Rebane's Ruminations

Check your PG&E bill (updated 11jan22)

George Rebane

PG&E continues to provide its customers with added dimensions of its incompetence as the power utility of northern California.  We have covered the litany of its poor performance in these pages, and now add another to the list.  The December bill arrived with a blatant and obvious overcharge for electricity not delivered.  During the last series of snowstorms along with thousands of PG&E customers in the foothills, we too lost our power for eleven days.  It went off at 1215 27dec21 and came back on at 1600 6jan22.  Our bill (below) showed that they continued our electric service unabated on 27dec21 through 29dec21.

We have one of those ‘smart meters’ that are now standard in PG&E’s service area.  It is supposed to automatically report power usage to their accounting and power management systems.  There they have a computer algo that takes this data and massages it into the above graphic along with the billed amount using a complex formula of time-dependent rates.  Obviously, their data gathering system and/or algo is faulty, and this blatant revelation strongly implies that they may have been overcharging their customers for some time now.

So check your electricity bill, and if yours is also in error, do something more than just bitching to the PG&E billing department.  Write a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission and demand that they get PG&E to account for the performance of their metering and billing system, and prove that they have not been screwing up for who knows how many months/years.  It is implausible that such an error is a onetime affair that was caused by the storm.  (Note that the algo did not revert to some constant default usage level, but actually varied the post-shutdown daily usage.)

I ascribe the problem to the ongoing cadre of ignorant, incompetent, and slothful dunces that populate PG&E’s management ranks.  Their hardworking field crews are capable, hardworking, and fully acknowledge that they have to be the public face of an organization that has had a rotten head shed for years.  The PUC should hold them to account for this and numerous other sins too many to list.

[11jan22 update]  Jo Ann called PG&E and went online to our account.  The nice lady at the other end apologized that the bills they send out continue to have bogus indications of power usage, and that they are working very hard to fix it.  She further assured us, and showed us the appropriate page online where the usage numbers for the power outage period had cross hatches below them, indicating that these were not the actual numbers to be used to calculate our bill.  She was very accommodating and informative about their problem and their consumers’ misapprehensions.  In the future we should ignore the bill they send us and log in to our account online to see the actual data that goes into calculating out bill.  What a way to run a railroad.

Scattershots – 3jan22 (updated 7jan22)

 

George Rebane

Eight days with no power on Hind Tit Rd.  We have received the same lame information-less message five times from PG&E, telling us that they have access to our area and are starting to assess the outage to see what must be done to restore power.  Not even a hint of any schedule or estimate of how long we have to stay hunkered down.  We're a stone's throw from the Rood Center, and there is total access to our ridge, the outage up here is no doubt due to some problem at a local distribution facility, which you’d think would be easier to fix than having to wait until trees are cleared from the road and downed power lines are restrung.  At every turn they demonstrate another function or task of which they are incapable.  But hey, their outage map is looking better today than yesterday.  Some day it’ll be our turn.

The next worry on everyone’s mind is propane or gasoline for their generators.  Gasoline appears to be available – we trade at Robinson’s and they are doing their job with their fuels.  My supplier is Amerigas, with whom I’ve been a 45-year customer.  They have promised to resupply me before the sun sets on Wednesday.  Most people have already run out or are about to with not even a promise of their next delivery.  Calling a propane company today will have you listening to some very irritating elevator music for almost an hour or so until you go to Plan B.  Amerigas’ online account management is up, and they confirmed my delivery schedule in writing (of which I took a screen image) for what good that will do.  In any event, many others are really faring poorly.   It’s amazing how many people – especially the elderly and infirm - are stuck in their homes with no preparation at all for when the grid goes down.  Grandson-in-law Shawn, owner of Estey Electric, has been doing yeoman’s work during these las days with his crews and coordinating Project Haart teams of volunteers to do everything from getting generators going, bringing food and fuel, and clearing driveways.  These people are a blessing to the community.

Kudos to the Supes for getting Nevada County declared a disaster area.  Can anyone actually tell if that designation has yet to benefit us?

[4jan22 update]  California’s incompetence on parade – dumping untold amounts of water into the Pacific Ocean.  H/T to reader for the links (here and here) that tell the story of the Democrats’ eternal incompetence when it comes to governance and regulating public affairs.  In the last two years we have pissed away a 7-year water supply from our reservoirs in a state blessed with abundant water that comes to us interspersed with dry years – a centuries old climate phenomenon in this part of the West (that’s why God invented reservoirs).  But again, ‘the fault dear reader is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are the terminally ignorant voters.’ (with apologies to The Bard.)

"I've got a few bones to pick with recent columns", so writes Mr Richard Borlik in the 30dec21 Union.  He does a good job outlining all the left-leaning and politically correct (cum woke) editorial and news pieces to which The Union is prone.  And kudos to the newspaper for having the balls to publish such a forthright criticism of its editorial and news policies.

[7jan22 update]  How far we are apart.  A longtime RR reader and commenter, well-known to our regulars, is a dedicated leftwinger as evidenced by years of his comments on various subjects that decorate these pages.  He recently put another shot across my bow in a discussion thread by not only refusing to read a citation I gave him, but pre-emptively declaring that its author is a “totally non credible source”, not to be believed or trusted.  I was advised to “try again.”  The author, Victor Davis Hanson, is a noted historian and scholar (Stanford professor) who is nationally known, and who many Americans consider a national treasure.  He is also acknowledged as an astute observer of the country’s socio-political scene, and has an extensive contribution of published books, scholarly papers, and articles regularly appearing in prominent publications.  He is also interviewed frequently by a spectrum of media outlets for his views on current events, which he is uniquely able to connect with historical perspectives.  No one has ever accused or shown VDH to fly loose with his assessments or falsify any factual content in his writings.  Nevertheless, dedicated leftists abhor him because he is intellectually unassailable, and his presentations devastate the progressive narrative and established public policies.  If people like VDH are not accepted by the Left, then there truly is no possibility of dialogue.

Herding CRT's Ideological Cats

[This commentary appeared as an Other Voices column here in the 27nov21 edition of The Union.]

‘It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that ain’t so.’  Will Rogers and others.

George Rebane

Herding ideological cats is a job Union editor Alan Riquelmy is tasked with as the chair of the newspaper’s Editorial Board.  On the whole he does a commendable job in composing the EB’s weekly debate into a cohesive Our View column that appears in its Saturday edition.  Today’s topic (here) is a particularly hairy one – Critical Race Theory as taught in our K-12 schools.

The recent public forum on CRT was held at the high school board meeting with most attending being CRT’s ideological devotees, while denying that it is taught to Nevada County kids.  Their opposition was a group calling itself Protecting American Ideals whose members presented evidence that indeed the tenets of CRT are taught in our schools, and that such teachings are destructive to the kids’ learning and practicing American ideals.  As Riquelmy points out, neither side was there “to listen to the presentation”, but instead to “participate in the pageant” of people with made-up minds.  Moreover, our editor reveals that even the EB “couldn’t reach consensus on an issue this contentious”.

As Riquelmy sought to pour oil on the column’s troubled waters, he ran into a couple of items with which I have a nit or two.  First, our editor is of the common understanding that there exists only one history.  Serious students of history are the first to point out that there are countless histories, each of which aims to present a cohesive narrative of a period’s chronicled events.  The job of historians is to identify the causal basins and beams (sequences of ‘this caused that’, etc) of every notable milestone that they explicate.  And as we know, causality is both slippery and many-headed.  To every gathering of causal sequences, one can quickly come up with yet another one that tells a different plausible story of the times.

Another popular error embedded in our society can be laid at the feet of the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan – ‘you can have your own opinion, but you can’t have your own facts.’  Wrong!  It is easy to see in this age of the internet, 500 plus media channels, and facile international communications, that there are many disparate sets of ‘facts’ that attend and characterize any issue or notion.  It is only the voluble talking heads and media pundits who each purvey their own facts as the gospel upon which their narrative finds footing and reflects their biases.  We consumers of history and facts have more than an ample smorgasbord from which to choose what suits our fancy or yields to our grasp.

Finally, CRT does have a widely accepted definition composed of tenets considered to be true.  These are collected and displayed on various websites – e.g. britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory.  The tenets presented generally agree; they are not a mystery.  But here is the meat of the argument about CRT being taught in our schools – ‘Critical Race Theory’ does not have to appear in a school’s syllabus in order to have its tenets be taught to students.  The tenets of any body of thought can be marbled piecemeal into any of a number of different courses to communicate its desired ideological perspective – today there are even handbooks to show teachers how to inject CRT into all STEM(!) subjects.  And that is demonstrably what students tell their parents what is happening, and that is what the parents are up in arms about here in Nevada County and across the country.

Our editor admirably concludes, “Sure, we want our children to learn about history without the politics of the day tainting it. We don’t want our kids saddled with the sins of the past. We want a vibrant new generation to leave school armed with knowledge and critical thinking skills, questioning a country they love when needed and fighting for it when required.”

And then he adds the kicker, “But we also want people who think like us going to the polls.”  It was ever thus.

Ruminations – 27oct21

George Rebane

Record storm total at Casa Rebane measured out at 12.1 inches.  According to The Union this is a regional record for western Nevada County.  We were amazed that the power stayed on while the rain fell almost horizontally.  Home fires were kept burning; we’re blessed with acreage that supplies an ‘infinite’ amount of firewood.

Liberal Minds on Display #1.  Union reader Terry Boyles wants cuts in military spending to help pay for the Democrats’ Debacle of the Trillions.  He argues (here) cuts are justified due to our military’s poor performance, and points out “the fact that our armed forces have achieved little in the way of real national security recently, after a string of failed foreign excursions.”  You think that our political leadership might have had just a tad to do with those failures?

Liberal Minds on Display #2.  “Banning two-stroke engines over time is not a bad thing” opines Phil Carville in a 26oct21 Union ‘Other Voices’.  He cites the air pollution caused by two-strokers as the prime reason for going all electric.  What he and other liberals advocating such a future sooner than later is where does all this reliable electricity come from, and at what cost to both wallet, environment, and economy.  None of these proponents cite the energy losses required to convert one form of energy to another, and the multiple costs and pollution involved in such conversions. 

