Rebane's Ruminations

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.

A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

[This was submitted by reader and Nevada County resident Don Bessee.  It is posted as received. gjr]

Don Bessee

Commercial activity in Residentially Zoned neighborhoods is fundamentally in conflict with their land use protections that everyone agreed to when they signed their title papers that included mandated disclosures.

There are allowed things like piano lessons and day care and there are limits on the traffic those produce in your neighborhood that are meant to protect your peace and personal space.

There is a concept that your home is your castle, but I would submit that your home is your place to relax and enjoy the fact we live in a pine forest and the joy that brings to us all. Avian joys as well as the critters wandering around who are not threatened by us. Ticks notwithstanding.  A tranquil island of peace in a sea of turbulence if you will.

For some reason the County is considering an assault on our homeowner’s rights by expanding COMMERCIAL activity in peaceful residentially zoned neighborhoods.

They are still looking to abuse the neighborhoods again by trying to repeal or grossly modify the OUTDOOR EVEN ORDIANCE that became necessary to protect our neighborhood from folks that didn’t care about your block’s peace or your property values. It was all about the Benjamin’s for those abusers.

Some years ago there were people who disrespected their neighborhoods to grab a quick buck and endangered their Fire Evacuation routes in spite of their zoning not allowing their commercial party plans. It was the Road Association Folks who were having their pockets picked for road maintenance to support 1 properties commercial parties that led the way from across the county to stop it with the outdoor event ordinance.

The wedding planners who did not want to pay their way were incredibly aggressive against the neighborhoods in the committee that developed the ordinance with rhetoric that did not stand up to the actual wedding license activity record. Then Chair Beason bought their own industrial journal to refute the spin and hyperbole! I believe the video is still available.

Then Chair of the Board Beason and Supervisor Anderson were on that committee with me that included department heads, County Council,  both sides of the issue as well as Fire,  Law Enforcement to speak to the reality on the ground and the very real fire threat to Neighborhoods as well as Environmental Health issues.

Code has no presence on Friday afternoon to Monday to protect you and they knew it.  That’s why we need the Sheriff to protect the neighborhoods peace on the weekends.

Recently I was being lobbied with the line that the hospitality industry was crushed by the heartless Outdoor Event Ordinance.

Yet again the facts do not support the narrative no matter who is repeating the tired narratives.

The numbers tell the story as they always do.

Weddings are a trackable metric with the license data just like they were the last time around.

The average number of wedding licenses issued in Nevada County over the last 5 years was 453.

In 2015 there 435 licenses issued.

In 2016 there were 480 wedding licenses and that was very near the highest ever.

In 2017 there were 465 licenses issued.

In 2018 there were 432 licenses issued.

In 2019 there were 457 wedding licenses issued in Nevada County.

If you live in LOP or lake WW you might think its not your issue because of your CC& R’s that won’t allow a property to do that there.

The real financial threat my friends is that they want to do for profit events that will not generate new business but just cannibalize the business of those venues that have to pay a ton to support their commercial infrastructure in the properly zoned areas such as country clubs and event centers.

The idea to double the allowable events to 8 from 4 in your neighborhood is intolerable.

1 Saturday event in your neighborhood means trucks moving in on Friday to setup then departing, the event and all the cars of the attendees in and out, then another caravan to breakdown on Sunday.

Does that sound like something you want 8 times a year in your neighborhood?

The Ag tourism project portion of this proposal looks totally viable and appropriate.

If you live in a R1 or RA neighborhood then you are threatened by this erosion of your established rights as a homeowner. If you live in WW or LOP the financial stability of your country club/restaurant is at risk.

Tell your supervisors what you think of this assault on neighborhood rights.

Hunker Down Diary – 26mar20 (updated 27mar20)

George Rebane

When there’s a problem, government is guilty until proven innocent.

