to fresh water.

[9sep20 update]  Left always wants to silence the Right, but not vice versa.  Why?  This litmus test for a leftwinger is reliable because the Left never ever has any new ideas, but can only offer slogans for old collectivist policies that have never worked here or elsewhere.  So in the battle of ideas their best tactic is to take a pass and call off the contest.  Instead of ideas, they substitute the Big Lie and a stream Alinsky Alternatives.  Locally this tactic was again evident in calls to silence both RR and Jo Ann who sits on The Union's editorial board.  And the Big Lie gambit is constantly available in its various forms in our local left-listing newspaper, today having a particularly vicious cornucopia of anti-Trump copy.

The Democrats continue to work a brilliant tactic to promote Biden, they keep Trump talking about Trump.  Biden is a singularly unaccomplished, corrupt, and feckless politician with a 50-year record of absolutely no accomplishments that he can be allowed to burnish in public.  And he doesn’t even dare read off the list of policies his Marxist handlers have planned for us.  So to divert and suppress the Republicans’ strong suit of accomplishments and planned policies, the Dems have made the campaign about personalities, and ego-brimming Trump is more than happy to comply.  Our president still doesn’t understand that not many people like him personally, and that his only hope is informing voters of his record of accomplishments and plans for a prosperous and sovereign America.  Were he to make the campaign about what he’s done and plans to do, ol’ Bumblebrain would show up at that gunfight with an empty holster.

Shifting from the Fourth to the Fifth

George Rebane

Let me get this straight, led by Rep Schiff, the Dems are taking the DHS to task for doing its job in developing and providing intelligence on today’s anti-American rioters, their enablers, and their propagandists.  WaPo, the arch-leftwing lamestream outlet, presents one of its totally misleading reports on what’s happening in the land, and how the DHS relieved Brian Murphy, the head of its Office of Intelligence & Analysis, for compiling intelligence on the country’s coordinating rioters and journalists who published reports on confidential DHS documents to subvert and interfere with its security operations.

All this is part and parcel of efforts by the leading lamestream outlets to support continuing civil strife by undermining and managing public opinion against federal officials working to restore order in cities where local authorities promote looting, burning, and general mayhem by taking their police off the streets under the guise of protecting the civil rights of “peaceful protesters”.  (Today’s crime stats speak for themselves.)  WaPo, instead, tells its readers that “DHS has been under mounting scrutiny from lawmakers and civil liberties groups over its use of federal law enforcement officers to quell protests in Portland and in light of President Trump’s threat to deploy federal personnel to other cities that he asserts are being overrun by violent criminals.” (more here)

What the demonic Dems and their propagandist media count on is the short memory or just plain ignorance of the general public in consuming these breathless reports of the DHS doing its mandated job.  For over four years the Democratic leadership fabricated bought-and-paid-for ‘evidence’ against President Trump, his staff, and election campaign in an administration wide effort that we now know was launched and coordinated from the Oval Office.  Readers of these pages know the litany of charges that were sequentially brought by Democrat controlled and colluding Justice Department officials (the AG and FBI Director) and House committees that launched an unending series of investigations, including one requiring a special prosecutor, and finally ending with a disgraceful trumped-up partisan impeachment.

All of these came to naught, failing to find a shred of evidence of criminality or wrongdoing.  And ALL these enterprises involved government acting in its most cynical manner, employing extra-constitutional methods to destroy an administration and reverse the 2016 election’s outcome.  And how did our mainstream media comport itself during these subterfuges and kabuki performances?  Over the years they behaved as obedient lackeys of the Democratic National Committee, publishing article after article that bent the truth ranging from partisan innuendo to blatant Big Lies (latest examples here).

Today the beat goes on unabated.  The barefaced propagandists continue their daily manufacture of ‘news’ that widens the ideological chasm in America, having already brought it to a state in which neighbors, who formerly understood and tolerated each other’s political leanings, can no longer stomach their proximity.  Our ability to meet at non-partisan social occasions is fast disappearing, as everyone, first and foremost, frames the other as a compatriot or someone working to undermine our country’s future.  And as has happened many times during the upheavals of the last century, the afflicted country’s Fourth Estate has always been complicit as it morphed into its Fifth Column.

