Rebane's Ruminations

‘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.

Hunker Down Diary – 9may20

George Rebane

Today is HD63 in the Rebane household, and we are beginning to see little stirrings of sanity across California with even timid Nevada County showing signs of developing a C19 resistant backbone.  Now we are starting to see appeals from various late comers for letter writing campaigns to our electeds to exhort them to end our county’s lockdown.  In response, our Supes are now meeting in secret with the county health officer and others to develop plans to return to some semblance of normalcy, having taken the first baby step to loosen things to the level dictated from Sacramento (really a cop out, here).  Many other counties have more courageously and correctly led the state in returning their communities to prudent post-C19 environments of business, commerce, and social interaction.  That one-size-fits-all policies are wrong can be seen from the data on the disparate impact that the virus has had on our country. (here)

The upshot of it all, one that escapes many people and all progressives, is that we will sooner than later end the lockdown no matter what our command/control governments tell us.  This is an easy deduction, and one that RR (along with other conservatives) has attempted to communicate for the last two months.  We can open up quickly and purposefully with a set of broadly agreed prudent behaviors that are integrated into our new social contract, thereby saving the substantial part of our economy that remains and can launch into rapid recovery.  Or we can continue hunkering down toward a complete destruction of our economy so that unemployment rates go north of 50%, and result in a wholesale grassroots rebellion of a paupered citizenry with unpredictable results.

Local liberals lambast loosening lockdowns (updated)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 28apr20 (updated 2may20)

George Rebane

501c3 bets to co-locate money and mouth.  RR’s commenters have over the years made assertions and predictions with such deeply held convictions as to draw more than a smile from the rest of us.  So here’s a proposal (again) – offer odds and a material dollar bet that your measurable assertion will come true.  The bet may be taken up to a specified dollar amount by challengers.  The loser must remit his lost amount to the bona fide 501c3 charity chosen by the winner.  Say, one of our lefties and true believers in Bumblebrain’s November victory offers 2:1 odds for a maximum of $500.  Then if I take a $100 of that and lose, I have to mail a check to the 501c3 that he specified.  If I win, then the leftie has to mail a $200 check to my 501c3.  The bettors will confirm and adjudicate their own bets – honorable behavior is paramount. The comment streams will become the indelible archive of such bets, and I will keep an updated post of all such pending bets similar to how I ran the Dropout Derby.  The aim here is to sanitize RR comment streams from the reams of unmitigated bullshit posted by commenters, some who have the courage to use their real names, and the sackheads who don’t have any perceivable courage of their convictions as they continue spouting anonymous crap in these pages.  I have labeled these as ‘501c3 bets’, and a commenter can challenge the veracity of another commenter with such a bet, that if refused will communicate to all the level of conviction.  My own prediction is that most commenters will be happy to continue just passing hot air anonymously.

Socialist scumbags want others to pay off their perfidious vote buying debts.  For the last few decades our progressives have bought the votes of public sector employees – police, first responders, teachers, pencil pushing bureaucrats, … - through thug-like union negotiations for lavish pension plans that are now unfunded to the tune of trillions.  Today the evil Dems in Congress are attempting to attach to C19 relief legislation pension bailouts for the various Dem run states.  In short, they want future, say, Floridians to pay for the retirements of, say, Illinois state employees.  As Sen Rick Scott (R-FL) points out (here), federal bailouts like these are a very bad policy to begin with, but more so because they reward the continuance of blatantly corrupt and cunning incompetence by liberal politicians in such state governments.

‘You can never, ever trust the Communists.’ is a wise exhortation memorialized by William McGurn writing (here) about an elderly Hong Kong lawyer and democracy activist recently arrested by the Chinese communists for his role in illuminating the illegal conversion to totalitarianism of the former British colony.  The takeaway here is that today communism sports a broad halo of similar ideologies embraced by the greater Left who range from kitchen table communists, through practicing progressive academics, to legions of liberal politicians, media personalities, and entertainers, all abetted by a solid phalanx of leftwing government employees embedded in countless agencies and bureaus across the country.  Their common denominator is the Alinsky Almanac of public propaganda which was first institutionalized by V. Lenin who held that “Communists have only contempt for the ‘bourgeois’ idea of objective truth, replacing it with a morality that holds ‘truth’ to be whatever is expedient for the party at that moment. “  We see that replicated daily in our lamestream media.