[Here are some electrical energy conversion scribbles for the curious.  The world’s average fossil fuels net conversion efficiency of 33%, and that is further degraded by transmission and distribution losses of about 9.2% (CA) before it gets to the outlet that charges your battery.  And before your e-mower cuts a blade of grass, its motor works at most with only 80% of the energy that was used to (slow) charge the battery, and at least a 10% further loss in battery storage.  When you put it all together, the energy efficiency of your battery-powered appliance comes down to a generous net of about 20% - I’ve left out some other losses like in your house wiring.  More here, here, and here.]

Liberal Minds on Display #3 – Union letter writer Ron Lowe frequently shares his thoughts with us.  In the 27oct21 Union he is (here) “convinced Republican Party leaders have adopted an authoritarian approach that demands ideological conformity to most any political or scientific posture.  There is no room for independent thinking or freedom of speech allowed.”  Really?!  Now this is exactly what our woke progressives have put in place in government, academe, and the country’s workplaces.  Anyone see the GOP having done any of this?  None of us want to live with the Ron Lowes, and would only want to talk to him about a peaceful separation.  But the Ron Lowes, for some reason, want us to stay.

The Union – no room for blasphemies du jour

‘All great truths began as blasphemies.’  GB Shaw

George Rebane

[This commentary was published (here) as an Other Voices column in the 30Oct21 Union.  As usual, the leftwing commenters on the newspaper's website continue to demonstrate their total ignorance of who has been censoring whom across the land.  Add that to their reading comprehension and reasoning abilities, and the nature and content of their comments becomes clear.  gjr]

We have broken bread with our newspaper’s publisher Don Rogers, communicate with him regularly, and consider him a friend.  Don is a likable and honorable man with clear ideas about the kinds of content that should appear in The Union, ideas that he most recently shared in the 22oct21 edition of his weekly column.(here)  Writing about the criteria for acceptable commentary, he informed us, his readers, that –

Facts and evidence must check out with conventional, legitimate sources. We try to keep it within the mainstream guardrails factually for more grounded discussion than, say, on Brunswick street corners or at the start of county supervisors meetings.

Swimming with the times, the newspaper’s editorial policy has noticeably tilted leftward.  I sensed something had changed when a recent Other Voices submittal of mine (here) on some new research by sociologist Charles Murray was rejected for containing subject matter outside established norms, content that would violate the sensibilities of the newspaper’s readership.  It was my first and only rejection in twenty years, and since then I’ve almost learned to behave myself.

These are trying times and new ideas are a messy business, often rejected by minds more careful and staid.  And as a private enterprise, The Union has every right to determine what it chooses to print.  Nevertheless, this is my lament about our hometown newspaper which we eagerly consume daily.  It is also an appeal for more latitude in the ideas it sees fit to print.

With its current editorial policy in place, the writings of thinkers such as Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, DaVinci, Newton, Kepler, Darwin, Pasteur, Mendel, Edison, Bell, Einstein, Fermi, Payne, Revere, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, … would not have passed muster to grace the pages of today’s Union.

As a student of both history and science I am reminded that, fortunately, our beloved land was born on “Brunswick street corners” and in exciting “county supervisors meetings”, all of which then as now were considered outside “the mainstream guardrails factually”, violating the “more grounded discussions” of the day.  So now as then, such out-of-box expressions have again been proscribed, and it appears that The Union has joined the ranks of today’s publications with an editorial policy distinctly of a medieval bent.  But I wonder, does it have to be this way?

A Leftwing Journalist Admonishes

George Rebane

Darrell Berkheimer is one of our more thoughtful, though still terminally misguided, local columnists whose current crusade to “curb misinformation” and “halt the spreading of lies” is at its apex with The Union publishing his 24sep21 and 2oct21 back-to-back columns.  His main thrust is to find a solution to the government allowing “mass media to continue the spread of misinformation, lies, untruths and false conspiracy theories that create dangerous divisiveness and threaten individual citizens.”  To his favor, he does want such state enforced prohibitions while still protecting freedom of speech.

In his 24sep21 piece he attacks conservative media and quickly demonstrates that he knows not of which he speaks, especially when it come to C19 therapeutics.  But his naivete reaches new heights with his assertion that there is a government-discernible and “distinct difference between opinion and factual truth.”  Hence, we need to implore “our lawmakers (who) are long overdue to draft such limiting and protective legislation.”  And to help this process along, we grassroots citizens can “ask our attorney friends to recommend some suggestions and proposals”, which we may then communicate to our representatives.

The entire cast of his two columns reeks of the righteousness of the Left, and leaves no doubt that it is the conservative media that must be reined in.  He, of course, stands aside and above such crass practices of ‘fake news’ and yellow journalism.  Before one examines his recent record, it’s instructive to read – ‘Hunter Biden’s Emails Were Suppressed for a Reason’ - a well-summarized and pithy letter from Mr Dan Pisenti of Mill Valley, CA in the 2oct21 WSJ.

“Vindication Over Hunter’s Emails” (Review & Outlook, Sept. 25) rightly criticizes the press and prominent former officials for labeling Hunter Biden’s emails as Russian disinformation. But the victim—President Trump—is again disregarded. The Hunter story was neutralized to prevent Mr. Trump from winning re-election. Fair reporting of the graft and low behavior on full display in Hunter’s laptop could have kept Mr. Trump in office.

The media speaks often of “the Big Lie” about the election result, but Mr. Trump faced a buffet of lies spanning his entire presidency. Dirty tricks kept him embroiled in a Russian hoax for two years and left the stink on him even when Robert Mueller could provide no evidence. Congress tied Mr. Trump up in impeachment trials. The press manufactured phony scandals about him and his family. And then key states relaxed controls on ballots. Acknowledging the onslaught that Mr. Trump faced could help the press understand why he might question an election result.

Through his own condemnations and silences, Mr Berkheimer was one of our local co-conspirators during the ongoing epoch of journalistic lows.  Today he continues to wear his TDS mantle to comfort him as he looks down from the chilly and revealing heights of Mt Olympus.

In his latest offering Berkheimer concludes “The importance of repressing misinformation cannot be overstated — because it is tearing apart the fabric of our American society. It’s at the root of our mounting divisiveness. It is our biggest crisis.”  In consuming such heartfelt proposals to expand the reach of government to evermore precisely and consummately control our speech and thought, it is important to always note from which side such ‘solutions’ originate, and who then accuse their opposites of fomenting tyrannical government.

River Fire Reflections

George Rebane

Kudos to Yubanet.com for being the most heads up and informative website for wildfire information.  At the same time, government falls short of its function as is apparent to anyone visiting mynevadacounty.com.  Starting yesterday (4aug21) afternoon, all of us in western Nevada County have been on tenterhooks watching the River Fire started by someone at the Bear River Campground near Colfax.

For Jo Ann and me this kind of annual firewatch and evacuation preparedness has been a way of life ever since we moved to Simi Valley in 1968, and then into the Santa Monica Mountains in 1978, and here to Nevada County in 2002.  Every year it’s the same ol’ same ol’ – are we going to lose our home this year?  And frankly, after over fifty years of this and at our age, we’re starting to get a little tired of being puckered up every summer and fall.

‘CRT’s Attempt to Reframe Our Country’s Founding’

[Apologies for the belated posting of this third in the series of columns Ms McLaughlin which appeared in the 14jul21 issue of The Union.  The previous two can be found here and here.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has argued that critical race theory is “another right-wing conspiracy theory” that was “totally made up.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said that critical race theory is being “manufactured” by the right. Yet, over the July 4 weekend, the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, announced plans to teach critical race theory in all 50 states and more than 14,000 school districts. The National Education Association believes it is real, and they would be right.

One of the narratives being incorporated into critical race theory curriculum is the 1619 Project originally published in 2019 by The New York Times as stories, poems, and essays about racism and slavery. Twenty Africans, believed to be the first enslaved Africans in British North America, arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619. The 1619 Project suggests that this was the moment of America’s “true founding.”

Written by journalists and opinion writers, not historians, the project attempts to reframe our country’s founding around the concepts of racism and slavery.

Within days of its launch in August 2019, a number of notable historians pointed out numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements in a letter to The New York Times. They included professors Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon Wood of Brown University.

They disputed many of the statements presented as facts in the 1619 Project, not the least of which was an essay promoting the idea that the American Revolution was motivated by a desire to preserve slavery.

Northwestern University History Professor Leslie Harris, an expert on African American life and slavery in the pre-Civil War era, was the first historian to levy criticism who had actually supported the project and participated in it as a fact-checker.

During the publication process, she was presented with the assertion that “one critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

Harris vigorously disputed this claim, explaining that while slavery was an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the colonies went to war. Yet that claim remains in the published account.

According to Harris, colonists had no need to secede to protect slavery, as slavery faced no immediate threat from Great Britain. The opposite was true, Harris argued, as the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American colonies. It led most of the 13 colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. Thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies, and the ideals gaining force during the Revolutionary era also inspired many Northern states to pass laws gradually ending slavery.

These laws did not provide immediate emancipation, nor did they promise racial equality or full citizenship, but Professor Harris asserted that black activism during the Revolutionary War and the following era of emancipation led to the end of slavery much earlier than prescribed within those laws. Slaves often negotiated with their owners to purchase their freedom, or simply ran away in the confused aftermath of the war, and most Northern slave owners granted freedom to their slaves in advance of the time mandated by law.

Despite the many leading scholars who have discredited and criticized the project since its publication as historically inaccurate and ideologically driven, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary architect of the 1619 Project, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay introducing it.

The editorial staff of the New York Post, which had run multiple articles challenging the 1619 Project’s facts and arguments, wrote: “Too bad the Pulitzer committee now thinks that facts are irrelevant to journalism.” Most recently, Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater. (She turned it down in favor of a position at Howard University.)

