Rebane's Ruminations

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

In the last Dark Days Diary (here) I highlighted a short dissertation on the spread of communism by a former KGB agent.  As we have frequently pointed out, and he confirms, the spread of that evil ideology is made possible by its acolytes initially gaining control of a target nation’s public educational system.  This is from the Marxist-Leninist playbook – ‘let me educate one generation of your youth to assure communism’s triumph.’  In the United States we are now educating the third generation with a curriculum that ranges between pure trash and insidious collectivist propaganda – e.g. Critical Race Theory.  And this is done in our public K-12 schools and also academe, which has for the most part eliminated all dissenting voices and thought on their campuses.

Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson makes the extensive case (here and here) that this onerous task is being carried out by teachers’ unions and faculty associations which have wholeheartedly embraced the goal of a socialist world order.  Their success can be measured by the fraction of our graduates who are profoundly ignorant of their American heritage and equally lacking skill sets which enable their entry into a productive workforce.  A disturbing share of them find work with government as the employer of last resort.  There they immediately fit in with the correctly thinking and compliant deep state extension of the Democratic Party, doing its work no matter who currently happens to control Congress or reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

For the Left, this fortuitous outcome is to a large extent the fault of our ‘go along to get along’ Republicans.  Over the years they, as the conservators of our Constitution, have shown little interest to understand and a backbone to resist the nation’s ratcheting of anti-American public policies.  The Republicans appear to measure their political progress by how good they feel when grumbling and griping about the Left to their likeminded constituents in cloistered gatherings.  These pity-party nodding sessions motivate only a trickling of attendees, if that, to take an active stance to counter the encroach of socialism in their communities.  The rank-and-file Republican then returns to his homestead to continue living a productive and non-contentious life minding his own business.

The only plausible road back (from beyond the tipping point to the Great Divide) is to regain local control of educating our children.  Rebane Doctrine has long taught that to do this is to change education policy so that in the public funding of education the money follows the student, and parents determine where the students are schooled.  This calls for a restructuring of our education industry into a more open-market, capitalistic format, and away from the rank socialist structure of today.  In the main, K-12 education should be available to parents in the same manner as is the choice of a college education.  This means that schools would become transparent for-profit institutions that make their performance (quality of their product) accessible to their clients.  Overall, given today’s cost of education, such a change would significantly reduce costs, and increase the relevance and quality of the delivered education.

Our leftwing knows that Sapir-Whorf’s theory of language enabling thought (q.v.) is correct as was made public by Orwell and put in practice on a national scale by Mao et al.  Today’s public educated true believers can neither believe in the existence of alternative ways to organize a beneficial society, nor understand where our nation’s present path is taking us (e.g. evidence of that abounds in these pages).

No one knows the truth of all this more than does our Democratic Party which has viewed their support of socialized education as required maintenance of their private manufactory of an ever-increasing horde of compliant constituents and unquestioning voters.  The last thing our Left will tolerate is making school choice possible and letting parents decide where their children will be schooled.

Stupidity, against which there is no defense

Fools all who seem it, and half of those who do not.  Gracian #201

George Rebane

Executed anti-Nazi cleric and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer correctly maintained that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil.”  In America, we overwhelmingly confirm this daily.  Now I admit, sometimes it’s hard to accept this as the better of the two alternatives, but for the most part one can embrace Bonhoeffer’s observation because there are way more stupid people in the country than evil ones.  This has also been a Rebane Doctrine tenet for many years.  (more here)

Democrat politicians and lamestream ‘journalists’ demonstrate this with their audacious and ongoing stream of lies – e.g. the $4T+ BBB cost “will not raise the national debt by one penny.” - they constantly use to convince their cognitively impaired constituents who make up almost half of the country’s voters – without an adequate knowledge base and critical thinking skills, they’ll believe literally anything their favorite information sources spout.

Bonhoeffer went on to say –

Against stupidity we have no defense.  Neither protests nor force can touch it.  Reasoning is of no use.  Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simple be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can count by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.  So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied.  In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive.  For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one.  Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.

This why so many of today’s conservative and libertarian writers, along with moi, see no common ground across which a trail may be blazed to the unification of our polarized population.  The only solution being a negotiated Great Divide or barricades in the streets.

The Great Divide – America’s Cultural Split

George Rebane

Victor Davis Hanson continues the ongoing study of how America is coming apart.  In ‘Is America Repeating the Cultural Split Between Rome and the Byzantine Empire?’ VDH lays out the parallels and answers the question in the affirmative.

