Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 5mar23 (updated 8mar23)

George Rebane

Here on Hind Tit Road our power went out on 27 March for the second time and has been out since.  I scheduled an immediate delivery with Amerigas when it first went out on 21 March and was promised delivery during the next two days – nothing.  Numerous calls to their call center allowed me to talk to a bunch of east Asians who had been taught carefully to lie to their customers – all the way up from the supervisors to their ‘Dispute Resolution Center’, and all of them were expert at bullshitting their customers.  The entire company appears to be fashioned on ignoring customer fulfillment needs, and responds only to internal convenience.  Finally, yesterday as heavy snow again began falling, a marginally competent Amerigas driver shows up with our propane delivery.  He goes on to make difficult the simple job of pulling up next to the tanks and filling them.  But now we have several more 24/7 days of running our faithful 24KW Generac.  Time order more tomorrow, and install another 500gal capacity when the snows stop.

Meanwhile, PG&E makes spam calls to their customers claiming to inform on latest estimates of power restoration while saying nothing of the sort – we have been totally in the dark, figuratively and literally, as to when a semblance of normalcy will return.  Rumor has it may be tomorrow.  This what passes for meritorious and competent service in today’s big corporation America.

[6mar23 update]  Central control of everything by teams of experts.  The Pacific Legal Foundation has released the documentary video ‘Trust Us’ that takes America through the history of bureaucratic control during the administrations Teddy Roosevelt all the way to the present day.  It makes clear that FDR did nothing to shorten the Great Depression – he lengthened it and made it more severe – and that LBJ’s Great Society spawned a scourge that is still with us and has worsened all of our lives.

There is nothing in this telling that will be understandable to today’s progressives, especially of the woke-bent.  These people are terminally ignorant willing believers, ready to hand their fates, fortunes, and futures to the administrative state run by faceless technicians claiming expertise of which they have none.  But then again, there’s the off chance that watching the video …

[8mar23 update]  Power finally came back on today at 1530.  It went out at 2350 on 23 February, and the Generac has been running 24/7 ever since, consuming 2-2.5gal/hr from a 500 gal tank that was topped with 186 gal refill in the interval.  Turns out the break came from one of our old oaks falling across the power line on our neighbor’s property on the other side of the fence that separates us – of course it took out a section of the fence.  Several other trees also came down in our forest.  Time to buck them and stack them by the splitter ready for another season or two of firewood.  It ain’t cheap.

Stupid is in residence

George Rebane

Robert Summa, the new minder and regional editor of The Union, is a functional idiot.  Gold Hill California Media, the new owner of the newspaper, is on a rampage buying up small town newspapers all over the west with the aim of introducing neo-Marxism to the heretofore conservative hinterlands in laying the groundwork for the advent of Agenda30 (aka Agenda21).

Certain of his emails censoring reader letters discussing CRT and Wokeism (here) have been made available to me.  The man refuses to publish such communications on the basis that he is not aware of what wokeism is beyond a rightwing dog whistle that denigrates progressive ideas.  Really, he is so auto-insular that he has never heard the Left use or discuss the notion and concepts of wokeism (here) that have swept the land from academe to the military, of which he will “not continue to platform conspiracy theories and disingenuous arguments that lead to violence or is purposefully spreading misinformation or disinformation to harm others …”.

His ignorance binds him so tightly that he has not even heard of the multi-edition, best-selling leftwing manual to promote wokeism – Don’t Think of an Elephant – and its author, nationally celebrated progressive philosopher George Lakoff (here).  Nor is he aware of the massive response from the country’s Right to counter wokeism – e.g. Counter Wokecraft.  In this sense, in addition to ignorant, we must add ‘stupid’ to his assemblage of professional attributes.

Peeking Into Progressive Minds

George Rebane

As most RR readers know, the Rebanes have been in local leftwing crosshairs for some years now.  Jo Ann’s prominence in Republican circles - Nevada County Republican Central Committee, President of Nevada County Republican Women Federated, ... - and her long hitch on the Union’s editorial board have reserved for her a regular ration of opprobrium from our Left.  In today’s (29dec22) Union she garner’s the paper’s Hits & Misses column headline – ‘Miss to Rebane’s comment on immigrants’.  Thereunder reader Richard Howell writes, “To Mrs. Rebane’s comment (12/23) ‘… five million illegals and hundreds of thousands of known got-a-ways(sic) invade our country?’  Actually, 5+ million were intercepted trying to cross illegally into the U.S.  Perhaps next week she can write a ‘Hit’ comment for our border patrol under President Biden.”

Can’t rightly tell whether the man is terminally bamboozled by the lamestream’s misreporting our border crisis, and thinks that the 5+ million were denied entry, or that when illegals are intercepted by the border patrol on our side, they then have broken no laws and it’s OK for them to be turned loose and stay here.  And wanting a hit for Biden is beyond ludicrous – the president who has created the most porous border in the country’s history, and is personally responsible for tens of thousands of migrant and America’s drug overdose deaths that continue to mount daily.