African-American history and slavery is a critical theme in America’s story, but we can recognize the impact of race without denying the roles of other influences or erasing or denigrating the contributions of early American settlers and our founding fathers, as critical race theory attempts to do.

A dozen Civil War professors and scholars have stated that they are “troubled that these materials are now … the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of The New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights.”

Professor Gordon Wood, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for history for a book on the American Revolution, wrote, “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution. … I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. … We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.”

Despite its demonstrable flaws and distortions, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum approved by the California Department of Education this year draws significantly upon the 1619 Project to validate what The Wall Street Journal calls the curriculum’s “radical indoctrination.”

‘Parents wary of critical race theory’

[This is the second in a three-part series of articles on CRT by Ms McLaughlin.  The first was posted here on 16 June 2021.  This column appeared here in the 1jul21 edition of The Union.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

California residents may be familiar with euphemisms for critical race theory, such as “ethnic studies,” “educational equity” and “culturally responsive teaching,” but may not understand the philosophical premise, which is to divide all people into oppressors and oppressed.

My last column sought to describe examples of critical race theory curriculum our children may be exposed to, but parents who are speaking up all around the country tell the more authoritative story from their firsthand experience.

Scattershots – 25jun21 (updated 29jun21)

George Rebane

Biden on gun control smirked at the notion of guns in civilian hands being effective against a tyrannical government.  He cited that any such insurrection against our federales will require disgruntled citizens to have at least “F15s and a few nuclear warheads” to be successful.  This is the common hypocritical response of the Left that feared the unarmed 6jan21 Capitol mob as insurrectionists, and then continues to fear a population legally armed with politically-identified “assault rifles”, guns very seldom used by criminals to perpetrate ‘gun violence’.  The Left knows and has always known better than anyone else of what an armed citizenry is capable.  Bumblebrain now demonstrates daily that he the nation's ‘compleat idiot’ when it comes to governance, history, and human nature.

Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ is still an attractive nothing-burger for far too many light thinkers.  Mr Ryan Smalley writes (here) in the 25jun21 Union about the “true silent majority” that would be able to ‘just get along’ were they given a chance through a centrist third party on our political scene.  Unfortunately, he does not understand the nature of our polarization which involves diametrically opposite futures for America (see ‘Toward Unification’), and believes, that magically, the center will spontaneously coalesce to a collection of commonly supported public policies that its elected politicians will be able legislate, and we will all live happily ever after.  These policies will have the magical quality in that they will come into being without any notion of a commonly held or resolved view of America’s tomorrow.  As I’ve pointed out ad nauseam, our country is full of such Rodney King disciples who are incapable of understanding the problem and making progress toward a solution.

Juneteenth was sensibly opposed by 14 House Republicans.  All of them, including our Doug LaMalfa (here), explained their reasons to their constituents.  In a 25jun21 letter to The Union, a history-deprived and poorly-read Dean Olson could not fathom why anyone would oppose Juneteenth as a federal holiday.  Reps LaMalfa and McClintock published their most reasonable reasons for their oppositions, which were, of course, both ignored and/or misunderstood by our more progressive neighbors.  In its comment stream RR reader Gregory attempted to set them straight.  My own views are memorialized in ‘The Joys of Juneteenth’.

SBC job opportunity heads up.  The unfortunately misnamed Sierra Business Council is looking for some equally unfortunate individual who is required to have at least a high school education and “min 1-2  years” experience having done a long list of analytical tasks in the energy audit and consulting field.  And s/he will do all this for the princely sum of $20-24/hr as a “Planning Technician”.  This is less money that most property owners pay for an illegal alien doing weed eating on their property in preparation for fire season.  Nevertheless, as a RR public service, interested parties can get more information here and here.

[26jun21 update]  Here is that lying SOS Bumblebrain announcing agreement on an infrastructure bill that later he immediately made conditional on the passage of the most horrendous economy destroying tax increases in American history.  Have no idea what passes for thinking in that wrinkled melon on his shoulders.  This latest Big Lie is a sure fire reason for Republicans to walk away from the whole thing. (H/T to reader.)

[Later]  Bumblebrain has no idea what he says into a mic.  Apparently his handlers got tangled up with his first message.  Now he’s making “perfectly clear” again, this time that he will not hold infrastructure hostage to the humongous $4T vote buying bill of goodies that the Dems want to also pass.  But it ain't over yet - the adventures with an addled president.

A rehab that worked.  (The following from a correspondent.) 

After 6 burglaries, 3 car thefts, multiple illegal trespasses, an ongoing cocaine and alcohol addiction, committing 2 violent home invasions, 3 armed robberies, dealing Fentanyl and Meth, passing counterfeit money, beating 4 victims senseless and being arrested 23 times since 1998, George Floyd hasn't committed a crime in over one year now!

BUT.....IT DID NET HIS FAMILY $27 MILLION FROM THE STATE AND $20 MILLION FROM A GO FUND ME ACCOUNT.

We are one sick country to fall for this scam! Not to mention that our demented President and his VP met with the Floyd family on May 25th, the one year anniversary of his death and Nancy Pelosi, in June, 2020, gave the Floyd family a folded American Flag that had flown over the Capitol on the day he died, as though he were a fallen hero!  How SICK is that?

[27jun21 update]  The Defense Departments UFO report is essentially a cover-up nothing burger.  They told the country that they didn’t know what was happening and what is behind all the sightings recorded by the military from their ships and aircraft.  That kind of ignorance from our mainline national security institution is pretty scary in and of itself.  So now we’re supposed to remain sanguine about UFOs buzzing our aircraft and ships, and demonstrating kinematics and operational domains unknown to us mere terrestrials.  Given the information so far, my assessed probabilities are P(extra-terrestrial) = 0.8, P(terrestrial) = 0.2.  ETs have had billions of years to populate our galaxy and/or send info gathering drones anywhere they want.  (My take on SETI is here, here, and here.)

[29jun21 update]  The Democrats, all of whom are guilty of fomenting the nation’s crime wave with countable marginal deaths that can be laid directly on their feet, have now run out of all excuses for their horrible values and social ideology.  Their last gasp is to apply Saul Alinsky on steroids and blame the whole thing on the Republicans.  And you know what?  Their constituents are sufficiently dense between the ears so that a goodly share of them will actually believe the bull crap now being trumpeted through the lamestream.  Maybe some will even come here to exhibit their gray matter.  ‘A nation ignorant and free …’

 

 

The Futility of Searching for Common Ground

George Rebane

My original ‘Quo tendimus?’ piece (here) was published in the 20apr21 Union (here) retitled ‘Where exactly are we headed?’, I guess, to make it more accessible to the newspaper’s readership who are classed not capable of googling the original Latin.  The article immediately drew the vitriol, ire, and personal invective from a long list of local liberals, not one of them having understood the thrust of my offer of a new approach for finding common ground which may help us start back on the road to unity.  None showed the ability or propensity to discuss the presented ideas.

They all exhibited what has become the common denominator for the worldview of the nation’s main street Left (aka Democrats).  None of them are aware of the ideological sentiments of the political leadership that today dictate the Democrats’ policies in economics, education, foreign policy, workplace, environment, … .  Citing the names of such thought leaders and identifying example pro-Marxist policies for these light readers is like water off a duck – these cannot serve as substance for them because they know not how such policies have historically ushered in socialist autocracies.

So they accuse me, and anyone else with a similar portfolio, as providing no backing for our characterizing the Left’s desired destination for social order and the government required to implement and maintain it.  The short of it is that a conversation with them cannot be started even at this low level of reason.  One must take these unwilling people back to a grade school that no longer exists and the return to which would be a gargantuan task.  (Here is how one parent of one of today’s exclusive woke grade schools reacted with an eloquence which was totally lost on the school’s leftwing administration.  H/T to reader.)

And yet, the road forward that we can travel together must be selected through a process such as I have outlined.  The argument is simple.  Once again, identify your destination social orders,  attempt to compromise on one that you both would tolerate.  At this point you can begin sorting out the kind of public policies that would bring about and maintain such a social order.  If you are still fortunate to agree on a feasible set of those, only then can you select a road that you can walk together toward your mutually agreed on destination.  And until then you can do nothing other than continue drawing apart as you shout epithets at each other across the widening chasm.

Our liberal and more zealous progressives understand none of this.  While they quack like socialists, walk like socialists, they all still consider being labeled a socialist as some kind of petty political name-calling.  They simply resent being identified as collectivists, which messaging is carefully managed by the Democrat Party and its lamestream media. The bottom line here is that these people still consider themselves to be middle roaders, as they promote and support all the trappings of a collectivist leviathan government.  Hence, the ongoing futility of searching for common ground that must preamble unity.

On a totally separate matter, I continue to note the reaction and participation of local conservatives cum Republicans in such debates.  These people are chronically absent from the public forum’s political frays that are a necessary feature of democratic republics, especially as constituted by peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds and practices.  Our local Republican Party does literally nothing to support those few of us locals who daily engage in the national debate with collectivists, those who want to fundamentally transform America.  The rightwingers are absent from the fray, year after year spending time in cliquish enclaves, echoing their sentiments to each other, while hoping that somehow the great political outdoors will discover their number and cloistered apologetics, and spontaneously morph into good constitutional conservatives.

Ruminations – 13feb21 (updated 17feb21)

A happy finish gilds everything, however unfitting the means may have been.  Which explains why at times it should be the rule to offend the rules, when it is not possible by other methods to attain a happy ending.  Gracian #66

George Rebane

‘My way or the highway!’ were the responses to the 13feb21 column by my favorite conservative Union columnist (here) wondering how Biden’s calls to unify would work as the country's Left continues to vilify the tens of millions on the Right who voted for Trump.  The strong answer from our locals echo their national response, and confirms that there is no middle ground.