When the Roman Empire split into its western part centered on Rome, and its eastern part centered on Constantinople, the two halves took distinctly different approaches to governing their territories, with catastrophic results for Rome.  Rome’s hedonistic practices and passive acceptance of a “polyglot and often fractious” tribal cultures and religions (including versions of Christianity) soon focused people on the regional me and mine that came to vie with the you and yours.  By 600AD the disintegration that started around 450AD was complete.

This was not the case in the east – “the glue that held the East together against centuries of foreign enemies was the revered idea of an ancient and uncompromising Hellenism—the preservation of a common, holistic Greek language, religion, culture, and history.”  The Byzantine Empire, as it then became known, held together for a thousand years after Rome, finally becoming so over-bureaucratized and corrupt that it was overrun by the Ottoman Turks in 1453AD, and Constantinople became today’s Istanbul.

Today we see the definite analogue of such a split in our red/blue America.  Now “millions of Americans yearly self-select, disengage from their political opposites, and make moves based on diverging ideology, culture, politics, religiosity or lack of it, and differing views of the American past.”  Our conservatives are migrating to the interior, leaving both coastal areas to liberals.

This is producing two distinct Americas.  “While red states welcome change, they believe America never had to be perfect to be good. It will always survive, but only if it sticks to its 234-year-old Constitution, stays united by the English language, and assimilates newcomers into an enduring and exceptional American culture.”  The more conservative traditionalists prefer states “where there is usually smaller government, fewer taxes, more religiosity, and unapologetic traditionalists.”  

America’s Left prefers the blue state “bicoastal salad bowl” as their “model for immigration” where “newcomers can retain and reboot their former cultural identities”, and where “religion is less orthodox; atheism and agnosticism are almost the norm. And most of the recent social movements of American feminism, transgenderism, and critical race theory grew out of coastal urbanity and academia.”  Tribalism par excellence.

VDH concludes with – “Our Byzantine interior and Roman coasts are quite differently interpreting their shared American heritage as they increasingly plot radically divergent courses to survive in scary times.  But as in the past, it is far more likely that one state model will prove unsustainable and collapse than it is that either region would ever start a civil war.”  From his mouth to God’s ear.

So here again is the bottom line.  Today a lot of lip service is paid to ‘finding common ground’ and ‘coming together’ and ‘there’s more that unites us than divides us’, etc.  But for any of these attempts at dialogue to bear fruit, we must first and foremost recognize the gorilla in the room – the “radically divergent courses” that have been plotted and embraced by the tens of millions of polarized Americans which give rise to the Great Divide.  If these radically divergent courses are not resolved first, the rest will only continue the rehash of hot air.

Scattershots – 1aug21 (updated 4aug21)

The redistribution of wealth does not affect its creation. - Democrat/Marxist shibboleth

George Rebane

According to its director Dr Rochelle Wolensky, CDC’s new national mask guidance – even vaccinated people should wear masks in regions of high C19 incidence - is based on data from a spike of cases that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts.  Well, it turns out that the data is a bit more than skewed.  The data was compiled subsequent to Bear Week, an annual gathering of thousands of gay men who congregate for socializing, entertainment, and sex.  The CDC did not point out Bear Week nor that 85% of the new cases recorded were men.  It confirms that the more CDC attempts to inform the public, the more muddled are its messages.  (more here)

National Propaganda Radio has finally gone public with a policy that allows its ‘journalists’ to also be political activists and report on their supposedly non-partisan efforts opposing racism and white supremacy while promoting social justice, equity, and the usual leftwing list of progressive policies.  Meanwhile, they continue to maintain that they remain a government-funded, non-partisan news and information outlet.

Gymnast Simone Biles’ withdrawal from competing in certain events at the Tokyo Olympics has the media abuzz.  Most reports and commentaries celebrate her “courage” for choosing not to compete due to mental issues.  This attitude is taken by all in the lamestream media, but also by some conservative talking heads.  Some on the Right are being less accommodating about the young lady’s decision, going so far as to view her decision as a national embarrassment.  It’s hard to tell how much of the division of sentiments is based on Ms Biles gender – would a similarly disposed male athlete garner equal rations of celebratory courage and embarrassment?  I can only imagine the pressures that Biles has been under to perform, and am told how important it is for gymnasts to have their head together in order to safely perform their routines that regularly threaten life and limb. IMHO, her decisions do not call for celebration nor denouncements of embarrassment.  In the age of ‘trophies for all’, no one wants to set a precedent of hailing athletes who refuse to compete as expected, a simple expression of disappointment should put such matters to rest.