Also right below was the following letter from a George Roberts to the editor labeled ‘Misguided immigrant comments’.

I just finished reading Joanne Rebaine’s (sic) hits and misses holiday rant (12/24) about the asylum seekers.  She must have special glasses to have spotted specific “sex traffickers, fentanyl dealers and terrorists.”  Sort of like Trump’s “rapists and murderers.”  I don’t have those special holiday glasses.  All I saw were some poor, cold, hungry, scared but hopeful human beings.  I think the Christian bible would call them the most vulnerable and precious of god’s children.  “Feliz Navidad” to Ms. Rebaine.(sic)

It is clear that Mr Roberts belongs to the country's tens of millions of news nebbishes who don’t have a clue about what’s really going on at our southern border and its follow-on impact across the entire land.  The lamestream media has so effectively papered over the ongoing tragedy that it’s coverage and communication to a large population, one with purportedly free speech rights, will be studied for years by anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists as one of history’s most effective campaigns of large scale propagandized fake news.  The Third Reich’s Göbbels and the entire Soviet ‘truth’ nomenklatura were not able to convince even a smidgen of their populations to their versions of ‘truth’ (Pravda).

The dimensions of Roberts’ ignorance are immeasurable.  He hasn’t an inkling that the overwhelming share of illegal aliens from all over the world come not as asylum seekers, but only economic opportunists (including criminal) who take advantage of Biden’s abandonment of America’s national security.

But dear reader, we must remember that the final and perhaps greatest tragedy and threat to our  republic is that the country is swarming with mind-mangled people like Richard Howell and George Roberts.

Scattershots – 26dec22 (update 29dec22)

George Rebane

Christmas 2022.  Jo Ann and I were again blessed to be in the bosom of our family on Christmas eve and Christmas day.  The whole affair took place at daughter Teine and Dave’s house (head of our Southern Tribe) in Alta Sierra.  Teine organized and put on dinner on the eve, Christmas brunch, and big Christmas dinner.  In attendance were also granddaughter Fiona (with child) with hubby Shawn and their daughter Maybelle, grandson Sean and wife Bella (with child) who arrived late on Christmas eve, driving in one day from snowbound Denver where they live (as part of our Eastern Tribe) along with granddaughter Claire, hubby, and four more great-grandchildren.  Throw into that mix two male dogs and a Maine Coon cat, and you get a rough idea of all the goings on in the house and yard.  Our Northern Tribe, headed by daughter Sini and hubby Roland, was snowbound in their Seattle area home along with their timely assembled kids Elizabeth, Lucas, and Catherine with hubby.  Needless to say, a lot of inter-tribal texting and sending of pics went on the whole time.

‘Into each life some …’  The regular reader will have noticed a drop-off in the frequency of RR posts.  As reported before, Jo Ann and I came down with Covid during Thanksgiving week.  And that malady has lingered with us, mostly me, over the last month.  I had some health issues (inevitable in your 80s) start earlier in the year which Covid compounded.  So anyway, we’re getting tested for this and that, and dragging a mite in the process.  Hope to be back online sooner than later.

[28dec22 update]  Our beloved Union is in the hands of junior varsity journalistic philistines.  Their new managing editor Elias Funez showed his hand in today’s edition by writing a very long, self-adulatory op-ed (here) that leaves no doubt the man either failed Introduction to Composition 1A, or never even gave it a try.

Given my extensive history covering wildfires over my now 17 years of newspaper reporting, It didn’t take me long for me to connect the dots between my penchant for producing breaking news coverage, live video, and print photography.

And I was finding out that not just her, but many many others as well. My live feeds had now have become a resource where folks were exchanging information in real time, and with many other members of the community.

There’s much more to lament about this man’s talents in running a newspaper.  I also recommend RR readers take a look at the newspaper’s completely revised website (here).  This monstrosity is basically broken – e.g. it will not accept former account holders, and does not even feature the paper’s Opinion (op-ed) section.  It appears to now start focusing on syndicated writers with a distinct leftward lean.  More about this later.

[29dec22 update]  ‘ICE Admits It Has ‘No Records’ For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Illegal Immigrants Released With Electronic Monitors’  The evidence of government incompetence and criminal fraud pours in daily.  The Biden administration has assured their various departments and agencies fomenting and promoting the illegal alien invasion that they will not be touched by the formerly ‘long arm of the law’.  Future favors accrue to the bureaucrats enabling the now bulging pipeline of future Democrat voters. (more here)

Scattershots – 1dec22

George Rebane

China’s nationwide Covid lockdowns.  Does anyone have any reasonable explanation for this supremely stupid policy that will NOT avoid the inevitable nationwide pandemic, destroys the nation’s economy, and gives rise to riots that increase popular opposition to the CCP and its governments?  All pandemics will end through herd immunity – natural or vaccine mediated.  There are no effective Covid vaccines, and none on the horizon.  When the lockdowns are inevitably lifted, the disease will rage just like it has everywhere else.