‘On second thought, no witnesses needed.’  After they sobered up, that was the Dems’ second cut this morning at wanting to call witnesses.  The Repubs’ first witness would have been Mrs  Pelosi answering questions of what/when she knew about the Capitol riot and a whole lot of other stuff.  Her testimony would have resulted in either Perjury City (and an orange jumpsuit) or blowing the Dems case, not only for this impeachment, but also for every little lie and dirty trick that went down over the last four years.  No, no, no, can’t let that bird sing.

Our Supes have been pretty spineless during Newsom’s insane lockdown diktats.  There has been no science or logic to back up statewide and local policies to, say, prevent indoor eating at restaurants.  Other neighboring counties – e.g. Yuba and Placer – already have indoor eating as brave restaurateurs allow their customers to decide on their aversion to C19 risk.  In Nevada County our eateries cower compliantly under the leadership of county officials who dare not raise a peep against almighty Sacramento.  Well, today we read Board Chair Dan Miller will put on the next agenda an item “to further discuss state restrictions.”  I guess we’ll now inch forward one vertebrae at a time.

California mistakenly gave convicts over $30B federal C19 relief dollars.  That according to Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-6^th district) who stated today that further evidence has emerged indicating that a lot of that money wound up in the hands of LA and Bay area gangs which they have used to buy guns.  Any past increase in criminal gun violence has always been used to launch the next leftwing assault on the 2^nd Amendment to roll back gun rights for law abiding citizens.  That is beyond progressive logic, but simply a continuing scam to eliminate civilian arms.  Great Divide.

[14feb21 update]  More Covid fraud exposed.  For most of the past year RR has examined the C19 pandemic in detail with analytical models and numerous cited sources.  As reported, my own findings have always indicated that there has been something funny going on in the feds’ C19 reporting and recommended response policies – things didn’t tie, and most certainly did not follow cited science.  The scope of and responses to the whole pandemic seemed to be politically motivated and manipulated.  Early on I also examined the 'excess deaths' aspect of C19 and found them to be minimal as did others (here).  Recently more detailed analyses of CDC releases expose how the institution has played fast and loose with its reporting of C19 cases and deaths.  A summary of the findings are here, and a detailed report of how the data was manipulated can be downloaded here. (H/T to reader)

[15feb21 update]  Equity on parade.  So, the guy who made $8/hr will now get $15.  The guy making $11 gets $15, and the guy who made $15 gets $15.  And as a result, that hard worker is on the bottom again.  (And don’t even start me on the well-known principle that a rising minimum wage floats all prices.)

Covid deaths as you like them.  A regular reader sent the following graphic that he dug up on the CDC website (here).  He makes a cogent argument that IF these reported numbers of simple body counts are true, then there are indeed ‘excess deaths’ (from the projected norm) that can be plausibly attributed to C19.  At this point of (C19 and other) stats flying this way and that, it is hard to determine what to believe, since both journalism and govt agencies have now succumbed to publishing injections of political propaganda.  But for completeness, you are invited to make up your own mind.

Billionaire Bill “has a master plan for battling climate change” and ending our dependency on carbon and other bad stuff.  He will reveal it all in his How to Avoid Climate Disaster that will be published this month.  Using a lot of “analysis”, Mr Gates has been able to reduce the whole thing to “a simple plan” that most of us should be able to understand.  He has started a couple of green venture funds with other very rich people, and, of course, he has a funded a sophisticated lobbying organization that can buy politicians by the dozens.  The latter to make sure that appropriate laws and regs get passed so that the venture funds make a lot of money investing in green start-ups protected from open markets by the government gun.  (more here)

The leftwing commenters to Jo Ann’s 13feb21 Union column have a hard time understanding her point about Biden’s call for national unity.  It was Biden who issued the call, not Jo Ann.  All she’s doing is asking how one can respond to such a call if the Left continues to call people like her bad names and accusing her of doing bad stuff in being a Republican who supported Trump.  Understanding that seems to be a bridge too far.

[17feb21 update]  NAACP sues Trump and Giuliani under guise of violating the 1871 KKK Act as reported in the 17feb21 WSJ.  That is another blatant exercise by the transformed leftwing civil rights group to enlarge the country’s division, keep reminding blacks that they continue as victims, and that they should remain on the plantation cared for by their elitist black political leaders who have learned to play the game.  (more here)

Texans are freezing their symbolic balls off.  The energy richest state of the Union has its energy generation and distribution grid and its energy market in general so badly mangled by its (Republican) state government kowtowing to federal mandates, that there is not enough functioning power generating capacity available as inclement weather knocks out their fair weather wind turbines.  Playing ball with the global warming Left invariably gets the bat shoved up your butt sideways as California already has demonstrated.  Global cooling – it’s a comin’.

 

Dark Days Diary – 28jan21 (updated 30jan21)

George Rebane

Quietech in Grass Valley is a very capable local computer service store owned and run by Melissa Hannebrink.  The Rebanes have been satisfied customers since Melissa’s retired father established the business.  This morning Melissa sent her customers an email that begins with, “I am writing you today with a very heavy heart. As I have shared with some of you, here at Quietech we have endured daily abuse over the past 10 months. By enforcing basic COVID guidelines, there are some who feel their rights are being infringed upon. In addition, we have some who walk through our doors and are so disappointed to find that they aren’t next in line, or that they can’t have their device fixed on-the-spot, that they have full-blown tantrums. These unfulfillable expectations, in addition to the pressures of COVID, seem to be creating the perfect storm for abuse, shockingly even from some of our longest-standing clients. This morning, we had an incident that went too far. We decided to temporarily close to regroup, although the last thing we want is to close our doors and stop helping those in our community who need us.”  As the country sinks into its woke-powered autocracy, we will be reminded more frequently than ever that a gossamer thin veil separates civilization from barbarians at the gate.

Welcome to the After-Trump Era.  Victor Davis Hanson explains the matter to us in his latest commentary.  There he points out, “During the Trump Age, the president was supposedly responsible for every death from COVID-19. Now, the media report that career scientists and health administrators in the federal government, especially at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were largely to blame for past slow testing, and were tardy and lax in apprising the nation of the infectious threat. … In the new age, expect the media and government to suddenly resent any pushback against a sitting president. Questions about the Biden family’s past multimillion-dollar influence-peddling overseas or Biden’s cognitive ability can no longer be asked. … None will compare the recurring violence of Antifa or Black Lives Matter to that of Islamic terrorists. None will compare Biden, who dismissed Antifa as a mere “idea,” to Mussolini or the Nazis. Any retired officer who smears the president, we will be reminded, would violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. … The media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, top retired military brass, corporate America, universities, and professional sports are all recalibrating the truth for our Year One. … In about a month, they will have it down. And soon, we won’t even be able to tell the old reality from the new.”

[29jan21 update] Danny Pearl’s killer is set free by Pakistani courts (more here and here).  Pearl, WSJ’s South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002.  Danny’s parents, who have been fighting the Pakistani justice system for almost twenty years, stated “Today’s decision is a complete travesty of justice” that “puts in danger journalists everywhere, we urge the U.S. government to take all necessary actions under the law to correct this injustice.”  RR has covered this Islamist travesty in previous posts here and here.

[30jan21 update]  Ms Hannebrink has surprisingly taken exception to my above Quietech entry.  Her remarks with my reply may be found @1058am in the comment stream.  I find it remarkable that she seems to think that I ascribed a political leaning to her remarks, especially when I explicitly declined to do so.

Misguided Public Safety Power Shutoffs

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 October 2020.]

Dear Gov Newsom – This is an open letter to you from an old and very disgruntled citizen who has spent the last 63 years of his life in this beautiful state.  During these decades I went to school, earned my living, raised my family here, and watched the steady decline of a once golden state.  And I can attest that it truly was the Golden State because I was there.

Today, after decades of a virtual political monopoly in Sacramento, our state has landed on the bottom of the barrel with several other equally discredited states.  We purposely raised our taxes to the highest levels, became the leader in regulatory burdens heaped on our businesses and homeowners, and are now the hands down mecca of the nation’s welfare recipients – one out of three live here.  We lead the nation in the number of homeless, and invite their filthy tent favelas that now stretch from the coastal cities to the Sierra foothills.  Our food and fuel prices have sky rocketed to the highest in the nation.  Our roads, bridges, and other infrastructures are in third-world disrepair, public employee pensions are unfunded to the tune of unpayable billions, and businesses and middle-class taxpayers are departing in droves to greener pastures.

Add to this California’s highest electricity costs and disastrous power outages that now resemble the availability of electricity in second and third world countries, and you almost have the complete picture of where we are today and the direction we’re headed tomorrow.  (more here) And that, because the state’s legislative and regulatory pipeline is chuck full of a lot more of what already pains us.  But governor, this is just a short summary of California’s deficits and decline, about which long and detailed books have been written.  On top of all this, the state’s political leaders and bureaucrats have created a problem that’s even more up close and personal, one that affects all Californians, especially those of us who live in the rural counties.

The Union Decimates its Other Voices

George Rebane

A new editorial policy has descended on The Union.  Since former editor Brian Hamilton left, several columnists, including regular Other Voices columnists Terry McLaughlin and Manny Montes, have had their submitted columns edited to the point of being shredded.  Specifically, the newspaper’s new line editors not only have removed entire sections of pieces that contain major points, but also have decimated submissions by eliminating critical citations included to substantiate important arguments made by authors.

Most recently Ms McLaughlin’s 7oct20 column ‘Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation’ had its print edition abbreviated, and the online version was restored only after the author’s complaint to the new acting editor Alan Riquelmy.  Mr Montes’ 10oct20 column had an entire section cut out of the print edition that contained the main thrust of his piece.  The supposed 750-word allowance for Other Voices columns was reduced to 440 words.  Given Mr Riquelmy’s response to Ms McLaughlin, we may presume (hope?) that he has also responded promptly to Mr Montes’ concerns.

As a former Union columnist and now a some-time Other Voices contributor, I add this concern to those that I have noted here over the years.  The previously already left-leaning newspaper has recently taken some noticeable steps toward presenting itself as an unabashed outlet of all things progressive.  Its nods toward conservative views have become more disproportionate.