Nevada County government is turning out to be a toady when it comes to asserting the obvious fact that rural counties are not the same as urban counties, and should therefore not be forced to adhere to the one-size-fits-all lockdown mandates from Sacramento.  Absent our county, six northern California counties have joined in a publicized protest (here) of the governor’s wrong-headed program to fight the C19 virus at great cost to the state’s private and public sectors.  Gavin Newsom, along with other Dem governors, sees this as another opportunity to ratchet up the state’s power over citizens, power once institutionalized that will be hard for citizens to walk back once the crisis is over.  ‘How Louisiana Reopened After Hurricane Katrina’ is only a recent example of how the government takes and keeps.  Closer to home, Nevada County has now issued a formal legal lockdown order that is to stay in force until 15 May 2020 (here).  The document is beyond byzantine government-speak with detailed exceptions that continue for pages and can be gratuitously interpreted 20 ways from Sunday.  Reading such prolific verbiage always makes me wonder again what happens to otherwise normal and reasonable people after they enter politics.  To various degrees they all become tainted personages who confirm their obvious blemishes by posturing themselves as being exalted by their positions of power.

[29apr20 update]  Anti-C19 drugs are on a rollercoaster ride of acceptability.  First we heard good things about re-purposing hydroxychloroquine (HCL) plus additives as being both a C19 prophylactic and a curative, then the lamestream screamed at Trump for suggesting its use and studies were dug up to show that it didn’t work.  The same happened to Gilead’s Remdesivir, first it was good (here), then it was totally ineffective according to the lamestream.  Now it looks like both HCL and Remdesivir are back up on the C19 Pharma Hit Parade.  As of 1030 29apr20 the Dow is up 609 (2.55%) on news of a most comprehensive study showing that Remdesivir works (here and here), and also other studies coming in showing that HCL also works (here).  A kicker for this news is that several pharma companies developing C19 vaccines report progress is being made much faster than the experts anticipated with at least two candidates going into early human trials.

[30apr20 update]  C19 mortality rates.  A correspondent sent me a link to a website (here) that specializes in collecting data and making information out of it.  Of current interest are the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  This posting covers the age and health factors on C19 deaths.  Analysis of the data delivers the punchline – “both aging and being unhealthy, separately, contribute to a greater risk of dying from Covid.  The risk from being unhealthy, though, is far greater.”  This important finding is backed up by numerous clearly laid out charts and tables from which I lifted the one below.  (Actually, TypePad is partially up right now, but won't accept graphics for posting.  1may20 - and now it will.)

[1may20 update]  More C19 data to assuage the TDS sufferers who can read.

[2may20 update]  The mentality of the Nevada County BoS.  The Supes shut down our local ‘transfer station’ (aka county dump) for a week before wholesale public uproar made them rescind their dictum.  What haunts me about their action, as the most recent and locally accessible decision by government politicians, is how could they possibly have come to such a conclusion to limit the hours and number of vehicles that the Waste Management dump could, should, and would service in a day.  When some county staffer laid such a proposal before the Board, why was it not unanimously rejected in the first, say, 3 to 5 milliseconds?  Cleaning up junk from your household and land during an imposed lengthy quarantine is an extremely useful, rewarding, timely, and safe activity.  Packing your vehicle or trailer with junk and taking it to the dump exposes no one to unnecessary risk of infection, including to Waste Management’s workers who need their hours in this time of economic distress.  All that became obvious to our Supes only after they were overwhelmed with the public pushback that they had acted with blatant and palpable idiocy to compliantly place yet another such unreasonable restriction upon the citizenry.  The item of enduring interest is what went through their collective minds when they issued that edict.  The record shows that not a single supervisor stood to publicly oppose it.  Understanding this same process, as it is historically practiced by politically powerful assemblies at all levels across the land, is important for us as a free people, so that we can be vigilant and work hard to reduce and/or eliminate its effects on our lives.

 

Hunker Down Diary – 27apr20

George Rebane

Today is HD51 for the Rebanes.  As most people, we have been doing extensive Facetime with family and friends, and Zooming in for meetings.  We also meet surreptitiously for dinners with equally hunkered family and friends. The rest of the time is taken up with household chores and deskwork.  RR readers know what I’ve been noodling about.  Jo Ann has been busy with her Republican Women Federated, NC Republican Central Committee,  and Union editorial board work.  My labors on the boards of MIM and SESF have been minimal since the C19 lockdown.  And now that the weather guessers are predicting warm weather going forward as far as the eye can see, it’s time to get the farm going and the horseshoe court spiffed up for competition.

We are also participating in weekly online cocktail sessions with other couples.  These have turned out to be more fun than we anticipated, and all of us look forward to the next week’s happy hours.  So all in all, social life continues along newly created paths.  We always have a fire going during the evenings which are divided into TV nights and reading nights.  The TV fare is all prerecorded stuff of various series, new/commentary programs, movies, and documentaries.  (Years ago, we pretty much weaned ourselves off of live broadcasts, everything gets put on the DVR – we pace the presentations, they don’t pace us.  I suppose everyone now does that so it’s hard to see why advertisers still pay to advertise, unless some people still watch live TV.)