More black mayors celebrated.  As Jason Riley points out here in the 30nov22 WSJ, the worst thing that can happen to a city or community is to elect a black mayor.  America’s decades old record of such unfortunate election outcomes clearly demonstrates a strong correlation of economic downturn and soaring crime rates when leftwing black community governance is ensconced.  And yet they keep doing it, while bitching about everything from police brutality, horrible public education, to racist allocation of state and federal largesse to the local weal.  The motto of our black communities has long been ‘vote the same, then expect change’.

The League of Women Voters is a partisan Democrat shill.  Looking at the political affiliation of its members over the last decades demonstrates its firm position in America’s progressive politics.  Things in the LWV started turning left in the 1970s when Jo Ann was on the board of the Ventura County LWV.  Having early lost credibility as unbiased sponsor of national presidential debates, the organization pulled in its horns to focus on non-partisan bamboozles delivered at the local levels.  And today, Ms Fran Cole, head of the Nevada County LWV, attempts a ludicrous counter argument in the 30nov22 Union – ‘Let’s set the record straight; the League of Women Voters is a political non-partisan organization’.  In it she goes on to twist the record into a pretzel, following the well-established Alinsky model in the Democrats’ communication kit.  For openers she argues that today’s overwhelmingly leftwing LWV members can set aside their political proclivities and provide unbiased reporting on issues and conduct similarly neutral candidate forums.  The latter is contradicted by legions of Republican candidates in recent years who have refused to take part in such one-sided kabukis.  The former is something unknown in the field of psychology, and not accepted as unbiased by any broad-based audience (starting with the leftwingers themselves).

Two blind mice

George Rebane

Celebrating political monopolies.  Leftwing thought leaders, syndicated Thomas Elias and local George Boardman, write with glee how California’s Democrat Party cancer continues to grow.  Having already metastasized the state, it is now starting to pick off the remnant low population rural counties in the northern part, leading with our Nevada County. (Their columns in the 29nov22 Union, not online yet.)

The social and economic devastation is totally invisible to these mavens, as these were to the Stalin celebretorians in Pravda of the 1930s and 1940s.  As with all autocrats, it’s the party über alles, no matter what trail of destruction it leaves behind.  They see nothing wrong with the exodus of the skilled and productive.  The exodus of small businesses for greener pastures.  The ever-increasing taxes and regulations to conduct and corral our lives.  Nothing wrong with the state’s top 1% earners paying nearly 50% of the state’s general fund revenues.  And many of these 150,000 out of 40M are now leaving or have already left, thereby causing huge ($25B) and promising bigger state budget deficits.

But what the Left’s cricket chorus hides is how decades of one-party control has made California the nation’s posterchild of every government folly and foible that places us in the bottom of the federalized barrel of states along almost every metric that is important to the country’s makers.  However, the country’s takers see an entirely different California.  They welcome its teeming cities filled with the homeless, littered with needles and feces, and rife with crime rates that are anything but equitable.

To be fair Thomas Elias does make a couple of good points about the state’s Republicans basically sitting on their collective butts celebrating a micro gain here and there, but none of it amounts to a hill of beans in being a relevant opposition party in the state.  Elias doesn’t have much advice for that achievement save give up on some core Republican planks like opposing abortion.

Bottom line though is that neither columnist gives a hint of lament about the detritus all around us as evidence of what the Democrat Party has accomplished during its tenure in Sacramento.  

Dark Days Diary – 30sep22 (updated 1oct22)

George Rebane

Sen Joe Manchin has turned out to be another double dummy political hack and a major disappointment, succumbing to the predictable and obvious wiles of Sen Schumer.  Ol’ Joe had us all fooled during the past year as being the staunch stalwart, along with Sen Sinema (D-AZ), against the economic ruin the Dems were cooking up with their Inflation Reduction Act bamboozle.  They got Joe’s vote with the promise of including his pipeline and permit facilitation bill, which most on the Right correctly saw as Lucy’s football.  Now that the bill has no chance of passing as is, Manchin’s reputation is in the mud with Republicans, moderate Democrats (vanishing breed), and, of course, his West Virginia constituents who expected more than the meadow muffins he wound up delivering.  Tough to see how he’ll ever recover.  (more here, here, and here) 

Fire tax – Nevada County voters will have a chance to vote down the proposed ½% sales tax increase that’s supposed to fund wildfire prevention and mitigation.  Actually, the collected monies will go into the general fund where the Supes promise they will be carefully watched and audited by a “citizens oversight committee”.  California’s Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association warns us once more (here) how such taxes will be misused as they have been in the past.