Readers may recall that back in 2015 my bride Jo Ann (before becoming a member of its editorial board) did an extensive survey, lasting several months, of the Union’s op-ed page contents that quantified a definite liberal bias, and reported the results to its management.  The Union acknowledged this through an ‘Editorial Page Challenge’ inviting readers to corroborate the findings.  Only Jo Ann and one other (liberal) reader responded to the challenge with their results that covered the contents of January 2016 (more here) As expected, both surveys gave opposite results.  Jo Ann’s results were 40 conservative, 56 liberal, 46 neutral.  This showed a 40% liberal bias in that month’s op-ed page contents.  The liberal lady’s results were 34 liberal, 40 conservative, 71 neutral – a 17.6% conservative bias.  No doubt according to her lights a good portion of her neutrals were seen as liberal by Jo Ann.

But that was then and this is now.  The beat toward the Left has continued, and I’m willing to bet a pretty penny that what we see in our beloved Union is now overwhelmingly left-leaning.  But please don’t interpret this as my having a hissy fit about what appears in the newspaper.  There are no complaints against the motivations of their management and staff – they are good people and our neighbors.  And we must never forget that the newspaper is a private enterprise and news outlet, one which its owners and editors can tilt in any ideological direction they desire.  No blame, no shame there as long as we all understand which way its winds are blowing and filling the sails of Nevada County voters.

Blackouts Transparency

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 9 September 2020.]

Two weeks ago in this commentary I discussed California’s blight of 3^rd-world country blackouts, and argued that the Power Shortage Blackouts were unnecessary and caused by incompetence at the highest levels of California’s state government.  The other kind of blackouts we are being trained to accept are the so-called Public Safety Power Shutoffs.  These blackouts, we are told, are necessary to prevent wildfires like the one that burned down the town of Paradise.  The real reason for such tragedies is that the power transmission lines which cross our forested mountains have not been properly maintained for decades.

Power companies like PG&E have prematurely focused on the administrative and political machinations involved with the mandated conversion to green power.  All this hullabaloo has been going as they have let their existing power lines deteriorate and become invaded by dangerously flammable foliage, waiting for a spark from a faulty connection or insulator to trigger the next disaster.  In short, our power utility mavens have ignored their existing infrastructure required for reliable power generation and delivery, in favor of new, more expensive, and insufficient means of providing electricity for California’s homes and businesses.

Wildfire Diary – 18aug20 (updated 20aug20)

George Rebane

1. PG&E turned off power on Hind Tit Road and told us it was part of the 1-2 hour rolling blackouts all across the state. Our blackout has now been rolling along for 17 hours.  Moreover, it was beyond cynical that they decided to turn off power to neighborhoods hurriedly preparing to evacuate from the Jones Bar Fire.  Our power does not come through the fire area, it comes from the other direction.  As I mentioned before, there is no power shortage, the outages we are suffering are politically mandated by the state’s Democrat super-majority who have taken offline natural gas and nuclear power generators.
2. Government incompetence and incapability has been on parade again during this fire. All information outlets, loudly proclaimed and lauded during calmer times, outlets that we’re supposed to access when the fire emergency comes, all of them were dysfunctional.  This in the sense that websites were down, phones weren’t answered, and media outlets not informed, most certainly not in any useful timely manner, of the state and extent of the fire.  County and Cal-fire failed utterly, informing us for hours of a 30 acre fire that was already over 300 acres, and no idea of its progress toward populated areas.  They couldn’t even “confirm” whether a home had burned.  Apparently in an environment of low winds and high humidity, the firefighters are doing a better job in the field than their colleagues sitting in command centers and emergency management offices.  No doubt through no fault of their own, Yubanet and KNCO have been particularly worthless as sources of useful and timely fire information.  And the nation’s useful idiots want government to nationalize our healthcare system??!
3. Memo to county emergency management: have someone in the incident command center, that always has an updated map of the current burn area, draw the fire contours on the map in their pad, timestamp it, and then send it to the webmaster who can post on the advertised fire information sites.  Do this at least hourly.
4. Yesterday afternoon we got multiple notifications, all concurrent and inconsistent, of “evacuation warnings”, “evacuation advisories”, and “evacuation orders”. You could take your pick by just choosing which outlet (website, radio), robocall, or text message you wanted.  After the power had been off for two hours, we had the Jeep and truck packed with some important irreplacables and more immediate necessaries, and evacuated to our daughter’s house in Alta Sierra.  It was a redo of a similar evacuation we did to her house in 1993 (more here).  We all had a laugh about it when we arrived – we now owe her two evacuations to our house. 
5. This morning I caught up on the Democrat doings. They’re still singing lyrics from their tried and true TDS Anthem.  Nothing about policy specifics for their promised Socialist America – the leftwing constituent demands very little information from his politicians, as long as he hears promises of OPM coming his way.  In this regard Bumblebrain Biden is his man.  Biden has called for “an end to the era of shareholder capitalism.”  According to him, it’s “untrue and a farce” that "a company’s primary responsibility is to generate returns for shareholders."  (more here)  As I have pointed out countless times, the progressive has no idea how a functioning economy works.  EVERYWHERE in the world where they have gotten their hands on an economy, it either flushes immediately or immediately starts circling the drain hole. 
6. Then there’s carefully cultured Kamelion Kamala who “when she changes her stands it tends to be politically convenient, slowly acknowledged and poorly explained. There are signals of seeing policy as an external thing, not an outgrowth of one’s own belief structure, and things can change.” She was born into a very liberal, upper-class, educated family, and enjoyed all the privileges that our land could offer.  She is a political powerhouse with few public service accomplishments save some very critical ones about which, perhaps, only Willie Brown knows the particulars. (more here) 
7. Last night we gathered all the potpourri of fire information we could, mixed it with our own considerable experience about such things, and decided to spend the night in our own bed. We arrived in the dark, fired up the generator, and had a restful night listening to the fan we set up in the bedroom.  This morning we got up, checked the web for updates (no joy), listened to KNCO (no joy), and had breakfast.  The neighborhood up here on the ridge is very quiet; every once in a while we can hear an airplane in the distance.  No S-2 bombers in sight, but we’re told that Calfire is getting good use out of 800-gallon, single-engine, converted crop dusters since they can maneuver better in the South Yuba River canyon.  So, we’re still all packed up, with our bags staged by the door, ready to high-tail it out of here once there is some visible evidence to recommend that.  Otherwise, we just check on the fire info outlets that contain little besides yesterday’s newspaper.  At 930am PG&E's bullshit rolling blackout, it don't say nothin' but jes keeps rollin' along.
8. [1313 hrs]  NC Emergency Service Fire Dashboard is over 13 hours old.  I just drove the peripheral roads of the fire and talked to stationed police and firefighting personnel.  No one in the field knows what's happening, the extent of the fire, or even where the incident command center is located.  The closest was a congenial CHP on 49 who opined that it was located in the Helling Library.  Turns out its in the Rood Center as expected.  When you try to call Emergency Service, you get blown off.  The government beat goes on; no one knows and everyone is quite sanguine about the fire.  And PG&E tells me that the dolts working for them are still trying to figure out the "cause" of my "outage".  Apparently the idiots can't determine if it's still their announced "rolling blackouts" or God knows what - power has now been out 22 hours.  And their Lucky Strike extra is that they have no information as to when they might get additional information about my outage.

[20aug20 update]  Last night Jo Ann and I got texted that it was safe to return home, our part of Cement Hill Rd had its evacuation order lifted.  We were hunkered down at our daughter’s house in Alta Sierra, she had been the perfect hostess during our stay and made the sojourn actually fun (save for trying to find out what the Jones fire was doing).  We made numerous trips into town to get more groceries and pick-up some necessaries that we left behind.  During these forays we always stopped in Morgan Ranch at a spot that overlooks our entire ridge to the north, and also provides a view of the fire’s smoke coming up from behind a closer ridge to the northwest from our observation point.

RL Crabb misses by a mile

"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

George Rebane

Our county’s celebrated and beloved political cartoonist and prominent leftwing thought leader, RL ‘Bob’ Crabb, got a twofer in the 15aug20 Union (on the editorial board of which he sits along with the wife of my life).  In addition to his regular weekend cartoon (here), he wrote a major piece titled ‘Whose town is it anyway?’  Bob is a longtime resident of Nevada County and his words go a long way to shaping our community’s understanding of the county’s rich and historic past.  Do not dismiss them lightly.

In today’s column Bob takes on the task of comparing the happenings and attitudes of half a century ago with what is going on in the county today, and what went down on the streets of Nevada City a few days ago.  We then witnessed a protest march of BLM supporters – locals and from sources unknown - sporting a variety of signs emblazoned with what have become common leftwing anti-American sentiments seen for weeks in the country’s cities that host violent riots and demonstrations by contingents of Antifa and BLM cadre and supporters.  In our town, these marching protesters were met by a handful of counter-demonstrators who did not take kindly to having their community being designated as the next target of the Left’s declared foment of revolution.

The counter-demonstrators did not act wisely with their emotional response, during which they tore up some protester signs and pushed back individual protesters.  All in all, the ‘violence’ we saw on Broad Street compared favorably with what is the everyday norm for commuters on the workday subway platforms of New York and Tokyo.  And it didn’t even qualify for comparison with what has been happening nightly in the downtowns of Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, … .  But Nevada City is now a hard-left town, and their own were being manhandled in the streets.  This clearly called for a good dose of social justice administered under the prominent flutter of virtue signalling flags.

So the town’s police launched what is undoubtedly their first “complete investigation”, and from the perusal of numerous videos of the dust-up, perpetrating suspects were identified, with the first already arrested and booked into the county jail – more arrests are promised.  The county’s Left continues in the lather of righteous outrage, as witnessed by the number of contributed editorials that surround Bob’s contribution on the newspaper’s op-ed page.  And it is with this background that we dive into Mr Crabb’s literary contribution.