Today we had to make a trip into town for bags of soil and sand – soil for Jo Ann’s farm and sand for refurbishing my world-class horseshoe court.  She gets the best manmade soil you can buy which contains all the nummies that her veggies want, including 15% chickenshit.  Long ago we decided not to run the numbers on the actual cost of our vegetables – we’re not in competition with Safeway, but they are with us.  It has turned out to be a labor of love and the pure joy of eating loads of home-grown veggies.  We even enjoy the late night hunts for tomato worms with our UV flashlight.

But my big report of the day is that regardless of what our out-of-step governor dictates, the people of Nevada County are not staying at home.  Traffic on the roads and Brunswick Basin was somewhere between normal and heavy.  The nursery parking lot was so full with people coming and going that they had two clerks out there directing traffic.  Picking up sand at B&C was no different.  The entire shopping center’s parking lot was full of cars, and the store full of  people.  More than half the people were not wearing masks.  It is clear that it is the people who have ended the lockdown – rural Californians are not waiting for the word from Sacramento.  The only thing we are still waiting for is the county to get their jackboot off our necks and let the restaurants, bars, churches, and theaters open up for sit-down food, worship, and entertainment.

Sometime in the not too distant future I’d like to see some constitutional legal beagles from the Left argue the legality of the government’s peremptory shutdown and destruction of our economy and social life.  From my perch, this has not been the finest hour for enterprising and independent America.  And now the data is coming in from multiple sources overseas and within our borders that national lockdowns are wrongheaded and more dangerous, most certainly in the long run, than hunkering down.  (more here)

A Nation Risk Averse - Scared, Cowering, and Compliant

George Rebane

In the middle of the 20^th century we lived in a world filled with ‘unconquered’ infectious diseases that were both life threatening and life limiting.  Everything from measles to polio lurked in places unknown.  And, of course, we had the rates of mortality and morbidity to show for it.  Nevertheless, life went on in full recognition of the hidden dangers laying in wait.  None of us thought of shutting down the country and cowering in our homes until someone somewhere in authority would make the dangers go away.

The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed 50M worldwide and somewhere well above half million Americans died of the disease.  But life not only went on, it thrived in the years after WW1 with the country’s economy growing while people were still coming down with the virus and other maladies.  Little to no mention of the disease made the news nor required special government dispensations affecting the entire population.  The flu was there, it would stay for a while, and then it would go away – meanwhile try not to get sick.

The same happened later in the century when we weathered the ‘Asian flu’ in 1957 – over 110,000 deaths in the US and 1M worldwide.  And then there came the ‘Hong Kong flu’, another Asian flu in 1968 – 100,000 deaths in the US and 1.1M worldwide.  From the NIH we learn that “within the past one hundred years, four pandemics have resulted from the emergence of a novel influenza strain for which humans possessed little or no immunity: the H1N1 Spanish flu (1918), the H2N2 Asian flu (1957), the H3N2 Hong Kong flu (1968), and the H1N1 swine flu (2009).”  They summarize these pandemics in the following table.

And then there were others like the avian or ‘bird flu’ which killed 70,000 Americans; and even more - it’s all very confusing.  But the bottom line is that people didn’t lose jobs, companies didn’t go out of business, the fed and state governments didn’t go autocratic, no one panicked, life went on.

Hunker Down Diary – 23apr20 (updated)

George Rebane

We are now in HD47 and watching how the national lockdown has slowly turned from a health safety policy to yet another political match between the Left and the Trump administration.  These days we do a lot of reading about C19, recognizing new data on the extent of existing herd immunity, greatly lowered death rates, and contagion numbers a bit higher than the annual flu, in addition to the curves already being flattened.  And therefore, by our lights it’s long-past time to end the lockdown; at least start a rapid phased loosening of commerce that’s based on regional factors.

It is clear which side wants maximum misery and economic disruption/destruction in these months leading up to the election.  The party with no policy but continuing criticism of those fighting the pandemic is working wonders to rend the country during this global pandemic.

In the meantime, we note that Placerville has already appealed to Gov Newsom about pulling back on his ‘one size fits all’ statewide C19 proscriptions so favored by socialists.  Placerville correctly argues that it is a low-density rural town which does not compare with LA and the other metro areas of the state.  Meanwhile, our own county and city governments continue to meekly toe the lockdown line, making not a discernible peep to Sacramento as to the growing insanity and hardship of practicing the statewide policy in these foothills.  The correct way forward here is to let the shops and public spaces open, and then deal with any jackboot responses from state bureaucrats – always better to ask for forgiveness than permission.  What the hell can they do to us anyway as other states and regions of similar descriptions are already going on with their lives?