J6 show trial postponed closer to election – Moving the century’s biggest-to-date show trial closer to the election again tells you all you need to know about this hyper-partisan kabuki theater.  The Dems have no viable platform or record of achievements to present to the voters, so all they have left is to pump up the J6 hysteria of imminent attacks by Trump led ultra-right MAGA white supremacist terrorists.  The real tragedy is that there are millions of muddle minded Americans who swallow this political swill. (more here)

Dems’ Big Lies – As opposed to counting Trump’s political bombast as lies, the real material lies that continue unabated from the Left need to be reviewed, revived, and reinserted into the public’s attention span.  This, of course, is the job of the Republicans who have not shown much political moxie in keeping these highlighted in the public fora.  Oh, to again have two viable political parties.  Here is the list from a recent post -  

When the dissemination of prime-time, first-rate whoppers comes up for discussion, our leftwing neighbors, both national and local, volubly maintain that both sides are at least equally guilty, with the Republicans dispensing the majority.  By any comparative listing of such poetic truths (aka Big Lies), the contest is not even close, nor has it ever been.  Historically socialists are the big liars, for that is the requirement for their public square bamboozles to gain any traction in governance.  Today’s examples overwhelm –

‘Our southern border is secure, there is no border crisis’,

‘Crime rates are not up, there is no urban crime wave in America’,

‘Increasing taxes will not exacerbate the ongoing stagflation’,

‘Increasing taxes will grow the economy’,

‘Tax rates do not affect investment and productivity’,

'You can keep your doctor ...',

'Obamacare will reduce national healthcare costs',

‘Fossil fuels are bad and unnecessary; our energy needs can be met entirely by renewables’,

'America is better off being energy-dependent on foreign suppliers,'

‘Illegal immigration and illegal aliens in the workforce are necessary for economic growth’,

‘Capitalism and minimally regulated markets are arbitrary, cruel, and don't work’,

‘Men and women are exactly the same, making sexual distinction racist and unnecessary’,

‘Christians are intolerant’,

‘Trump’s collusion with the Russians swung the 2016 election’,

‘The tenets of Critical Race Theory are not taught in our K-12 schools’,

‘Merit based education (especially in STEM subjects) is racist’,

'Western culture is intrinsically racist',

‘America is a systemically racist country’,

‘Blacks don’t overwhelmingly kill blacks, cops gratuitously kill blacks,’

‘Government enforced equity motivates better than equal opportunity,’

‘Multi-cultural factionalism serves to unite America,’

… and on and on.

[1oct22 update]  Competing for the biggest of the Dems’ big lies is their ‘Republicans want to destroy the Constitution, censor free speech, do away with our freedoms, and establish a totalitarian state.’  This message to their cognitively constrained constituents is Alinsky and Lenin on steroids, each part being exactly 180 from their own daily demonstrated policies and activists on the march.  Today’s fragmented conservative pro-life movement is as close as any leftist can get to some Republicans wanting to limit your freedom to kill your unborn child.  Other than that, it is ONLY the Republicans who work for fewer regulations, lower taxes to support a smaller government, and a nation of constitutional laws instead of a corrupt and growing administrative neo-Marxist state.  And to put a bow on it, today’s Republicans leave a lot to be desired in their efforts to keep our republic.

[2oct22 update]  One of our astute readers and commenters posted a link to a recent VDH piece, ‘The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization’.  In communicating the current state of western civilization, the good professor has again hit it out of the park.  Definitely a must read and share.  One wonders how much of such writing is comprehensible to our Left.  Dark days indeed.

Scattershots – 8sep22 (updated 14sep22)

George Rebane

Accuse them of your own sins.  That longstanding advice to our Left comes from both Lenin and Alinsky.  Today no one knows that the Democrats were the first election deniers, seeking to overturn the 2004 election in favor of John Kerry by not certifying Ohio’s electoral votes on the House floor on 6 January 2005.  Fortunately, the 31 Democrats’ votes were not enough to carry the day and Bush2 remained our president.  One of those election deniers was James Clyburn (D-SC) whose last-minute endorsement of Biden flipped his faltering campaign just before the election.  Imagine what would have happened had the corrupt FBI also not helped mangle the 2020 election by keeping Hunter’s laptop under the rug.  (more here)

Economists are becoming more dismal than ever.  (Don’t even call it ‘the dismal science’, there is nothing scientific about that field of pseudo-sorcery.  Be especially wary when an economist argues with equations.)  The latest example comes from the “leadership” of the American Economic Association that announced the mandates for attendees at their January 2023 New Orleans conference.  All must have been vaccinated with one additional booster shot, and wear a mask that at least as good as the N-95.  Nowhere else at the hotel venue, in the city, or overwhelmingly in most of the country, are people still subjected to such unscientific protocols.  It’s hard to think of another ‘discipline’ in which its demonstrated error-prone practitioners are still accepted and continue to be cited. (more here)

One of Jo Ann’s ‘Hits & Misses’ in today’s Union was censored.  She has been one of the longest-serving members of the paper’s editorial board, and under previous publishers has never had any of her submissions rejected, even the occasional ones critical of the publication.  She submitted the following Miss regarding the recent treatment of RL Crabb’s cartoons, which have recently been printed in hard-to-read, washed out, black and white while other cartoons continue in their full color formats - Miss to The Union which demoted favorite, local political cartoonist RL Crabb’s offerings to a faded black and white format.  That’s no way to treat such talent. Please bring back his witty, vibrant political cartoons in color.  The times they are a-changin’.