Taking a knee or other ways of showing disrespect for America when representing our country at the Olympics is an altogether different matter.  I have no sympathy for athletes who take their highly partisan and dreadfully misguided political sentiments for exhibition on the world stage.  Such acts and expressions are blatantly anti-American, and do nothing but succor our enemies abroad, dispirit their more patriotic fellow athletes, and expand the partisan chasm that already rends our homeland.  Keep America’s internal politics in America.

[4aug21 update] Our beloved Union continues flying its true op-ed colors.  I am disappointed, not so much in its ongoing tilt to the left, but in its uneven application of the editorial corrections it inserts at the end of contributed commentaries with which it does not agree, and in which it detects an error about which readers need to be notified.  This morning’s Union has a piece by devoutly blindered leftwinger Richardt Stormsgaard (here).  He ends his piece with -

Much of the Republican Party has edged perilously close to outright authoritarianism. Hundreds of moderate and conservative national security and military members from current and former administrations have warned against this disturbing tendency under Donald Trump. … A majority of Republican voters still support Trump and his attempted coup even though the leading perpetrators of the “Stop the Steal” myth in court have defended their false claims in court documents stating, “No reasonable people would consider these statements believable.” … Despite these damning admissions, a major portion of Republicans is increasing their assaults on our democracy leading up to the next elections. There are disturbing similarities between the USA today and Germany in the early 1930s, including the attacks on the democratic rule, along with the personality traits of Hitler and Trump and their fanatical supporters.

Aside from the fact that it is and always has been the Democrats who attempt to drive the country from a constitutional republic to naked collectivist authoritarianism, Republicans are explicitly impeded from taking that tack because their proposals and policies all inhibit the growth of government and/or actively seek to reduce its size.  No authoritarian governance is possible without an ever larger, growing, and intrusive government, exactly the kind that Democrats have always sought to bring about.  The Union’s editorialists are unwilling to point out such glaring errors in the op-ed contributions they print.

And celebrated Union cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb does his part to underline the newpaper’s editorial policy with his latest cartoon, filched and presented below.

This Crabb contribution is an excellent example of soft vitriol against the Right.  Note the number of bases in the progressive narrative he covers with these cleverly constituted panels – a master’s touch.  And it behooves the rest of us to never forget that this is exactly what they think of us, and given the chance, how they will send us knuckledraggers to be re-ejikated in new institutions that will be built for our benefit.  The templates for all this have been operated by the Left all over the world since the turn of the last century.

Bernie Sanders answers ‘Why We Need the $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Package’.  He sidesteps the Democrats’ real answer – the biggest vote buying “package” in the country’s history.  Instead, he talks about oodles and oodles of goodies for everyone from the terminally unemployable to illegal aliens invited to continue their surge across our southern border in order to get free everything and citizenship to boot.  For our mis-educated youth, the law will establish a Civilian Climate Corps in the hopes they could be taken off the streets and stop murdering each other, and marshalled into more institutionalized settings in which they will work on approved progressive priorities and projects.  The last couple of decades have seen Democrats offer different proposals to set up institutions to politicize and propagandize the unemployed and unemployable.  The ultimate function of these nascent legions of brown shirts is not a mystery; we can already see them ferreting out ‘white supremacists’ and other undesirable irredeemables across the country.

The Great Divide – an updated review (updated 20jul21)

George Rebane

This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’.  The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’.  I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country.  And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine.  I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.

The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen.  Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border.  Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”

The Ubiquity of Bias

George Rebane

I am a biased ideologue (q.v.).  My biases, along with their reasoned bases, have been spelled out in detail on these pages for well over a decade.  No other blog I’m aware of has so meticulously presented its host’s credo and glossary of vocabulary relevant to the topics covered.

Having again made that statement, I go on to the more universal contention that there are no unbiased presentations of facts or fiction by Man, especially when it comes to matters of human affairs.  We all have a specific world view, a specific way we receive and incorporate new evidence into that world view, a unique set of desiderata for almost all aspects of human striving, and, of course, our own way of communicating and convincing others of the correctness of our particular perspectives.