Bob opens with a fine memory lane jaunt recounting the days of yesteryear when the aftermath of the social unrest and riots of 1968 gave rise from the cities to an exodus of hippies, free-thinkers, counter-culturalists, and other various misfits.  They lifted their eyes toward the hills from whence cometh their salvation, dotted with communities which promised the freedom to let them do their own thing, unmolested by those pesky norms of established tradition and nosey cops.  A goodly cohort arrived in Nevada County, and Bob details their somewhat rough reception by the locals while crediting their arrival with all kinds of good things that befell our community in the subsequent years after the dust had settled.

So far so good.  But then our pencil-pushing philosopher attempts to cross one historical bridge too far with his vivid recounting and unfolding attempt to dovetail the ‘then’ with the ‘now’.  He claims that the decades-separated episodes are really birds of a feather, and a reprise of what our community had once before successfully handled, digested, and integrated.  Then he concludes his considerable comparison and counsel with the lament, “So it is disappointing to see history repeat itself on these same streets.”

Not even close – there is nothing here that represents history repeating itself.  Fifty years ago the hippy migrations were strictly a resocialization of urban misfits into kinder climes.  There was neither a national movement underlying it, nor did it include a concerted and much-advertised goal of fomenting a revolution to fundamentally transform America, a revolution which has now successfully co-opted the nation’s established leftwing political party and jerked its leaders into compliant mouthpieces for the movements’ socio-political ideology.

Today’s proto-communist protestors have no desire to quietly integrate into our communities as profit-seeking merchants, service providers, and professionals; or even as workers for capitalist companies competing in minimally regulated open markets.  Today’s rioters and protesters are neo-Marxists, whose limited and jaundiced view of history sees America as a terminally evil country in a world in which socialism has suffered many faulty starts, corrupt capitalist conspiracies, and mistakes by the various leaders of leftwing movements.  All of these are seen as correctible, and will be corrected this time around as we once more unite and march to the strains of the Internationale.  

Ruminations – 11aug20 (updated 13aug20)

George Rebane

Countering imported BLM demonstrators.  Given that BLM has shown its true colors as a political ‘black lives don’t matter’ movement created to transform the country into a socialist state, and demonstrating their violent methods in other towns and cities, I suppose it’s not surprising that people in Nevada County are turning out to defend home and hearth from imported 'protesters', no matter how many like-minded local leftists join them.

‘Mayhem Continues, Protest Narrative Crumbles’  The lamestream media has done it damnest to foist the Big Lie that the country’s riots, burnings, shootings, lootings, … are just “peaceful protests” of people seeking “social justice” in the wake of George Floyd’s death.  None of them admit to the existential evidence generated nightly across the land, and none of them admit to the greater political purpose of a socialist revolution to which the various factions of rioters readily admit and publish.  And this selective blindness is dutifully aped by our local leftwing loonies as demonstrated in these pages and elsewhere.  (more here)

‘Fighting Back Against the Woke Corporation’  The country’s mega-corporatists are doing their best to sell rope to our socialist cum communist revolutionaries in Congress and the streets.  Today their size is such that “Corporate power can enforce cultural conformity—through marketing, through lobbying, through firing.”  Is this not the perfect time for some unwoke, say retailer like Walmart, to make the big move against the market dominance of Amazon?  Just advertise that you are not woke and that you are a capitalist corporation which makes its profits by putting the interests of its customers (not the list of “stakeholders”) first.  For millions of us it will then quickly become the go-to place for online shopping as it builds up its SKU inventory. (more here)

[Update]  The NC BOS defeated the most recent version of the draconian covid ‘urgency ordinance’ at the end of a very lengthy meeting late this afternoon.  The best the proponents could do was to reduce – yes, reduce – the fines for violating the mask, gathering, and dining-in provisions to $500, $2,500, and $5,000 for the first three offenses.  The heroes of the session were Supervisors Ed Scofield and Susan Hoek with their no votes.  If covid ever becomes an ‘urgent matter’ in Nevada County, the BOS can always revisit such an ordinance.  In the interval, let’s respect the common sense of our residents who are well aware of the pandemic’s dangers.

[12aug20 update]  'Black' is a categorical political identity.  Kamala is advertised by the lamestream as being ‘black’.  Her ancestry is way more complex than that, and returns us to the question of how much Negroid blood qualifies one as black or African-American. (more here) In legal terms she’s classified as black if that’s how she wants it.  But what fraction of Negroid ancestry should our society demand before accepting such a politically beneficial de juris racial classification?  (more here) We answered that question for Elizabeth Warren’s Indian ancestry.  Today the answer is ‘whatever works’.

AP News suckers our local Union again.  AP (All Propaganda) is an unabashedly leftwing fake news outfit that still manages to bamboozle the news editors of most of the country’s newspapers.  The latest piece – ‘Virus surge make the United States weak link in global economic recovery’ - that appears in the 12aug20 Union is utter editorial bullshit passed off as news copy.  At best it should appear on the newspapers’ op-ed pages.  But the fact that it passes off as news goes a long way to explain why today’s Americans have such a low opinion of journalists and journalism.  Did any of them ever take a critical thinking course in journalism school?  (The article on Union’s page A6 could not be found on the AP site, nor on the Union’s website.  It looks like a piece of fluff propaganda passed down to small town newspapers that need to fill some real estate in their print editions, and are not that alert or savvy about what qualifies as real news.  You can read it if you look in the print edition on their website – try here.)

[13aug20 update]  President Trump is finally putting some balance into his C19 ‘science team’ with the invitation to a couple of physician scientists who are part of the cohort of thousands of such professionals that has a markedly different take on what our proper response policies should be for this highly politicized pandemic.  Perhaps there now will be some meaningful backroom discussions between Fauci et al and the newcomers.  (more here and here.  H/T to reader.)

Doing it to ourselves – why? (updated 12aug20)

[The Nevada County Board of Supervisors will again vote on Item 26 this coming Tuesday.  Item 26 involves the passage of an "urgency ordinance" that will levy draconian fines on NC residents and businesses for violating any of the decrees and diktats regarding Covid-19 passed by higher up government jurisdictions, and piles on a passel of additional ones in the form of a county ordinance (here) to which we who live here will be subjected.  None of this local government overreach and virtue signalling is necessary since we are all aware of the Covid-19 infection dangers and know how to mitigate the risk - our stats demonstrate.  We don’t need our local pols to establish a legion of STASI-like plain clothes snitches who will cite innocent infractions with fines of thousands of dollars.  We don’t have to do it to ourselves.  Write to your supervisor about opposing Item 26 on the agenda.  My sweetie-pie Jo Ann is doing her part, so I asked if I could publish some of the drafts of letters and emails she is sending to the Supes and senior county staff members.  Hopefully, some of these will inspire you to drop them a line.  gjr]

Jo Ann Rebane

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – live public meeting             

Consideration of item 26, the urgency enforcement ordinance should be held during a live public meeting.  As a board you previously sat through not hours, but DAYS of public comment on the Marijuana Urgency Ordinance.  The public needs to personally express their comments and personally see and hear your reactions thereto on this version of the urgency enforcement ordinance.  Surely you can figure out a way to let the public address your board in person while maintaining social distancing and other covid precautions. 

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I oppose the revised and current version of item 26, urgency covid enforcement ordinance.  This version is draconian.  It encourages the public to “snitch” or “tattle-tale” on individuals, businesses and commercial enterprises to cause code enforcers to levy excessive and confiscatory fines.  There is enough acrimony in this county already.  Don’t stir up more divisiveness.

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I oppose agenda item 26 for the express OVERREACH which makes it unlawful for any individual, business or commercial enterprise to do anything contrary to orders of ANY governmental body, agency or individual at any level in California.  It is impossible for the public to know all those rules, regulations, edicts, and orders.  Send this draft to the waste can.

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I urge you to oppose agenda item 26.  This county and its businesses, including restaurants did everything the governor required under the initial order in March.  This county qualified for special opening status and re-opened carefully.  Restaurants and others invested heavily in costly infrastructure and what did they get – another shut-down.  This county continues to qualify for the special relaxed opening status but the governor’s recent order doesn’t recognize this.  We comply and he punishes us.  Does one size fit all counties? 

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

I urge you to oppose agenda item 26.  The Nevada County Board of Supervisors should be fighting the governor not our local businesses.  Scrap the urgency ordinance and fight for our county’s businesses and not against them.

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

Please oppose agenda item 26.  I urge the board of supervisors to petition/urge/lobby the governor to rescind the statewide “close all restaurants” order.  Nevada County is one of the “open” counties (but how can we tell?).  There is not one case of covid emanating from a restaurant here,  our hospitals are not impacted, and this county has done everything it was required to do to move to the current phase of opening. 

BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11/20, item 26 – OPPOSE

That the governor threatens to withhold recovery funds feels like blackmail for an offense that wasn’t committed.  Arbitrary, capricious, politically motivated, and wrong-headed. 

I would rather see the BOS stand up for the community and its businesses than to enact a punitive urgency ordinance.  You, Supervisors and the city councils should be doing all in your power to NOT lose another business (tax payer).   

Address comments by email for this BOS item in this format:

To: bdofsupervisors@co.nevada.ca.us, bos.publiccomment@co.nevada.ca.us
Cc: Dan Miller <dan.miller@co.nevada.ca.us>, Heidi.Hall@co.nevada.ca.us, Sue.Hoek@co.nevada.ca.us, Scofield Ed <ed.scofield@co.nevada.ca.us>, Anderson Richard <richard.anderson@co.nevada.ca.us>
Subject: BOS Agenda, Tues. 8/11, Item 26

[11aug20 update gjr]  Mercifully, the ‘urgency ordinance’ with its revised, yet still draconian, fines was defeated yesterday by the BOS, thanks to Supervisors Scofield and Hoek.  Why Supervisor Dan Miller pulled a ‘John Roberts’ on us is still a mystery, or is it?  His suggestion that the fines be “reduced by half” to (seatbelts please) $500, $1,000, $2,500 for the first three offenses defined by ordinance was jaw-dropping.  And it begs an answer to ‘why are we doing this to ourselves?’