Addendum - Please allow me to expand the reasonable basis on which one may conclude that Bob Crabb’s work has been discriminated against.  In an email exchange The Union’s leadership claims that they have no control over which pages the printer decides to print in black & white, to them it is a random process.  Now allow for a moment that we consider the last two months or nine weeks during which The Union has published 45 op-ed cartoons.  Bob submits two per week, and the rest are selected from a potpourri of syndicated cartoonists.  That means that Bob submitted 18 cartoons, all of which appeared in faded black and white.  While I don’t recollect any b/w syndicated printings, but to be generous, assume that one in ten of the 27, or between two and three of the syndicated ones also appeared in black and white.

With this understanding in hand, we know that the probability was 0.1 that the first Crabb cartoon happened to be black and white.  The probability that his second one was similarly b/w is 0.1 x 0.1 = 0.01.  In the same manner, the third b/w cartoon appeared with probability 0.1 x 0.1 x 0.1 = 0.001, or a chance of one in a thousand.  Continuing this calculation for all 18 of Bob’s cartoons yields the mind boggling miniscule probability of 10^(-18) = 0.000,000,000,000,000,001 or one billionth of a billionth that such a run of b/w cartoons would have occurred from the claimed random process – talk about highly improbable.  It is clear that any reasonable person with a smidgen of understanding of the above would reject the The Union’s characterization of the process along with the claim of no bias against RL Crabb’s work.

As a coda to the above argument, I want to remind readers that RR has always supported the rights of private sector enterprises to manage their own relationships and conduct their business affairs as they see fit – subject as always to a minimum set of regulations and laws that prevent parties from doing gratuitous harm to each other.  In this case The Union and RL Crabb are both private sector parties, and are free to negotiate any mutually acceptable working relationship, including one that contains discriminatory provisions.  At the same time others, including the customers and consumers of products and services provided by a business, are always free to criticize the business for any reason or no reason at all.  In sum, I oppose the kinds of discrimination against RL Crabb and Jo Ann Rebane described above, and I do it without impugning The Union’s right to so discriminate.  The discriminating reader(sic) will understand that an instance of discrimination and the right to discriminate are independent notions/issues.

[11sep22 update]  Seattle has cracked the homeless problem.  They plan to spend $66.5M to build a “homeless megaplex” that will house 500 homeless to be maintained by 400 staffers costing in excess of $22M/yr to keep open, and the indigents and crazies from killing themselves and each other. (more here)  Fantastic!  That comes to costing more than $50K/yr for getting one homeless off the streets.  So let’s apply the Seattle solution to the national problem consisting today of about 575,000 homeless.  That will cost the country’s taxpayers about $76B to kick off the program and over $25B/yr to keep the nation’s streets clean of derelicts, needles, and feces.  Not sure who all are going to pay for the Seattle project.  I suspect they’re going to pass the hat to the rest of America to solve their problem in the Puget Sound area.  And, of course, if this template is applied nationwide, then we all pay.  But think of the extra benefit from such a public ‘investment’; it will require the training and hiring of about 460,000 low skilled (pre-homeless?) workers to take care of the 575,000 homeless, an almost one-for-one ratio of government keeper per bum.  Bum?  That was a popular label in less enlightened years that described “a person who avoids work and sponges on others; loafer, idler, tramp, hobo, or derelict.”  Bring on the megaplexes, one in every neighborhood.

 [14sep22 update]  Nevada County’s sales tax will be increased by 0.5% if a majority of voters approve Measure V in November.  The anticipated $12M annual take will go into the county’s general fund to be spent as the supervisors determine.  However, the tax is being sold under the guise that “the money would go toward fire prevention and mitigation efforts.”  A local judge ruled that the voters would not be confused by this double labeling of the new tax.  According to the unfathomable legal logic used in our corrupt legal system, the judge stated that “… this court is satisfied that should Measure V be adopted, the public would have been adequately informed that it was adopting a general tax.” (more here)  Experience advises otherwise – all will focus on the wildfire aspect and few will discern that it is really a general tax increase which depends on the promise of politicians to be spent as advertised.  Would it be correctly represented to the voters as a specific use tax, then it would require a 2/3 super-majority approval to pass it.  IMHO the tax passage requirements should be reversed – 2/3 to approve a general fund tax, and simple majority to approve a specific purpose tax.  Better yet, 2/3 to approve all tax increases.  Thoughts?