People who claim to be innocent or cleansed of bias, and therefore present views which they claim are in some sense ‘ex cathedra’, are charlatans, deluded, or both.  This assessment applies especially to those self-proclaimed middle-roaders who profess to clothe their preferences in various forms of authoritative infallibility.  Even in science and every other STEM field we find biased presentations and ongoing debates as to where resides truth, goodness, and light.  The most visible charlatans here are those who seek to buttress their biases with claims of non-existent ‘settled science’.

From this, I and others like me conclude that bias in human affairs is ubiquitous – it was ever thus.

Therefore, the best that disputants in a debate can do is present their case in the context of their respective utilities (definitions of ‘good’), and the reasoned bases which support their propositions.  Wise debaters know beforehand that even with the best intentions and transparent interchanges, all disputes cannot be successfully resolved.  In the art of negotiation, participants are advised to approach all such contentious proceedings with a firm handle on their own BATNAs (best alternative to negotiated agreement).

In our country’s gathering socio-political storm, ongoing debates, accusations, and indictments between the polarized sides are seen at all levels, from the national to the thousands of towns and villages across the land.  As detailed on these pages, the manner in which these contentions are conducted is highly asymmetrical – the Right always willing to spell out the America they want, with the Left keeping secret the details of their vision of a fundamentally transformed country.

From the Left’s published proposals and ensconced public policies, the Right cannot help but conclude that their desire is for a socialist (anti-capitalist) state under a much enlarged and intrusive government that controls almost every aspect of Americans’ lives, livelihoods, thoughts, and speech.  And the Left’s leadership continues to broadcast its vision of those on the Right as being racist, white supremacists who desire to return the country to Jim Crow days with an economy dominated by large oligopolies that pollute the environment and beggar their workers.  They present no evidence beyond repeated allegations to support their case.

[Addendum]  In discussions and debates with my leftwing counterparts in private communications and on this public forum, I often have my supportive citations of verifiable facts rejected on the basis of their having been presented by sources considered hopelessly biased, unreliable, and therefore rejected on their face.  Their opposition is seldom a substantive refutation of the message, it’s always based on the received credentials of the messenger.  The obvious reason for this gambit is that they have no substantive refutation of what has been cited, and therefore must needs be reduced to denigrating the source with claims that all of its output are widely known and acknowledged falsehoods – neither being the case.

A second gambit of the leftists is to require the rejected citation to be additionally buttressed by sources they consider unbiased and reliable.  It never occurs to them to simply go to their own sources and delineate the specific error(s) that were contained in the originally presented citation.  That may also be a too generous conclusion.  The reason they exercise either of these gambits is that they know the original citation to have presented the truth, and all that now remains for them is to deny, delay, and/or deflect the subsequent course of the exchange.  For the Left, countering citations with an equivalent depth of evidence seems to be terra incognita.

The Joys of Juneteenth (addended)

George Rebane

As most Americans know, today we are a nation fractured into tribes of various victimized and victimizer identity groups.  This new social order started gelling in the national consciousness under Barack Obama, hardened during Trump’s contended presidency, and is on schedule to become a fully petrified structure of America’s society under the pro-Marxist policies of the Biden/Harris/Pelosi presidency.

A contributing policy for realizing that anti-American future will require a constant and heightened flow of reminders in the public news, entertainment, sports, and social media for which our lamestream is now experienced and fully prepared to support.  To that end, and as of today, we have started adding national holidays to remind everyone of our history’s warts, each of which will be designed to maintain the sense of ongoing victimhood for every tribe to which an individual can claim membership and find meaning.

Biden signed into law ‘Juneteenth’, the newest federal holiday that will annually celebrate June 19^th as the real day of freedom from slavery for the nation’s blacks.  It will fly in the face of our historical July 4^th Independence Day which has already been losing its luster in the minds of the various progressive cohorts.

And now we may look forward to other aggrieved groups with heightened consciousness, in the name of equity arising to remind us of their milestones and demand that more days be set aside for their particular observations, celebrations, and remembrance.  I can see our Latino, Asian, women, LGTBQ, …, and European (aka white supremacist) contingencies, all demanding equal recognition and opportunity to remind us of America’s historical blights and blemishes, to provide frequent recounts throughout the year that the only thing exceptional about the United States is its provenance of evil.