Today is HD19 for the Rebanes.  We started hunkering down on 8 March 2020, and finally risked it all this morning by showing up at our local Safeway at 7am, the advertised ‘old folks shopping time’.  Apparently the younger people had not gotten the word, and the store was full with a lot of couples like Jo Ann and me pushing two carts.  Most of us wore gloves, a few had on masks, and all of us social distanced as much as possible.  But what we saw was dismal; something you’d experience in a socialist second or third world country – ‘miles’ of empty shelves of the stuff that everyone really wanted to buy.  Still, we all filled our baskets with what there was and substituted a lot of PlanB items.

What surprised me was that today the younger generation of managers have no knowledge, let alone experience, of the buying patterns during times of emergency and need.  With all signs of the coming hunker down time apparent more than a month ago, no one, starting with FEMA, advised the supply system to put the pedal to the metal on obvious staples and sanitary items.  There was no anticipative ‘push’ in the pipeline.  Everything appeared to have continued on with the JIT (just in time) scheme that works so well during happy days.  The makers and distributers are making do with the JIT schema in spite of the enormous consumer ‘pull’ of empty shelves.

Scattershots – 22feb20 (updated 25feb20)

George Rebane

Surprise! – school costs are projected to double their budgeted income.  Well, not really.  It’s only a surprise to our progressives who either skipped or failed Econ 101.  The 22feb20 Union cites a report by WestEd that projects the coming “silent recession” in our schools (here) This was known to most of us years ago (2008) when its first ignored signs became apparent.  The schools will “likely be running deficits soon because of factors like the rising rate of pensions, special education costs, and rising staff costs, along with the price of health care.”  With state socialism running wild and teachers’ unions sitting in the catbird seat, whoulda thought?  In Nevada County we are holding emergency meetings at the school district “in an attempt to get ahead of the possible (?!) problems.”  And guess what is the big unfunded gorilla in the room – can you spell ‘CalSTRS’?  As usual, no one is discussing cutting the schools’ ridiculous cost structure, but only how best to raise taxes to pay off the new bonds that must be floated to cover the deficits.

The mood of California’s disgruntled Democrats is correctly captured by our beloved liberal cartoonist Bob Crabb.  You see, they already control the state with an electorate of gimmes having voted in the Sacramento super-majorities, and a double dummy governor who’s competing with Bernie for the Time's cover picture of the ‘Socialist of the Year’.  But there’s a bit of northern California that still remains mostly Republican and conservative, and that must not be tolerated to complete a true-Blue, one-party state – any vestige of remaining representation of the knuckle draggers in Sacramento must be purged.  And Mr Crabb is up to promoting that in his cartoon which I filched from the pages of the 22feb20 Union.

The fair share between pay and profits, that is the consuming question for America’s socialists, who, of course, know the answer.  Jon Sindreu in the 22feb20 WSJ gives the issue a workmanlike airing (here).  There he points out that “there has been a lot of attention paid to how much of national income goes to profits instead of workers’ pay. Labor’s share of gross domestic product remained close to a postcrisis low in 2019 amid record corporate earnings, according to the latest U.S. data.”  And the stability between pay and profits during most of the 20th century started tilting toward profits, which predictably has gotten up the dander of our ‘workers, throw off your chains’ leftwing.  A deeper look reveals no untoward imbalance, save that since 1980 competition has forced industries to consolidate, and technology started replacing labor’s share of productivity contributions.  This, of course, has caused labor’s share of GDP to decrease since the remaining jobs are tending to a dumbbell shaped distribution of pay, with the big hump consisting of lower wage ‘commodity level’ jobs.  If we want to maintain and grow our QoL, then start thinking again of systemic unemployment, universal basic income, and perhaps even non-profit service corporations.