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

George Rebane

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

The things that unite us –

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

The things that divide us –

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Racism – no time to decide (updated)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunker Down Diary – 16jun20

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

George Rebane

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

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

Riot Reflections - 30may20 (updated)

George Rebane

The videod murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police gave rise to justified public protests that quickly turned into destructive and violent riots which have little to do with the death of Mr Floyd, and instead have again revealed that we Americans are no longer ‘one people’ who can be called to ‘come together’.

Law enforcement agencies of all stripes provide daily demonstrations that they are an institution unto themselves, there to overwhelmingly look after their own interests and provide little or no security for those who pay them to preserve society and civilization.  As clearly admitted by the Minneapolis police chief who publicly stated the reason his officers are standing back, standing down, and hightailing it from rioters is that he does not want to put them in harm’s way in situations that could turn dangerous.  Think about that.  What if firemen would only fight unrisky fires?  What if the FBI adopted a similar policy, no field operations in which their agents were put at risk?  What if the Secret Service would protect the President only to the extent that it would not be dangerous to them?  What if our military didn’t want to commit troops into situations in which casualties would result?

So the police et al, those who do attend the riots now taking place in cities across the land, simply gather in solid self-defensive phalanxes to watch the rioting mob loot and burn.  Over the lamestream media we are informed in an ongoing stream of commentary that these are not riots (a word absent in lamestream reports) led by criminal thugs, but simply justified “protests” attended by “protesters”.  The rest of us are told by our politicians that any criminality that is evident is justified, and that we must simply let it play out.  Actually, its more than that as FN’s Tucker Carlson explained in a landmark monologue last night – ‘Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we're told crimes of the mob are our fault’.

Local business owners who witness their life’s work and savings go up in flames are seen pleading with the mob to no avail.  Some are again taking up arms to defend their lives and livelihoods, and most cynically, the police are arresting those who dare shoot (at) rioters inside their premises in acts of arson and looting.

No doubt one can draw a connection between the lengthy pandemic lockdowns and the number of urban dwellers eager to get out of their houses and small apartments to protest undeniable injustices at the hands of law enforcement and our entire ‘justice system’.  But in doing so, they do underline that we are not one people as former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile asserts in her ‘We are one people’.  The rioters are not people who built this country, as they claim, and are therefore entitled to ‘burn it down’.  These are people who have their very own and distinct social contract with the institutions of our government – contrary to their protestations, they have rights and privileges, demonstrated daily, that people like me and mine wouldn’t dream of having in a civilized society.

Here’s an interesting question – what would the police do if law abiding folks of all colors showed up armed in downtowns to protect and defend the properties and property owners against the rioting mobs?

And here’s an even more interesting question – what would local governments and law enforcement agencies do if the streets were filled with peaceful protesters of all colors who looked like you and me?

And finally – what if all those law-abiding peaceful protesters against LE injustice showed up also demonstrating why Americans are unique with their constitutional 2A rights?

[update] A reader sent me a link to a Powerline article on the Twin Cities riots.  It appears that both Democrat Mayors Jacob Frey and Melvin Carter are doing their best to dodge any and all responsibility for what's going down in their mismanaged metropolises, even to the anticipated desperate accusation that the riots are being instigated by out-of-state "white supremacists".  How do self-respecting Democrats elect such misfits to office?  (more here and here)

Local liberals lambast loosening lockdowns (updated)

George Rebane

As we and others across the country have pointed out, phasing out the C19 lockdowns has become the latest political chasm in the Great Divide.  You know that our country is now fundamentally transformed when it can no longer come together for a unified response to a national emergency.  It’s not a reach to conclude that had we this kind of schism in our citizenry in 1940, then the US entry and participation in WW2 would have been very different with historical consequences of creating a world we would not recognize today.