In the ‘don’t let a crisis go to waste’ department, we note that California has now issued a new set of guidelines to start statewide death panels in healthcare facilities like clinics and hospitals.  People will be scored based on age and health to determine their priority/access to healthcare.  The whole process is sold on the basis of “life-cycle considerations” to allocate treatment resources.  The idea being that older folks have already had enough enjoyment out of life, and since the younger ones haven’t, scores based on age should be used in allocating limited care.  There is no provision in these guidelines for other factors like the social contributions that many older people continue to provide their communities. (more here)

I think such an allocation policy has been done informally on a case-by-case basis for years, and I see nothing wrong with that practice.  But bureaucratized formalization is a giant step toward bringing the state into the middle of intimate doctor-patient relationships, and a notch away from new requirements for healthcare professionals having to request permission before providing this or that type of care, and then reporting what was provided and its aftermath.  As most of us know, once this kind of command/control starts, it is almost impossible to walk back.  And within the greater embrace of encroaching socialism, in America it has already started.

In the 23apr20 WSJ Dan Henninger writes a compelling column – ‘How We’ll Live With Coronavirus’ - wherein he argues that human nature will trump egregious lockdown policies, and people will learn to live with C19 as just another disease that needs to be recognized and dealt with in the daily round, much as we did with all the other dreaded diseases before we eventually conquered them.  Extended cowering has never been a prominent part of how people behave – save perhaps under the tender mercies of a KGB or Stasi.

[update] Newsom’s 6-point plan to lift lockdown was released about a week ago - I forgot to mention it above.  On the face of it, his plan ranges somewhere between cynical and insane.  For openers, most of its provisions are either unattainable or will only come to pass in the far future.  You can review them here.  His message to the state’s idiots is a warning that the dependers on relaxing the shutdown would hang on “science, not politics”.  Now that is one the largest cartloads of bullcrap any politician has delivered in a long time.  Of course his decision will depend on politics – the current delay in opening up already confirms it.  The many considerations that will go into his actual decision will be munged over only in the political arena, and science will enter in only for CYA purposes to camouflage some more partisan and self-serving factor that cannot be revealed to the public.

The whole thing reeks of the usual subterfuge used to cover the socialists’ perpetual campaign to remove citizens’ rights and freedoms.  I’m reminded of the ongoing 2A battle that cites ‘gun violence’ as its raison d’etre.  There the Left has been diligent in constructively abrogating our 2A rights.  How?  By not being able to directly confiscate our firearms, they instead continue to pass collateral laws and regulations which make their purchase, possession, storage, transport, use, and purchase of related equipments (e.g. ammo for openers) between difficult to illegal.  This approach works wonderfully with those in the land grouped under the ‘myth of the rational voter’ (cf. Bryan Caplan).

Scattershots – 15apr20 (updated 18apr20)

George Rebane

For a progressive the content value of delivered messages depend only on the correct credentials of the messenger. 

Autocracy rising.  Granted that all the federal and state hunker-down mandates have taken a big bite out of our civil liberties (here and here), we witness and read daily of people being stopped, harrassed, arrested, and even handcuffed for engaging in non-infectious activities like walking in the woods, surfing alone, riding a bike, driving a car, … .  Given their head to control and dictate, government workers are becoming more autocratic, hubristic, and commanding in their relations with regular citizens.  Don’t get me wrong, they were no paragons of helpful knowledge and assistance in the best of times, but now we get regular reports of everyone from law enforcement people to clerks behind counters beginning to act like the caricature authorities of tyrannies like the USSR, East Germany, Red China, Iran, Cuba, … .  In such behaviors these bureaucrats have predictably wrapped themselves in the mantle of inflexible machines executing pre-programmed and unwavering dicta from on high.  I recently ran into that on an call to our Rood Center on an administrative manner.  The response between now and then was markedly different.  And it’s all being helped by the legions of naïfs who continue to repeat the mantra, ‘It can’t happen here, cause we’re Mericans.’

“Bernie’s an American original”, embellished Barack Obama during his announced support for his former VP Joe Biden.  Calling Sanders a “man who has devoted his life to giving voice to working people’s hopes”, Obama kind of goes off the rails because the record of all of Sanders’ proposed policies would have reduced the number of jobs available to working people, grown government, and made those same working people de facto wards of the state.  An ‘American original’ indeed; Obama’s intellect has never embraced history (among other pursuits), so he doesn’t realize that Comrade Bernie is nothing but a clone of old school Moscow.