[23feb20 update]  One of the Democrat Big Lies is that Russia is backing Trump in 2020.  This not only a lie, but blatant idiocy for anyone to believe such tripe.  We have pointed out how Trump’s walk is what people should focus on, not his public talk about Russia which is firm yet relatively mild-mannered.  For those snuffies unfamiliar with public/private negotiations, this is what you do to maximize your position in deal making – talk softly while wielding a big stick.  As John Hinderaker explains in ‘You Don’t Need a Spy to Know Which Way the Russian Wind Blows’ - "Donald Trump is anathema to the rulers of Russia. Not only has he armed the Ukrainians, he has re-invigorated NATO by insisting that members take an interest in their own defense; stood up to and badly wounded Russia’s key ally, Iran; overseen an expansion and strengthening of American armed forces; and, most important, encouraged fracking and other development of U.S. oil and gas resources, which has kept down the global price of oil. … It is blindingly obvious that the Russians would prefer any Democrat to President Trump. All of the Democrats have promised to limit U.S. production of oil and gas, which no doubt sounds like pure insanity to Putin but is music to his ears. Equally important, they all vow to shrink America’s armed forces and never to use them under any foreseeable circumstances. And they all would pursue a soft line toward Iran." (more here and H/T to correspondent)

[24feb20 update]  There is a Sanders Silver Lining.  What many of us have been saying for years about the true social and governance objectives of the Democratic Party are now visible to all as the curtain has been pulled aside to reveal their true aims for a fundamentally transformed America.  It is clear that communism is the ultimate goal, and proto-communist policies, should Team Bernie et al prevail, are the first steps.  But first, our guns have got to go as the government’s guns come out to make us heel.

[25feb20 update]  Google full-page ad in the 25feb20 WSJ touting their cloud services has the banner – The Home Depot is solving for empowering doers to get more done.  Huh??!

From the immortal Robert Burns “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us! …"  - Since George W. Bush I have been writing about the fundamentalist hijacked Republican Party. It is 2020 and the GOP Jihad continues on with the new moniker of the Trump Party. … Leaderless and adrift, the far-right hoards of white Republican religious purists are still trying to purge the country of decency, morality and moderation instilling their brand of anti-abortion and anti-immigration and science denial. … I understand the necessity of an opposition, but the Republicans are completely AWOL, in that regard. The Republican Party is becoming a group of fringe right-wingers lacking the moderation of centrists. Get ready for the Trump-Republican 2020 campaign of lies as they play to the wealthy, religious and conservatives. What a god-awful mess. May they self-destruct.  Ron Lowe, Nevada City (from Letters in the 25feb20 Union)

And in the same vein from Thomas Elias’ ‘California carrying the national economy’ , we learn that instead of all the growing problems the state has been having under decades of Democrat rule with workers and companies leaving, highest taxes/fees/regulations, welfare capital of the nation, illegals and gimmes arriving, and crap-infested cities full of indigent homeless and addicts living in the streets, and … .  All of that is wrong, and California is really “the envy of the nation” as we were told the other day by Governor Goofy Gavin.  Since the state has a couple or three counties that are home to major corporations raking gazillions of revenues from manufactories and server centers all over the world, all is well – better than well, it’s just peachy.  When county GDPs are tallied like that, then it’s easy to see how places like India and China can also have several small concentrations of outfits that produce enormous wealth which doesn’t accrue to the surrounding countryside where people are in dire straits.  Don’t know whether the arch leftwing columnist Elias is a bit teched, but he’s sure betting that his readers are.

We do have our own facts (updated 7feb20)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

Scattershots – 9jan20

George Rebane

Progressives’ public displays of caring social involvement will abruptly end when they finally destroy the economy that enables such displays.

Joining the chorus of all Democrats, Sen Tim Kaine is a POS and a lying scumbag every time he opens his mouth.  Last night on FN he lied about there being members of Congress who favor a “war with Iran”.  He continued spewing his crap by claiming that we actually are at war with Iran, thereby violating the 1973 War Powers Act (which was only a joint resolution of Congress).  We are NOT at war with Iran, but only responding militarily in the type of push-back operations that George Kennan first outlined in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ from Moscow, and which we have been doing for over 70 years.  (Granted, we had two non-declared wars in Korea and Vietnam in the interlude under Democrat presidents.)  And the POS finished his interview by lying that Bolton needs to testify to the Senate since he has appealed “please subpoena me”.  In truth, far from Kaine’s mouth, Bolton has only said that he was willing to testify were the Senate to subpoena him.