Our leftwing wants the country to suffer enormously and enduringly – first, in order to defeat Trump in November, and then to remain in a devastated state during which main street mobs will rise to demand a bigger government to save them.  Today the most reliable way for the Left to achieve this state of affairs is to maintain the economy destroying lockdown for as long as possible while buying votes wholesale with government checks drawn on newly printed money.

On the local scene we see this policy promoted daily in the pages of The Union by our county’s progressives.  Most recently, columns by conservatives Terry McLaughlin (here) and the wife of my life, Jo Ann Rebane (here) have drawn extensive ire on the matter of loosening the local lockdown.  It is particularly instructive to read the comment stream under Ms McLaughlin’s column, and the same can be said for Jo Ann’s column.  A more measured response to the latter is in the 7may20 print edition of The Union from a Mr Paul Hauck.  He claims Rebane’s call to prudently loosen the Nevada County lockdown is both unreasonable and factually incorrect.

Nowhere did Rebane promote a “precipitous” abandonment of social distancing, masks, etc.  And whether through careless reading, promoting an agenda, or both, he disputes the cited university reports on the estimated levels of existing herd immunity in California, and goes on to doubt her understanding of “the causal connection” between stay-at-home and low C19 incidence (no active cases currently) in the county.  I personally can attest to the lady’s deep and detailed understanding of such factors affecting pandemics, which appears to be a cut above Mr Hauck’s own understanding of regional herd immunity variances in the country.  (My own analysis of the impact of herd immunity levels and the intensity of a ‘second wave’ was published here and in the 18apr20 Union.)  He most certainly does not know what other countries have done and are doing to effectively loosen their lockdowns.

We know the story of Sweden (more here), and are learning daily how other EU countries have fared on their return paths to normalcy.  The evidence, as I have presented before, shows little correlation of death rates between various lockdown levels implemented by countries.  The latest good news comes from Germany (here), a country that never went into a draconian destruction derby with its economy, and is now rapidly reinstating pre-C19 norms in its commercial sector.  Such reports are, of course, omitted or on page seven in the lamestream media.

The main point that is lost in such leftwing opposition to prudent paths to loosen the lockdowns is both gratuitous, and definitely politically motivated to retain public policies that will maximally stifle the healing of our economy and the return to normalcy.

[update]  Are we in the middle of a ‘Plandemic’?  Along the line of argument presented here and elsewhere in these pages, I received this video of an interview with renowned molecular biologist and medical researcher Dr Judy Mikovitz, PhD (here). She did seminal work on viruses in the development of vaccines and the eradication of HIV/AIDS.  Her PhD dissertation and subsequent discoveries put big pharma at risk, and she was successfully attacked and silenced for 5 years by court order (while uncharged with any crime) and threat of fabricated prosecution.  This interview is not only a pertinent revelation about the underside of what’s happening now in our nation’s C19 response, but also about how an entire industry controls the science and released public information about infectious diseases.  The five years are up, and she has co-authored a book (here) about the massive subterfuge that is drawing legions of physicians equally concerned (outraged?) about how our power establishment is managing the business of infectious diseases.  I personally am a bit astounded that in today’s environment of corporatist censorship, that this video is still available to us (YouTube took it down).  It’s worth your time to view it and see what you will make of it.

And make no mistake, there is plenty of opposition to Mikovitz and her assertions of conspiracy at the highest levels that include recently canonized St Anthony of Fauci.  Here and here are a couple of links to give balance to the above.

The Great Divide – A Solution RFP

'The goal of socialism is communism.'  Vladimir Lenin

George Rebane

This is another request for proposal to our leftwing fellow citizens to offer a solution to the irreparable Great Divide which has been instituted over the last 50 years in America, and continues to be widened daily.  Our Left and Right citizenry no longer shares a common history, values, mores, facts, humor, logic, ethics, science, economics, culture, national future, …, unto even our language for which the Left now has its own new lexicon, semantics, and proscribed usages. 