National Conservatives are a relatively new branch of the GOP and have some nuanced yet important differences with those who view themselves more as ‘Reagan conservatives’.  I find some tenets of their ideology attractive, and easily accepted by the conservetarian in me.  Since we’ll be talking more about national conservatives and national conservatism, I recommend that interested readers get acquainted with this version of conservatism.  (more here)

Scattershots – 18jul22 (updated 23jul22)

George Rebane

The Khashoggi murder continues to aspirate the pundits on both sides after Biden’s fistbump with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.  To me the whole affair is politically ridiculous and a diplomatic farce.  Khashoggi was not a US citizen, but a foreign national with a permit to live and work in America (among other countries).  While within US borders, our governments’ responsibility toward Khashoggi’s security is the same as it is for any US citizen and legal resident.  But our federal government has no responsibility for the security of ANY alien permitted to live and work in our country when they travel outside our boundaries, especially when they frequent one of their own legations in a third country.  To think otherwise would be a ludicrous contemplation.  So why then are we putting our important foreign relations on the line when this foreign national gets butchered by his own countrymen in a foreign land?  If some soft-headed pundit or politician thinks otherwise, why are we then so sanguine with the governments of Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, … who regularly murder their own citizens?  Why are all of them not also ‘pariah states’ denied handshakes when making diplomatic contacts?  And why is this consideration not brought up by all those sharp-witted journalists, pundits, and politicos?

Nevada County’s currently registered voters were made available to me by my bride who concerns herself with such things.  The CA SecState collects and publishes this data for all the state’s counties as of 23 May 2022 shown below. (more here).

What interested me was the prominent inclusion of the American Independent Party in the political party headings.  I’m ashamed to admit that I know next to nothing about the AIP, and had to do a quick read-up on the organization (here).  What I found was both surprising and refreshing.  With my longtime and growing frustration with the Republican Party, I discovered that the AIP’s tenets and platform were totally acceptable to me save, perhaps, their stance on marriage.  I share it with readers in hopes of soliciting a broader critique of that party’s statement of purpose and principles.  My only regret is that they seem to have gone dormant after the 2016 election as witnessed by their website.  But then, how do they maintain a self-declared, currently registered membership of 3,335 in the county?  My bride’s answer is that most of these people are really political independents who, when registering, were confused by that word appearing in the party’s name.

[21jul22 update]  Corrupt corporatism is ubiquitous in the land, and runs rampant in our automotive industry.  Reader Efox (@ 858am below) beat me to the report about Ford getting ready to cut thousands of white-collar jobs currently at work in its combustion engine division (here).  The reason?  Ford along with the other car makers are investing over $500B before 2026 to develop new e-vehicles.  Now why would all these capitalists go out on a limb and spend so much of their retained earnings to get ready for volume production of products for which there is no evidence of open-market demand?  Simple answer, they’re not going out on any limb.  Instead, they are colluding with federal central planner/controllers who have informed them of future federal mandates for us to purchase all the e-vehicles they can roll off the assembly lines.  You and I will soon be told to either buy an e-car, or walk.  Unabashed corporatist corruption on parade.

Right/Left Polarization is a Myth

George Rebane

This is proposition is presented by Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis, professors at Harvard and BYU respectively, in their ‘The Myth of Ideological Polarization’.  They use a series of weak arguments and erroneous facts to conclude that “polarization is a myth” and the Left/Right labels are better thought of as names of tribes whose belief systems change over time.  The claimed changes are so radical that their tenets even switch sides over the years.

For example, one of their claims is that today’s Left supports free trade that used to be supported by the Right.  Given the Left’s desire to double-tax US corporations that do business overseas, this characterization is clearly wrong, as is their representation of the Right’s opposition to free trade.  The Right imposes tariffs on selected foreign goods only 1) when foreign governments subsidize certain products/industries to distort competitive markets, and 2) when certain such products/industries are critical to maintaining our sovereignty and national security.

The authors claim that the Right has turned ‘statist’, which formerly was a forte of the Left.  Well, statism still is the Left’s overarching prescription to solve the nation’s ills.  The Right cannot support any kind of statism through its constant initiatives to reduce taxes (i.e. government revenues) and regulations (i.e. the currency of government bureaucracies).  Without a blink or further justification, our scholars write, “Republicans favor lower taxes than they did in the 1960s, but so do Democrats.” (emphasis mine)  Mind boggling.

The Lewises even miss the claim about free speech that “the Democrats ‘moved left’ when it was once a defining value of ‘the left’.”  The Left was never a proponent of free speech, even during the anti-war years of the 1970s.  Anyone claiming membership of that ‘tribe’ who did not parrot the anti-war party line soon found themselves abandoned and shunned by their former comrades.  While the Left’s party line narratives have always been malleable – they regularly rewrite history to serve their ideological needs du jour – they have always demanded instant recommitment from their loyal constituents when, sometimes overnight, north turns into south and east turns into west.  And we see this happening daily in the lamestream with its asymmetrical coverage of events that favor the Left’s retention of power.

Finally, the good professors entirely miss the nature, role, and utility of the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ labels.  They misunderstand these as single-dimensional attributes like temperature, instead of names of umbrellas under which are gathered the more or less stable collections of ideological tenets that continue to point their adherents toward their unchanging global government collectivism or open market capitalist sovereign nation-state futures.  These seminal reasons for our ideological polarization are completely missed by our scholars.