The progressive pinheads of Middletown, Ohio have established expanded facilities for its homeless and publicized that they welcome all comers.  Well, all comers from all over the state are now being shipped to Middletown.  And wouldn’t you know it, the Middletown mamas and papas are shocked at the response – I mean, talk about room temp IQs.  3 of 4 homeless in town now are from out of town, and Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw (his real name, I swear) says, “We have a huge problem with other cities (they know who they are), dumping homeless people here because they don't want them in their city.”  Now folks hereabouts know that Nevada City and even Grass Valley are real concerned about becoming more caring and welcoming to the homeless, both indigenous and immigrants.  RR recommends that our Nevada County worthies put in a call to Chief Muterspaw, and go over their plans to handle the homeless from the I-80 corridor.

[Later] Authoritarian progressivism is America’s metastasizing cancer that is quietly eating away here and there at the social fabric that binds our people and has made our country the shining beacon for all humanity.  Like cancer, authoritarian progressivism does its focused work quietly and mostly out of sight until irreparable damage is done, only then does it step out and don the mantle of the government gun.  Its ongoing war on philanthropy is an area where our Democrat leftists intend to wipe out one of the most effective instruments of civil society, but one that visibly and successfully competes with the notion that the government collective should be the source of all civil good.  The Big Lie that private philanthropy is an “elite charade” is now promoted by lamestream outlets like WaPo, NYT, and NPR – the full court press is on.  More specifically, as editor of Philanthropy magazine Karl Zinsmeister points out (here), “Today’s critics of private giving are most misleading in their suggestion that it is primarily a game played by “the billionaire boys’ club.” That’s not even close to accurate. The lion’s share of America’s vast philanthropy comes from ordinary citizens, 100 million of whom make charitable gifts annually, with the average household donating around $3,000. In addition, 77 million citizens volunteer time and labor. This broad generosity powers some 1.5 million independent nonprofits across the country, operating in every imaginable part of the economy, pursuing a panoply of approaches to national improvement.”  (Much more to be said about this war, but I do want to point out that this is another of RR’s series highlighting leftwing's Big Lies - abiding and impactive lies that really do matter.)

A Progressive’s ‘Common Ground’

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

George Rebane

Sierra Business Council CEO Steven Frisch took to task my criticism of Terry McAteer’s Union column (here) in which he glossed over the real problems that California has under Democrat leadership.  Along with McAteer, Frisch also appears to be blind to California socialists’ homegrown catastrophes, and counsels those who would point them out to “stop acting like a bunch of babies and work together."

Ruminations – 8nov19 (updated 13nov19)

George Rebane

Progressives moving to suburbs and small towns after they have soiled their coastal urban areas.  Almost half of San Francisco residents now want to leave the shithole city.  These people – overwhelmingly ignorant and anti-capitalist - are like locusts and will also devastate their new homes wherever they land.  The process will not take place overnight, but it will be inexorable, especially if their states continue to adopt the disastrous policies of California.  Nevada County turning ‘blue’ is a poster child for this migration of socialists blind to socialism.   (more here, here, and here)

James Dean lives again through the magic of CGI (computer generated imagery) in an upcoming movie. (here)  In my field we foresaw the resurrection of dead, iconic movie stars almost 40 years ago when then nascent CGI technologies made their way into smaller companies that started servicing the movie and TV industries. (My own company and Hughes Aircraft were the first two west coast companies to establish the then advanced computer graphics labs for defense work.)  The current owners of these movie stars’ estates will have a chance to cash in again.  The impact of such a CGI resurrection on opportunities for today’s myriads of living actors is TBD.

University of California prepares to abandon academic meritocracy.  The Left’s constant push to compromise America’s future is making additional inroads in a field they pretty much have dominated and devastated our educational systems with their ‘social justice’ organizations now threatening to sue UC if it continues to use standardized testing (think SAT and ACT) as a basis for admittance.  As always, these anti-American warriors use the bogus argument that meritocracy discriminates against minorities.  Has anyone taken a walk on a UC campus lately?  Does anyone think that developing any realworld system - inventing an algorithm, writing a program, or building a bridge - will benefit from fewer or incompetent STEM graduates?