These pages give ample evidence, over a decade’s worth now amplified by the national emergency, that there is absolutely no common ground left between us upon which to meet.  We on the Right have recognized this for some time, and many essays have lamented this state of affairs.  We on the Right have also proposed, pursued, and continue to pursue solutions, all with a common basis that calls for various forms of orderly separation between the two ideologically riven peoples that results in a physical and political division of two more culturally cohesive populations.  The Left has ignored the problem almost in its entirety, and continues in its own way to understand the schism as arising from a primitive belief system that burdens a minor cohort of ignorant and evil Americans, beliefs that now should belong in the dustbin of history.

To date, the Left’s only semblance of a solution conforms to and seeks to repeat the 'solutions' of past collectivist regimes – identify, control, punish, and re-educate the remnants.  The Left wants neither a physical nor a political separation.  The Right’s view of the Left mostly mirrors theirs, and proposes solutions that hew to those exercised by our forebears and Founders.

So I am again soliciting from our leftwing readers to provide or point to a clear assessment of today’s ideological landscape in America, and methods to remedy the Great Divide in an orderly and non-violent manner, with a description of what such a fundamentally transformed America would then look like.  To give our opposites a firm set of starting blocks from which to launch such a proposal, I refer them to The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, and The Progressive Manifesto (2003) by Anthony Giddens.

Surely someone of our local Left has a communicable vision of the America that they and theirs labor daily to bring about.  I will post for discussion on RR all such proposals under their authors' bylines.  Thank you.

Ruminations – 20apr20

George Rebane

“We are all in this together.”  Who make up the “we”?  What defines the “this”?  Porter Stansberry makes a very compelling cast that this assertion by the governments and their loyal lackies is the Big Lie of today (here)  – we are not all in this together, and the ‘this’ is different for all of us who live in various regions of the country. Its main purpose is to convince good-hearted people to overlook the realities of the C19 epidemic and follow the ever more invasive and pervasive dicta of the authorities who laying in command and control procedures that will survive the end of the epidemic by decades.  What’s happening now that we’re hunkering down is training us to accept a whole slew of new constraints on the liberties that our Constitution guarantees.  Again, harbinger Numero Uno is when they come for our guns.

The Great Divide confirmed more than ever.  Cohesive nation-states have always come together and shown their fundamental unity when confronting an external threat or national emergency.  America has been a posterchild of such unity since the War Between the States (erroneously still called the Civil War).  No more.  As we have been observing now for over a decade, the divisions between us today are unfathomable and too large to overcome.  Nowhere is this demonstrated with greater unambiguity than in our response to the C19 pandemic.  Here in this election year, one party is doing its best to heal the nation and return to normalcy, while the evil party is doing everything possible to extend the human misery, bring longterm destruction to our economy, and blame America under the current administration for any and all ills across the world.  Their goal is to bring the US to its knees as the disease abates, in order to present the global collective a fundamentally transformed nation that is weak, compliant, and chastened.

Under ‘Autocracy Rising’ we are getting reports of new egregious behaviors by our LE cadres as they start imitating Stasi tactics across the land during this pandemic.  One Florida student who caught C19-type symptoms on a high school band trip and recovered, posted her experience on Instagram.  The school became enraged and sicked the local cops on her.  These showed up at her residence and threatened to “start taking people to jail” for “disorderly conduct” unless she immediately removed her post, which she did.  Later it was pointed out that our Constitution makes no “pandemic exception” for denying 1A rights.  Sign of the times – bend over and spread ‘em. (more here)

More on Autocracy Rising - NYC mayor and its Stasi’s Oberführer Bill de Blasio is now exhorting New Yorkers to report social distancing infractions by neighbors to the authorities (here). He wants the citizen snitch to take a picture of the scofflaws, and send it immediately to the police so that “we can get help there to fix the problem.”  Gotta love them Dems – give ‘em an inch, and they’ll take … .

Democracy Destroys the Electoral College

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 19 February 2020.  An edited version of this was published in the 7mar20 Union (here).]