So, we start with Juneteenth today to celebrate when the blacks of Galveston, Texas were told that they were no longer slaves on 19 June 1865.

Our Latinos can claim the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848 that made Mexico cede most of today’s American west to the US.  February 2^nd would be a day of remembrance and mourning the beginning of an epoch during which Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics were relegated to second-class citizenship as newly minted Americans.  (It would also serve to keep the fires of Reconquista burning.)

Asian-Americans will demand December 17^th as their special day of recognition and liberation from second-class status, and a time to remind all of ongoing discrimination against Asians.  On 17 December 1943 Congress passed the Magnuson Act which did away with all exclusion acts that primarily focused on denying Asians immigration rights, which began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Women of all shades, shapes, and biological origins will want to have August 18^th be designated a federal holiday.  For it was on 18 August 1920 that women’s suffrage ended with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment.  It will be a day of marches and speeches reminding us, not only of the past, but of the here and now when women still have to fight ‘glass ceilings’, unequal pay, and the right to be masters of their own bodies.

And of course, the LGTBQ tribe will want its annual place of pride in the federal sun.  They can militate for September 21^st as a national holiday, for it was on 21 September 1996 that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) was passed by Congress and became effective.  This started a period (1996-2020) during which SCOTUS passed five landmark rulings to the benefit of our LGBTQ group.

We can go on, but let’s just finish with a new national observance of the evils of European culture in America.  Actually, this federal holiday will not be demanded by Americans of European descent.  Instead, it will be established by a woke Congress as a day to recognize and never forget that white supremacy continues as the nation’s foremost threat and abiding enemy.  It is the ever-present possibility of a white supremacist insurrection against which our government must always be prepared to defend with new laws, regulations, processes, procedures, and agencies.  That day of national vigilance will receive an appropriate name like ‘Democracy Preservation Day’ or ‘Insurrection Day’, and will, of course, be celebrated on January 6^th, during which we will be regaled and reminded by demogauges of all stripes of how close we came to ‘losing our democracy’ on 6 January 2021.

[Addendum] A reader sent me the most appropriate Juneteenth graphic shown below.

Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

Why promote a minimalist government – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”  Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

Anyone notice how student debt is propagandized as an act of nature that afflicts students who were innocent of getting into financial straits?  Even FN is bamboozled by the Dems and the almost hysterical reporting in the lamestream on this issue.  Those poor students played no part in voluntarily signing up for those loans.  No siree, they were struck down as if by a dreaded disease, blindsided into a terrible state of affairs, sorta like getting Covid or having your house devastated by Katrina.  And now the national response to those fiscally innocents wailing about their wallets has to be another vote buying dip into the public purse to forgive their debts.  And, oh yes, Trump is guilty for not having done it last year.  And here's the solution sent by a reader.

Biden’s spending spree is definitely designed to swing the nation’s double dummies into believing that he is the one who is reviving an already revived and ready-to-roar economy.  Again, the purpose is to buy some near-term votes for the 2022 election with a handful of good quarterly bumps to the GDP.  What the lightly reads neither understand nor pay attention to is what this massive near-term spending portends.  Even liberal economists agree that these initial spurts will guarantee that the rest of the 20s will be mired in ‘a future of secular stagnation’.  The next 8 to 10 years will then see GPD growth under 2%, hearkening back to the Jimmy Carter years.  The anti-American Dems are all for that because it will mean that the US will not have the money to properly fund its military against China and Russia, and to complete securing our southern border against all who will cross it illegally to a waiting basket of welfare benefits not available to American citizens.  The policy is designed to keep America divided with an increasing cohort of Democrat voters who will guarantee that we will become a socialist-bound one-party state, you know, sorta like California. (more here)

[8jun21 update]  The Dems and their constituents – both lightly read and dismally educated – are in terminal denial that America’s Left has put the country on the road to Marxism.  This strong belief is repeated continuously on their lamestream media, even though evidence ignored pours in daily.  The latest can be seen in their grassroots being convinced to pine for new and stronger measures of censorship to established for national media.   In the 8jun21 Union (here), local leftwinger Linda Schuyler Horning (“Fox News was established to launch its assault on American democracy.”) calls for re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine and formation of a new federal Truth Commission to specify and filter what you and I can consume from the news and entertainment media.  In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz writes, “What emerges from Dangerous Ideas is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd.” (more here)  As I said, the evidence abounds for our current march to authoritarian Marxism, and maybe worse.

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)