‘California’s Disastrous State Illustrates Limits of Progressivism’ writes Victor Davis Hanson in his lates review of how our state has been turned into a third-world wannabe in the hands of the resurrected Socialist Party of America who still use their old name of Democrats.  Unfortunately, the limits of progressivism will be achieved when California becomes a social wasteland toward which it is now accelerating.  And the local idiots still think it's only some obscure foothill codgers who hallucinate about the state's long downfall.

[10nov19 update]  My skepticism about the reality of preventable man-made global warming is nicely summarized in this article written by climate scientist Dr Jay Lehr.  It incorporates most of the factors that I have addressed over the years about the global warming issues as part of Rebane Doctrine.  (H/T to reader)

[13nov19 update]  Apropos to the above update, another Democrat has outed a previously hushed truth about the public positions and policies of progressives.  Sen Mazie Hirono (D-HI) publicly admonished Americans “to fundamentally change the way they think about climate change” – more specifically, she urged that people “believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science.” (more here)  This, of course, has been a major Rebane Doctrine tenet about preventable manmade global warming in these pages for years.

Outrageous Outages (updated 10oct19)

George Rebane

Our power here in western Nevada County went out at 315am.  We set our phone alarms and got up at 630am, and started the generator.  Turning on our local KNCO, we were advised to remain calm, safe, and that everything in the region was canceled for the day.  A PG&E lady came on to read some prepared pap and informed us that power “may be restored” starting tomorrow noon.  Another local politico advised us all to “be patient”.

I have been continuously checking the winds, both current and predicted, and found that there was no wind, measured and predicted, in the Sierra for the next 48 hours that exceeded 10mph.  Whatever ‘high winds’ (20-25mph) there were to be, were on the central valley floor.  In fact, the entire northwest of the US is unusually calm, save for that small Sacramento Valley floor pocket of light winds.  Here in the Nevada City region it is DEAD CALM as is seldom seen – not even a leaf moving.  You can do your own checking here.

For all intents and “public safety” purposes, there is no evidence that power needs to be shut off in these foothills.  The outage, predicted and delivered, appears purely for punitive political purposes that is endorsed by a progressive leftwing government whose longstanding MO has been to get Californians to accept more and more abusive government control over their lives without so much as a murmur.  In a state where a free and independent people dwell, government and their monopoly utilities would at this time have turned power back on while broadcasting apologies for having turned it off for no reasonable purpose.

But long ago that ceased to be California, where we have been taught to hunker down and accept everything from the most onerous and useless/stifling environmental regulations, highest gas and fuel prices in the Union, sky high taxes, piles of human shit and needles covering our city streets and sidewalks, crumbling roads and bridges, welfare/homeless/illegal alien capital of the country, broken public education system, corrupt (and unfunded) public employee pension system, historical exodus of companies and middle-class wage earners, …, and more of the same on the way.

We now have an under-educated ‘woke’ electorate who are fed a daily diet of pap from our lamestream outlets, putting the blame for their dire straits on the state’s successful businesses and the well-to-do who can still afford to live here.  These are guilty of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and according to all Democrat politicians (especially those in Sacramento and running for president) they must be squeezed much much more in order to redistribute their ill-gotten assets and achieve social justice in a fundamentally transformed America.

And now we are being conditioned to patiently accept the power distribution schedules of third-world countries as the latest new norm for our once golden state.

[10oct19 update]  California’s historic Great Blackout continues.  The people are finally getting sufficiently pissed since no one has seen any dangerous winds in NorCal that might affect public safety.  The PG&E officials are keeping a stiff upper lip and passing the bullshit. (more here)  Here in the Sierra foothills there has been no wind all night, and looking out my window at our forest, there is not a single leaf moving – dead air.  Our politically punitive punishment continues (The Federalist agrees).  Which brings us to the whole deal about the National Weather Service and NOAA.

Nevada County – economic disaster area

George Rebane

The more that wealth gets redistributed, the less wealth there is to redistribute.

This morning’s (27aug19) lead article in The Union by reporter Cory Fisher (here) informs the reader an awful lot about our community that most of us did not know.  It turns out our county is an economic disaster area with more working people than ever going hungry and having problems making ends meet.