The nation’s Left is again demanding that the country should give up its republican roots and become a democracy – something which our Founders warned us against and were careful to avoid when they gave us a constitutional republic, with Ben Franklin’s admonition “… if you can keep it.”  It’s doubtful that those fine points of civics and governance are still taught in our public schools.  What’s happening today in Virginia gives evidence of that.

Now that Democrats completely control what used to be a battleground state, their House of Delegates have “passed a bill that aims to do an end run around the Electoral College.”  When the governor signs it into law, Virginia will become the latest state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  The compact calls for each member state to award all of its electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes in the national election – 50 plus percent will do the job, leaving the other 50 minus percent voiceless in a presidential election.

Virginia ratifying the compact will bring to 209 votes in the Electoral College that will be apportioned by a democratic majority, a compact that has already been enacted into law by 15 states and the District of Columbia, and is pending in all the other states.  When the total ratified reaches 270 out of the total of 538 Electoral College votes, we will have effectively done away with the Electoral College, and will then elect our president by plebiscite.  This major step toward a pure democracy will mark a dangerous milestone in the regress of America’s governance from what the Founders bequeathed us. (more here) and here)

We do have our own facts (updated 7feb20)

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." A. Lincoln

George Rebane

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

The nationally prominent public figure and liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us the well-known shibboleth that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Moynihan was a man of many talents, serving as adviser to several presidents of both parties, Harvard college professor, ambassador to India and the UN, and as a four-term senator from New York.  He died in 2003, a bit too early to witness the rejection and even falsification of what at first reading seems like an eminently reasonable and widely applicable statement.

Today in 2020 we have long acknowledged and adopted the existence of at least two sets of facts, held by each side of a deeply polarized country.  That we do not agree on the facts which support our stands on public policies is the prime reason why we can no longer emulate that great Texas politician and 36th US president Lyndon Johnson, when he would put his big arm around an uncompromising opponent’s shoulder and utter the biblical invitation from Isaiah to “Come now, let us reason together.”  But the prerequisite for reasoning together is to have some common ground that usually begins by accepting some common collection of critical facts.

They’re Off!

George Rebane

President Trump delivered his best speech ever giving the nation its State of the Union.  He ticked off an impressive list of accomplishments that benefitted every corner and population segment of the country.  He did a masterful job in selecting and managing the events in the gallery that honored and represented the many deserving.  And there was nothing nasty in his words, presented themes, and visions for America’s future.  All this while the Democrats sat like sore pustules in their seats denying the uncomfortable truths of accomplishments while they have spent their energies in trying every sleazy trick in the book to bring this president down simply because he beat their Chosen One.

But the prize and truly historical moment of disrespect came at the end of the speech when Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sitting behind the President, visibly made a show of tearing in half her copy of the speech and throwing the pieces on her desk in full view of the American public.  With that Great Divide play she bet the ranch that Americans see their country and future through the jaundiced eyes of the radical left progressives.  To my knowledge, no American political leader has publicly so vehemently and visibly dissed another political leader in the history of our Republic.  I believe she will live to rue the day in the coming months, because we will see that planned and egregious tantrum over and over again as the election approaches.

The 2020 election season officially started tonight.

The Harvard Reorganization Plan

George Rebane

Harvard has a plan to deconstruct our republic and rebuild it in their own image.  To launch a national dialogue on this initiative, the university’s prestigious law school has published ‘Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation’ which we shall here call the Harvard Reorganization Plan (HRP).  For those unfamiliar, Harvard University is today perhaps the best endowed ($40.9B as of FY2019) premier academe of all things ideologically progressive and the fount of America’s leftwing thought.  For our liberals it is the mother temple of correct forward thinking – as declared in its motto ‘Veritas’, the institution publishes its works on stone tablets.

In the HRP, on their most recently issued tablet, their legal academics make an extensive and well-documented case for yet the most fundamental transformation, if not the complete abrogation, of what has been the United States of America.  This is a bottom up plan that will rip out by the roots our “republic, if you can keep it.”  The HRP proposes a devilishly convoluted route to replace our present form of governance with a pure democracy; using the leaks, holes, and soft-points of our otherwise carefully constructed Constitution to first create a minimum of 96 solidly leftwing new states out of what is now the District of Columbia – since DC is federal territory, this will require only a simple majority in the Senate to achieve.  Then with a newly constituted hard-Left Congress, the Constitution will be pro forma amended beyond recognition so that the result is the birth of a new United Socialist States of America (USSA).