As if to underline all of the above, today’s (18jun22) Union features the sentiment of its editorial board in the op-ed section – ‘There’s always another election’ (not yet online).  Therein the editorial board exhorts Nevada County voters to participate in greater numbers and in all elections, primaries and the November main events.  They wonder what really sparks a big turnout and lament that some significant offices – e.g. sheriff and DA - really had but one contender, the incumbent.  Surprisingly what they totally miss is the issue of election integrity on motivating voter turnout.  Half the country is concerned about the confirmed reports of fraud and irregularities, and why many of these failed to gain traction in our judicial system.  Letting this sentiment fester unresolved does not invite the sometime voter to get educated, involved, and cast a vote. 

The thing that sticks out to readers paying attention is that only one of our polarized sides is concerned about voter integrity, and those are the Republicans.  The Democrats care only about voter access, seeking to maximize those qualified to vote that may include some who no longer can even fog a mirror.  The Republicans on the other hand demand that only franchised citizens should be able to cast ballots, and want procedures in place to vet these qualified voters.  To the Left, this all amounts to voter suppression and the diminishing of our democracy.

So the Union’s piece on voting that completely ignores election integrity and voter qualification confirms that the newspaper is another politically tinged outlet of the nation’s progressive wing and a solid member of the Left’s lamestream.  This assessment would be incomplete without acknowledging that the privately owned newspaper has every right to be a handmaiden of the county’s purple-to-blue transition as it caters to its leftward marketplace.  However, it would suit me more if The Union would admit to its ideological leanings and not attempt to represent itself as traveling close to the nation’s political center stripe.  After all, a media outlet identifying itself as tacking Left or Right would be a refreshing change and provide useful clarity to the many readers still in doubt.

Nisenan Nostrums (updated 4jun22)

George Rebane

The 26may22 Union reported (here) that there is a new initiative being launched to have the Nisenan Indians reclaim some of the land that the US government screwed them out of more than a century ago.  The history and Nisenan claim is anything but simple, but this indigenous local tribe, now numbering less than 150, want their land on which to build a cultural center that will anchor a venue in which they can maintain their traditions and educate the rest of us about their heritage.  At least that’s what I understand of their claims.  

The parcel they want is called the Nisenan or Nevada City Rancheria, and consists of almost 80 acres located in the Cement Hill area north of town, next to the old Nevada City airport property.  The old hand-drawn map shown below is all they have on their heritage websites which don’t really define how the tribe is currently organized, if at all. (here, here, and here)

I have taken the old map which shows one section (640 acres or one square mile) of land on which two lower left 40-acre parcels are labeled “Indian Colony” on the old map, and drawn it on the map of the Nevada City area shown below.  To date there have been no claims made on any specific parcels.

We don’t yet know where all this is going, but given the progressive propensities of Nevada City residents, it’s not a long shot to anticipate some serious heat starting to be generated about returning land to the ‘rightful indigenous owners’ before any light is produced.  I wouldn’t be surprised if in the process we don’t have hundreds of would-be Nisenan emerging out of the woodwork to militate for some sort of government reparations ranging from land to cash payments.

The whole situation is not unique to Nevada County and has been and is being played out elsewhere in the country (note the mess in eastern Oklahoma).  Which all calls into question as to what current productive residents of a land owe to people who claim to be deprived relatives of long-lost primitive ancestors who presumably spent centuries on the land, and were able to develop some woven baskets and stacked stick residences as their contribution to advance their progeny.

Full disclosure - the Rebanes have more than a passing interest in this matter since we have lived on one of the so-called ‘rancheria’ parcels for the last twenty years.

[4jun22 update]  The Union’s editorial board (of which Jo Ann is a member) gave their very measured view on the Nisenan issue (here).  They back giving land to the surviving members of the tribe.  More than likely this would be a hunk from the western end of Nevada City’s ‘airport property’ that abuts the recorded ‘Indian Reservation’ (the rancheria) shown on the above map.  For federal recognition of the tribe, a part of the land must include at least a “sliver” of the rancheria which is now private property.  No one yet knows what constitutes a sliver.  The editorial board’s position concludes with – “But we can make a decision at this moment to support a project that is warranted. We can acknowledge the harm that was done, and work toward a better future, not just with a recognition at the start of a council meeting, but a federal recognition supported by real action from Nevada City and this county.”

Scattershots – 1may22

George Rebane

‘Workers of the world, arise and celebrate the day that brings us together to again be thankful for the blessings of collectivism that unite us in a revolution to make socialism available to all peoples everywhere.’ - or something similar.  I just thought it would be appropriate to make up that piece of crap on May Day.