According to local reports, “1 out of 7 Nevada County residents” (14.3%) were “food insecure” (term of art for hungry?).  Across all US counties 13.3% were food insecure, only 11% were in such dire straits in LA County, the country’s individual rate is somewhere around 12.5% (1 of 8), and all this in a land where over one in three of us are mysteriously fat. (more here)

Then we learn that the hunger rate in our county is not only high but screaming upward.  At the Food Bank the increase has been from 800 in May, 1,000 in July, and 1,200 in August – in other words our calorie calamity is reported to be growing at about 150% annually.  We are told this is causing our non-profit food distributors financial hardship for two reasons – increase in the county’s hungry population and a reduction in charitable contributions because of Trump’s new tax law.

Somehow the truth about the tax law and its restrictions on charitable giving is completely opposite.  The standard deduction has more than doubled to $24K for joint filers and it does not limit giving at all.  All it has done is caused more people to take the standard deduction instead of itemizing deductions such as their former charitable gifts.  This little feature has induced many people to then just skip the giving, not because they have less money, but because there is no need to give to get the tax benefit. (more here) But that’s not what the article impugns.  Somebody forgot to include that character still counts, even under the new tax law.

And the overall problem of falling income making it hard for our county’s residents to make ends meet – it then appears that our workers did not share in the country’s benefit from the tax cuts that increased lower and middle class household incomes by an average of $2,000.  (More here) When you factor in the doubled tax credits for kids, the average family has even more dollars to spend.  And here is a summary of the real impact of the Trump tax cut.

So, while the rest of the country is enjoying historically low unemployment, rising wages, and paying lower taxes, in Nevada County our poverty rate is estimated to have started increasing again after Trump was elected.  He even caused a bump in climate change that started more wild fires, which then raised county residents’ insurance rates that forced some of them to move.  The takeaway is clear, it’s only California’s enlightened public policies in housing, homelessness, education, fighting capitalists’ greed and global warming that have somehow kept body and soul together.

In the real world "Americans in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners buy more consumer goods and services than the national averages for people living in most of the wealthiest nations of the world, including those in Europe." (more here)  How can this be?  Well, for all of you who have consumed the media-delivered poverty rate for Americans, Cato’s ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’ may shed some new light on reality.  All said and done, the piece did make me wonder why Nevada County is under the reported curse.

An Illustration of Liberal Ethics, Morals, Logic, …

George Rebane

The 22aug19 Union has a prominent column by Ms Susan Rogers, a very liberal member of the newspaper’s editorial board.  There in ‘Plenty of shame to go around’ she equates the thuggish behavior of county Democrats at Representative LaMalfa’s recent town hall, with the congressman’s socio-political ideology as expressed through his legislative work.  There is no doubt that the much-reported misbehavior of our local liberals seeking to disrupt a public meeting was something in which no American should take pride.  However, to diminish the louts at the meeting by impugning that LaMalfa shared an equal if not greater blame for the encounter is a down-home illustration of how far beyond the tipping point has progressed our national polarization.

In her column, Ms Rogers lists a litany of the congressman’s legislative actions and policy positions each of which she peremptorily labels as “shameful”.  We are not here confusing ‘shameful’ with, say, ‘erroneous’ or ‘misguided’ or even ‘ignorant’.  The woman illustrates how the liberals’ worldview puts people with whom they disagree onto a morally lower level of human beings – people who purposely behave in a manner that is shameful in our society.  And the basis on which makes such a comparison of bad public behavior at an event with a politician's longstanding ideology defies logic.

In our culture, shame is lavished on people who have purposely done something dishonorable, improper, illegal, etc.  The so accused is then supposed to respond to such a judgment by exhibiting some form of contrition in the attempt to make amends.  Attacking a politician on moral grounds for expressing his beliefs through his work, beliefs of which voters who put him in office were aware, is beyond the pale of political discourse, save the kind that is meant to further divide us.  And it does confirm our divisions since she means to put the rest of us who support congressman LaMalfa into an equivalent condition of shame.  I, for one, reject both her accusations and her hubris in ascending to heights from which she dispenses such lofty, unexamined, and perfunctory judgments.