On its first reading, HRP puts forward some very persuasive arguments for the founding of a new USSA.  But it is persuasive in a blindered and blinding manner.  And all of these arguments pivot on the siren song of “equal representation” - ‘one person, one vote’ - to be applied in a reorganized America to as many public policy decisions as possible.  The promise here is replicating the California template wherein cowardly politicians, rather than assume political risk and vote openly in the legislature, will throw the decision to a manipulable electorate so that the desired result can be credited to ‘the peehpul’.   Today the whole nation can see the fruits of that kind of a legislative dodge.

The purpose of this commentary is to invite readers to collect in one place their thoughts on the recommendations in the HRP and other similar plans that call for changing our democratic republic into a democracy.  In the sequel I list some numbered assertions, some of which I offer axiomatically, others as propositions, and perhaps a few as provable theorems.

1. The natural world (universe) has evolved over the billions of years to be an unequal, lumpy, more-here-than-there, highly discriminating, and therefore marvelously complex place that gave rise to equally unequal critters like Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
2. We are each identifiably unique in almost every dimension of being and doing that we can imagine. Therefore, if thrown into the same cauldron, we sort ourselves out very quickly as to those who can and will do what is the best, most, and/or quickest.  And we observe this as an attribute we share with all the more highly developed animals – the smarter the critter, the more differentiable it is from its fellows.
3. The belief in and the enforcement of unexamined and unqualified equality is unnatural, and gives rise to societies that cannot generate the wealth required to maintain a beneficial quality of life for any of its members, including the controlling elites.
4. Humans don’t know how to purposely manage large-scale, complex systems affected by random influences. While we can impact their serendipitous responses, we cannot beneficially control their behavior.  Mankind’s attempt to do so has always resulted in large-scale misery that precedes tragedy.  Central control of such systems requires much more knowledge than we have been able to assemble.  The eternal hubris of the Left is to ignore and/or deny this truth.
5. Nature’s answer to this conundrum is to distribute knowledge and control to the lowest levels (of agency found) in large systems. The leaf knows neither the nature nor purpose of the tree, and needs know neither to do a good job as a leaf, paying attention only to its immediate environment.  Even Rousseau and Marx caught a whiff of such an Elysian state of being in their philosophies.
6. Our Founders were astute students of human nature. They knew the histories of failed democracies, and to a man, sought to shield their new nation from a similar short-sighted fate.  Hence, the immortal words of Ben Franklin when asked what the Constitutional Convention had wrought – ‘A republic if you can keep it’, clearly indicating that future generations’ ability to sustain their bequest was to be western civilization’s Great Experiment of governance.
7. No reasonable person would argue that our Constitution is the perfect foundational document for a republic. Its flaws were already recognized when it was still being hammered on the anvil.  That’s why the Constitution was issued with built-in mechanisms by which it could be amended in a deliberate and orderly manner as new times would give rise to new values and thinking.  There is nothing deliberate or orderly in the manner HRP calls for rewriting the Constitution.
8. Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter – Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007) captured and quantified the recent experience in sustaining our Republic subjected to the vicissitudes of an electorate composed overwhelmingly of those who won’t or can’t grasp the issues about which they must choose. The results of this monumental study would not have surprised our Founders.
9. I submit that, were the measures outlined in the HRP to be initiated by the next Democrat controlled Congress, there would arise a spontaneous nationwide armed resistance to ‘save the Constitution’ and maintain the status quo. In short, reasoned national dialogue would break down in a similar manner experienced during the years before the War Between the States.

More later, based on our prolific and deep-thinking readers, and as other thoughts will undoubtedly arise in the fullness of time, I will add them to the list with attribution.

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."