Well, the answer may have been in front of us all these years, and is still there – Nevada County remains anti-growth and anti-business.  Under this policy the county has struggled for decades to collect enough tax revenues to barely make ends meet, and with the ongoing and insane ‘greening’ of government, it is clear that taxes from our remaining businesses and residents will not cut it.  So, the answer to the shortfall now in progress is a quiet but still visible shift to increase punitive revenues with a marked step-up in collecting fines and fees from code violations.  This tack is exactly the socialist counter to policies required for our county’s long overdue economic growth.  In the 12aug20 Union Michael Taylor expands on all this in his ‘Nevada County is ramping up enforcement to generate revenue’, and it most certainly explains away Dan Miller’s vote.

Ruminations – 30jul20 (updated 5aug20)

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks.  Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away, poor fools.  And their grandchildren are once more slaves. - D.H. Lawrence

George Rebane

‘America’s Summer of Cultural Suicide’ from Victor Davis Hansen is another voice that corroborates the sentiments of these pages.  With what we used to call the ‘silent majority’ practicing ever more persistent forms of quietude as our woke progressives rampage to transform the country, the chances for any return to normalcy have faded and now range between slim and none.

The Left’s desperate spinning of the country’s violent riots as “peaceful protests” has now become a staple in their stable of pre-election Big Lies.  When shown dated videos of mayhem on our city streets to counter their lies, they and their lamestream lackeys double down by calling the reporting of existential evidence as just rightwing Republican “narrative”.  The Left is confident in the effectiveness of such outrageous denials because they know their constituents are either ignorant or only lap up lamestream outlets, as we confirm in our comment streams.

Nevada County’s “Urgency Ordinance” to fine the bejeezus out of business and people who violate the notched-up version of Gov Newsom’s latest C19 diktats was tabled by the BoS for rewrite and clarification.  Now that everyone seems to be playing by the latest version of the lockdown rules, is there still any reason to prescribe fines at the draconian levels in the ordinance’s first go-around – in short, why do it to ourselves?  And the question still begs, ‘Why can’t an already informed populace in a remote rural county with low incidence of the pandemic not be allowed to take their own risks in following the guidance to wear masks, social distance, and not congregate in big gatherings where there is a higher chance of getting infected?’

'Stupid on Steroids' is how Bob Crabb has branded me and all conservatives for the above sentiments.

Mystery seeds from China.  "The U.S. Department of Agriculture said consumers in at least 22 U.S. states and several other countries had received unsolicited packages of seeds. Canada, the U.K. and Australia all are investigating the matter."  One of the Rebane clan in the county received such a seed package this week.

[31jul20 update]  Congressional Republicans are coming across to this commentator as somewhere between double dummies and dreadfully incompetent.  My general lament about today’s Republican Party (here) didn’t go into specifics, so I’ll highlight a couple of pieces of evidence here.  Thankfully retiring Rep James Sensenbrenner’s (R-WI) performance yesterday as the ranking member of the House Antitrust Subcommittee was a travesty (here).  As shown on FN’s 30jul20 news, every point he made was lame, and he phrased every question as a wrongway, unrevealing puffball to the tech execs.  He made a perfect Republican doppelganger of Democrat double dummies like Rep Hank Johnson (D-GA) who showed concern that Guam would tip over if we added additional military personnel to our base there (here).

Meanwhile, the ongoing Republican incompetence in the Senate is highlighted by WSJ’s Kim Strassel (here) – “As Congress spent another tortuous week nonnegotiating a fifth virus-relief bill, it finally dawned on Republicans that they are being played for fools. Democrats don’t want a bill; they want to win an election. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—who may go down as one of Washington’s greatest cynics—knew exactly what she was doing in May, when she cooked up the $3 trillion monstrosity known as the Heroes Act. If the GOP said no to her outlandish demands, Democrats would brand them as uncaring, unable to lead, unworthy of controlling Washington. If instead she bludgeoned them into swallowing her spendathon, Democrats would wave the win as proof they should control Washington. Heads Democrats win; tails Republicans lose.”  There are indications that McConnell and his caucus are finally having an epiphany as to the requirement for the Repubs to present a plan that robustly contrasts their approach with that of the Dems.  About f*&!ing time.

[1aug20 update] Rep John Lewis RIP.  As readers have come to expect, my take on the life and times of John Lewis runs counter to the national paeans raised in his honor and remembrance.  The historical record shows that he was indeed a courageous and self-sacrificing civil rights leader in the early 1960s, as he helped launch the landmark integration and voting acts of 1964 and 1965.  But then in the remainder of his public career, he reverted to join and then lead the other cynical Congress critters who went on to pass bill after bill that served to destroy the black family, deny education to their young, and create enduring murderous ghettos in our inner cities.  In these, residents mistakenly placed their last vestiges of hope on government largess, which did nothing but install an attitude of ingrained victimhood that kept them in place as they continued to vote for their calculating political ‘benefactors’, who perennially promised a better life that they had no intention of delivering.  Nevertheless, history will be kinder to John Lewis than this politically incorrect, socially unjust, yet factually accurate remembrance.

[2aug20 update]  Another nail in journalism’s coffin.  WSJ’s Paul Gigot joined all the lamestream journalists in reporting that the economy shrank 32.9% during the 2^nd quarter.  That’s like the GDP dropping almost a third in three months.  Notice they didn’t say it dropped at the annual rate of 32.9% during the 2^nd quarter, which is in fact what happened.  For the numerate out there, they tap a few calculator keys and quickly determine that the GDP actually shrank only 7.4% last quarter, and were it to repeat that for the next three quarters, then and only then would an annual drop of 32.9% come to pass.  The average Joe and Josephine on the corner don’t have a clue, and their takeaway is that Trump is mismanaging the economy so badly that it loses a third of its value in three months.  Journalists compete for the bottom of the barrel with politicians, public school teachers, and lawyers in the minds of the diminishing number of Americans who still pay attention.

The newest Big Lie from Democrats is convincing the already confused Joe and Josephine that all mail-in ballots are alike, and that since we have had absentee voting with mail-ins for years with no problems, expanding to all voting via mail-ins will follow suit opposed only by Republicans who want to reduce the minority vote.  Again, nothing is further from the truth.  County registrars mailing a mail-in ballot to all on their voter rolls are already causing reams of problems where such practices have been tried (and all of these in Democrat jurisdictions).  Almost all voter rolls across the country are woefully out of date, containing names of people moved, people dead, and people not qualified to vote – e.g. California has over 500,000 of these non-voters on the state’s active voter rolls.  On the other hand, absentee ballots are only sent to people who request them with appropriate vetting information.  Democrats love all the creative things that can be done with blanket mail-in votes.

[5aug20 update]  Insurrection Act of 1807.  OK boys and girls, here’s the skinny on sending in the feds, including the military and National Guard, to quell rioting in cities.  The act has been invoked numerous times by presidents since it was passed – last time by Bush1 in 1992 against the LA riots.  To pull the trigger on the full use of the act, the president needs to “publish a proclamation ordering the insurgents to disperse.”  Which in effect President Trump has done numerous times.  Check it out here.  (H/T to an astute reader who sent me the link.)

Letters from the Revolution – 24jul20 (updated 26jul20)

George Rebane

No one’s interests, objectives, values, … will exactly match yours.  The best you can ever do is support those with whom you share the most in common.

Kudos to our local restaurants Old Town Café, Sergio’s, and Friar Tucks for remaining open and in business despite Gov Newsom’s unconstitutional diktats and the compliantly cringing Nevada County Environmental Health Department’s threats to close and fine them.  The poster on their doors says it all.

[update] ‘News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’ observes Gerard Baker in the 20jul20 WSJ.  He cites Orwell’s “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”, and writes, Part of George Orwell’s genius lay in his insight that manipulation of language was essential to the revolutionary project. If you can command popular compliance with a lexicon that reorders—or even inverts—the widely understood meaning of political terms, you can remake society as much as you can with any law, mandate or act of force. Thought is constrained by the limits of language, and so language becomes a vital tool for placing limits on thought.”  Baker apparently is not aware of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of which Orwell undoubtedly was.  S-W makes the strong claim that one can only think thoughts that can be expressed in the language(s) one knows.  The Left quickly became the leading practitioner of this facet of human cognition, and has applied it worldwide where it has come to control the institutions of education, news media, and entertainment.

[26jul20 update]  Democrat Big Lies just continue washing over the country.  The latest is from Dem big city mayors who tell their know-nothings that the president’s sending federal forces into their cities to enforce federal laws, which the mayors refuse to do, is unconstitutional.  As former AG Michael Mulkasey patiently made clear on FN, the truth is exactly the opposite.  The Constitution requires the president to send in federal LE forces wherever they are needed in the country in order to enforce federal laws – e.g. secure and defend federal property.  Another longstanding Dem whopper is the ongoing charge that Trump has mishandled the federal C19 response, which ‘mishandling’ no one seems to be able to define.  So, when Bumblebrain was asked on MSNBC what the correct response should be when he is president, he stuttered through his ‘six point plan’ containing items each one of which had already been initiated by President Trump and is already in operation.  The liberal interviewer was either too ignorant to call Biden on his purloined ‘plan’, or didn’t want to tell her audience that Bumblebrain had blown another one.

 

This Young Collectivist’s Column is NOT a Caricature

George Rebane

Recent NUHS graduate Michael Sekerak is working hard to reshape our society and community.  He wrote the cri de Coeur ‘Time to elevate those marginalized in our community’ which The Union published in its 8jul20 edition.  What is remarkable about Mr Sekerak’s column is that it so exemplifies the education, indoctrination, and mentality of the youth that our long-politicized and polarized public education system produces.  His column and the way he expresses his deeply felt sentiments would be considered a tongue-in-cheek caricature of current collectivist expression were I or another conservetarian to compose such, and then claim that its prescriptions correctly represent the pap that passes for progressive thought.  Our liberal readers would take me to task for composing such an obviously naïve collection of leftwing talking points, insisting that this would be yet one more ‘racist perspective’ from the Right (what else?), and that their real nostrums for us come from higher, socially just, and more sophisticated sources.