Scattershots – 12aug19 (updated 14aug19)

George Rebane

A long march to protest over-regulation in California is planned to start on 13 August in Vinton (the northern terminus of Hwy 49) and wend its way through 300 miles of rural mountain and hill country roads to end in Oakhurst on 25 August.  It will be done in daily segments which takes it through Nevada City/Grass Valley on 16 August.  People are asked to join it and/or encourage the marchers as it passes through their communities.  This grass roots civic action is the latest expression of desperation with encroaching governments at all levels that daily increase their constraints and constrictions of movement and use of public lands a la A21.  It’s to be seen how such efforts will be received and persist in a state that no longer reflects our inherited culture and values from a fast-fading America.  More here.

President Bill Clinton’s 1995 SOTU speech to Congress on his “illegal alien” policy.  Since Clinton spoke, the situation has gotten orders of magnitude worse with today’s unlawful ‘undocumented immigrant’ policies and programs promoted by our anti-American Left.  Take a look at this 90 second video, it is one that Republicans should play continuously until November 2020, if they had the balls.  Sadly, that will never happen.

[13aug19 update]  ‘Never Again’ Means Nothing If Holocaust Analogies Are Always Off Limits. This WaPo op-ed is one of the most ignorant pieces of writing I have read in a coon’s age.  Author Danya Ruttenberg attempts to excuse AOC’s comparison of our deporting illegal aliens to Hitler sending Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.  Such comparisons are especially damaging and divisive to the mildly educated minds that populate our land and now embrace socialism, they don’t have the historical background to parse the ridiculous analogies Ruttenberg presents in her column.  You have to read it yourself to understand the new directions of the Left’s propaganda machine.  Is this another one of their Big Lies?

[14aug19 update]  That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a good looking yet abysmally ignorant shill for the DNC’s radical left wing is known to all who pay attention.  She was elected by the fewest of voters from her district, and receives campaign contributions from fewer still – 10 in the first half of 2019.  Her re-election campaign is funded by unknown sources outside her district, and she is handled by equally mysterious agents who consider her and her ‘Squad’ as extremely useful idiots used to manage the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party in fashioning its image as the election season heats up.  (More here)

Ruminations – 3aug19

George Rebane

Our favorite double-dummy communist, Umair Haque writing in Medium, continues his dive into the abyss of ideological idiocy with his latest essay attempting to explain ‘fascism’ to American readers.  In a piece titled ‘America Is Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism’ he does a great job of confusing the matter even further on his journey into regions of history and semantics in which he is a complete naif.  It’s worth a read though, if only to understand how our lightly-read are swayed.

George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility is the latest book to go on my reading list.  The sometimes conservative commentator has enjoyed a long career purveying his right of center ideology in the media (a regular on NBC, MSNBC, WaPo, and the National Review).  Will is both an anti-Trumper and an anti-Republican who shares my belief that our country’s march to collectivism has passed the tipping point, and that conservatism is in a terminal decline – the “Right’s losing battle against progressivism.”  (more here)

For a little light-hearted, local comical relief, I direct your attention to Terry Lamphier’s ‘Grass Valley’s burning desire for growth’.  There I challenge you to discover Mr Lamphier’s point of the article, save his eternal opposition to the county’s growth.  The man continues his established tradition of writing articles both long-winded and opaque.

Pricey Parking Problem Postponed

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 July 2019.  An edited version of it (here) was published in 22jul19 edition of The Union.]

You’ve heard Nevada City recently announce that it intends to expand metered parking in its downtown area and make it considerably more expensive.  The town’s left-lurching governance has been comedy central for as long as people can remember – it is always short of money and has very little idea about what makes an economically vibrant community.  Its city council mamas and papas see every financial shortfall as a problem solved with more fees and taxes.  As all of our pro-socialist neighbors, the town’s leadership doesn’t seem to understand that people’s economic activities are affected by the taxing of those activities.  Neither do they understand that you get less of what you tax more.