In any event, I present the entirety of Mr Sekerak’s composition below so that our readers can appreciate the product of our public schools.  As matter of fact, Nevada County would be one of the least likely locales in which to find individuals who have been marginalized by our community.  But that, of course, is not the proper woke attitude or outlook – America’s persecuted, denied, and aggrieved are everywhere marbled into our racist and white privileged communities, even unto these remote foothills now filling with liberal nest-soilers from the cities yearning to breathe free.

From the following copy, the casual reader will note that Mr Sekerak’s heartfelt desiderata, when even partially implemented, will further reduce our schools’ academic content and increase its level of dysfunction as an educational institution.  His accusation of our schools’ deficit of woke, and call for additional Newspeak instruction, and claims of “never given the opportunity” to “discuss systemic issues” is, of course, both ignorant and specious in today’s America.  Enjoy.

In light of the recent protests, we must make long-lasting and direct changes that critically challenge how we frame our community and our place in the nation’s history.

The letter below calls upon our local county public high schools to address problems concerning the diversity and cultural acceptance in our education system. We need more than a transient reaction from our schools. Through this petition, we provide a direct means for our local leaders to stand with black, indigenous, people of color (POC), lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQIA+) individuals, and all other marginalized peoples in the Nevada County community and across the country.

We urge Nevada Joint Union High School District to implement policy changes to become intentionally anti-racist and inclusive of the many diverse communities who make up our past, present, and future in all aspects of this county’s educational infrastructure. In your June 9 statement, you made a commitment to “ensure equitable outcomes for all students.” This can be achieved through a number of direct actions:

(1) Redefine the district’s mission, values, and student conduct codes to directly reflect anti-racist and inclusive positions.

(2) Expand the body of anti-racism, racial justice, cultural diversity, and inclusivity literature assigned in the social sciences and humanities curricula.

(3) Create identity-based affinity groups (Black Student Union, Asian Student Alliance, Queer and Questioning Groups, etc.) as a brave space for students to explore their identities.

(4) Re-evaluate the hiring process of administrators, faculty, and staff.

(5) Increase training on implicit bias, equity, inclusion, and restorative justice systems.

(6) Invite diverse speakers and take students on field trips that directly address matters of racial justice, inclusivity, and white privilege in the NJUHSD student body.

If you support this proposal, please sign the petition.  It is time we work together to elevate the voices of our marginalized community It is time we work to educate ourselves and our future generations to stand up against injustices. In order for this to happen we must first address the gaps in our local education system. How can you discuss systemic issues if you are never given the vocabulary to do so? How can you discuss systemic issues if you are never given the opportunity to do so?

Our education system should have provided us with the tools we needed to critically challenge the systems we have in place. And it did not.

Michael Sekerak graduated from Nevada Union High School, Class of 2013.

Letters from the Revolution – 8jul20 (updated 9jul20)

George Rebane

Reports of the number of cumulative C19 cases in any given jurisdiction misses the point.  Nobody should care about cumulative cases, only the number of active cases, and maybe the number who have died.  It’s the active cases that communicate some measure of risk for those who are out and about.  The ones who had it and were “released” (died or recovered) are history.  The 7jul20 Union headline piece (129 total cases as of last Friday) misses the point and tells us nothing about how risky it is to go grocery shopping.  This kind of reporting is shared by our crack journalism industry across the country.  (more here)

Our Bob Crabb is again flying hot, true, and normal in the Left lane as is evident in his latest graphic contribution in yesterday’s Union (filched below).

Bob's cartoon falls right in line with the nation’s lamestream outlets advancing the narrative that it’s the people from the Right who are the dangerous gun-toting rioters out there amongst the righteous folks of Left filling the streets with their "peaceful protests against racism".  The falling statues, looted shops, and burning buildings can easily be explained away by natural expressions of social justice and spontaneous combustion – remember, correlation is not causation.  Bob would do a lot to rescue his ‘mid-road’ credentials were he to draw something that illustrated the riotous actions of clearly identifiable Antifa and BLM thugs.  But with high likelihood that could also cause  the locals to pull his Leftwing License, and maybe even get him booted from The Union – worse things have happened for less to those progressives who stray from the straight and narrow.  We are reminded that revolutions first and foremost eat their own.

The causes of “gun violence” in minority neighborhoods continues to be ignored by the nation’s pro-communist commentariat.  Even FN (‘fair, balanced, and scared shitless’) is using that label in reports of the mass murders occurring every weekend on a Democrat-controlled urban plantation near you.  So when the next anti-2A push comes, you won’t have to worry your little head in the effort to discriminate between law-abiding ownership and use of guns, and the ongoing onslaught on black lives that really don’t matter.  Everyone wants to stop gun violence, right?

Speaking of legal guns, entering our Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital yesterday, I was again reminded of the utter insanity of policies that put up signs reading ‘The carrying of firearms in this facility is prohibited.’  This ensures that the facility is a ‘free fire zone’ for any deranged shooter until the police arrive, and then get organized to enter and confront the shooter.  Experience has shown that an in situ CCW-armed individual is the fastest way to stop the murderous mayhem and save countless lives.  For those not familiar with the safety stats of America’s CCW holders, consider that you are six times more likely to be murdered by a criminally rogue LE officer than a CCW civilian.  And here we’re not talking LE shootings caused by mistakes and/or incompetence.  Given the background checks and vetting required for a permit, CCW holders are the nation’s safest cohort of gun-carriers.

[update] The Bumblebrain Administration.  It is now old news that his VP woman of color will exercise historic powers in the Executive Branch; the DNC will have it no other way (and you heard it here first, I think).  But now a cascade of leaks from the Dem leadership also inform us that it’s “inconceivable” that Bumblebrain would run for reelection.  (Recall, for me it’s inconceivable that he’ll complete his first term.)  Additionally, in order to calm their constituencies, the Dem king-makers want our presumptive president to identify the complete spate of nominees for his cabinet, preferably by convention time.  Then everyone will know that capable and politically progressive people will be in charge of the various arms of government, and a vote for Bumblebrain will really be a worry-free vote for a socialist POTUS-optional government – the fundamentally transformed country’s first steps toward a post-constitutional Politburo.

[9jul20 update]  Victor Davis Hanson, one of my many mentors, makes a curious argument in his ‘The Fragility of the Woke’.  He correctly points out their fecklessness, insanities, and virulent ideology, but makes no case for the movement’s fragility.  In fact, he seems to do the opposite and confirm what we all witness in the news and daily round.  The woke movement, along with its militant BLM and Antifa arms, Democrat political support, and Soros et al financial support, appears to be the most robust, dangerous, and long-lasting  anti-American enterprise yet launched by the Left as their latest political road to socialism.  I’m confused as to why anyone keeping up with today’s events would consider this movement to be fragile as more and more institutions fall to its socio-political dicta.

Among the cavalcade of Dem Big Lies is Pelosi’s daily refrain about “the president is not above the law.”  What her constituents apparently are too dense to puzzle out is that President Trump has never been above the law, but has always gone through the bowels of the appropriate legal processes, defending himself as the law allows everyone to defend themselves.  And this is what is happening with the recent SCOTUS ruling concerning his financials and tax returns.  It’s only the lying leftwing loonies who continue to portray the process as the president somehow remaining above the law.  Now you have another litmus test to tell if a person is an idiot – just ask him if what the president is doing is above the law.

Hunker Down Diary – 23may20

George Rebane

Competition is the only cure for incompetence.

On this Memorial Day weekend today is HD77 for Jo Ann and me.  Even though we have not left the county, we have taken a number of ‘essential’ trips to the grocery, nursery, and hardware store.  We have also had a number of essential dinners with family and local friends, and continue our Facetime cocktail hours.  Jo Ann has her farm planted for this year, and everything appears to be on track for a bountiful summer and fall.  I overdid it on splitting firewood; we now have enough to finish out this season and much of next season.  Both of us keep attending Zoomed meetings of the various organizations in which we are active.

As political animals, we maintain ferocious reading and writing schedules.  For better or worse (currently still worse), we have not touched our portfolio during the recent wild dip and roller coaster recovery.  So far so good.  I am having a great time rummaging around the technical sides of epidemic science and management.  Readers know my thoughts on the amount and kind of ‘science’ that has been brought to bear on this coronavirus pandemic here in America and also in other developed countries.  As more and more people begin to understand and admit, there is little or no science that is evident in the measurement and/or management of this disease (you heard it first here two months ago).  The whole C19 affair is a dreadful self-inflicted farce that continues to play out in the healthcare and economic sectors.

The record of pronouncements by both our national and state healthcare professionals, and political leaders illustrate a growing tsunami of contradictory statements regaling us with predictions, prescriptions, policies, and prohibitions which range between the comical and insane.  Basically, no one knows anything definitive about how/what to measure that can be used to track and support a coherent set of response policies.  Everyone is flying by the seat of their pants under the rubric, repeated with the greatest gravitas, that ‘we will be guided by science and not politics’.  Given the bevy of brown numbers that continue to flow from universities and alphabet-soup agencies, the real national and state responses long ago succumbed to exactly the opposite guidance – what little science there is about dealing with the coronavirus, it doesn’t have a chance.  In the meantime, people are revolting against the lockdowns and betting on herd immunity until a vaccine makes its debut from the wings.  Actually, it’s only half the people who understand the real desolation that economic destitution brings, the other half don’t have a clue and believe in the tooth fairy, endless newly printed money, and the states’ national guards mobilized to work the farms, deliver the goods, and staff the grocery stores, until the all-clear is sounded by Drs Fauci and Brix.  (more here)

And to put a ribbon on it or add insult to injury, we here on Hind Tit Rd (aka Cement Hill Rd) suffered our second power outage in a week.  Don’t know what the boys and girls at PG&E are doing, but they ain’t doing it right.  I again draw your kind attention to my above tagline.