Inflation Tax.  Last year many of us already saw the salacious intents of the Biden administration in how they were systematically going about to ruin the nation.  Among the many disasters they were cooking up was inflation.  Well, it’s here now, and the piece I posted then (here) is definitely worth reviewing by those who are impacted by inflation and those who are planning to be so impacted.  I count myself among the latter, so it’s time to review the taxing aspects of inflation (here).  And for those who are spreadsheet challenged, I made a spreadsheet with the formulas from the ‘Inflation – up close and personal’ post. Download InflationInvesting2

Wealth tax:  The Build Back Bullshit agenda is still not dead and buried.  Team Bumblebrain has every intent on passing most of its provisions, especially those increasing our taxes.  The administration's entire team on economics are double dummies who couldn’t pass Econ 101.  They continue to tell the sheeple that we can tax ourselves out of an inflationary spiral.  Even Keynes, the lord of demand-siders, counseled against raising taxes in an inflation infested economy. (more here)

Election corruption right here in River City?  My bride and a commenter picked up on a thinly disguised campaign ad in the 30apr22 Union for Natalie Adona, our Soros'(?) foreign plant Assistant Registrar of Voters, who is running for the county’s Clerk Recorder – Registrar of Voters in the 7jun22 election.  The ad, pictured below, is made to look like a public service announcement from the Nevada County Clerk Recorder – Registrar of Voters office.  Notice the formal seal in the lower right corner.  Were it a bona-fide voter info notice from that office, then it would have been published under the aegis of our current holder of that office, Greg Diaz.  It does not speak well for The Union to have allowed this campaign ad to appear without some corrective editorial comment.

Leftwing Journalism (Addended)

George Rebane

Reading this morning’s (28apr22) Union, I was both startled and disappointed when I came to the paper’s weekly Hits & Misses column (here).  Publisher Don Rogers usually places his contributions at the bottom, and there we saw –

MISS (from Publisher Don Rogers): To the kind of free speech as uttered by bullies, liars, abusers, propagandists, trolls, rumor-mongers, gossips and other asses lurking in social media, including the new owner of Twitter.

Now, it’s been no secret for decades that there is a great asymmetry between the reportage from our neighbors on the Left and Right.  (The published literature on that could fill a library.)  We have covered this phenomenon going on 15 years now.  Recent leftwing journalistic atrocities include the multi-year unabashed and still ongoing reporting of the Great Russian Collusion for which there is not a shred of evidence.  In a similar vein, material events of national importance are thoroughly buried in what is now correctly known as the lamestream media.  An example of that is the Hunter Biden laptop scandal which revealed influence peddling that included payoffs to the “Big Guy” principal, now in the White House, whose influence was peddled.

Such evidence-free, evidence-hiding journalistic behavior is to be expected in the national press, but not so much from local outlets in markets where the writers and readers know each other.  This is why I was surprised to read Don’s pre-emptive swipe at Elon Musk.

Readers may recall that I consider Don Rogers a respected friend, among the many I have on the port side.  However, his published Miss is so out of character of the man I know on two counts.  First, Musk’s stated intentions to open up Twitter to uncensored free speech should be welcomed by all who support our First Amendment, especially those who supposedly deal in ‘Truth’ as journalists claim in their code of ethics.  And second, Musk has yet to do anything at Twitter that would justify anyone to categorize him on Roger’s list of misfit communicators.  So why launch such a pre-emptive editorial attack that looks so much like gratuitous pandering to the county's growing progressive faction?

In expressing all this consternation, I am reminded that The Union is a privately owned enterprise, and has wide latitude in what kind of news and editorial content it is free to publish.  I don’t think that the above Miss crossed any libel lines, but I do think that Don Rogers does step over the bounds of editorial prudence when he joins the ranks of the country’s leftwing lemming chorus, all howling their imagined portents of Elon Musk single-handedly about to bring American democracy to an end by opening up Twitter to free speech.

Addendum:  Leftwing journalism cannot survive as a co-equal in an open market of ideas.  In such an environment, collectivist thought withers away into a dry shell of an echo, infrequently encountered and never taken seriously by those open to the greater wash of ideas that inundate the public square.  This is to be corroborated by the establishment of a very visible crutch that will henceforth support the already limping lamestream.  The Biden administration will seek to ensconce a permanent Ministry of Truth (aka Disinformation Governance Board) to oversee and variously censor ideas, opinions, happenings, and facts that counter the neo-Marxist narrative of socialism that has become the dissonant chorus from the Left. (more here and here)  The leader of these quenchers of free speech will be Nina Jankowicz, a renown incompetent in all but partisan zealotry, which she has demonstrated throughout her career (more here).  This woman is the carefully chosen poster-child for fettered discourse in the land.

Scattershots – 21apr22 (updated 24apr22)

George Rebane

Re Rise Gold’s opening of the Idaho-Maryland mine, Union columnist Terry McLaughlin writes an excellent summary of the cost/benefit factors in the newspapers 21apr22 edition.  I’ve been on the fence leaning toward opposition of the project.  Terry’s clear, complete, and concise column helped me resolve toward opposing the project.  It’s definitely worth a read (here).

2017 corporate tax cuts have now demonstrated that they paid for themselves.  Beyond they gave the economy a boost, raised real wages for middle class, and attracted more capital investment to increase the nation’s productive capacity.  As a collateral benefit, the rate reduction also greatly reduced the usual tax avoidance stratagems that always accompany high tax rates.  In short, the working of the Laffer Curve has again been demonstrated, as has been the error of all predictors – starting with the CBO - of massive government revenue losses.  Now, you’ll hear none of this from the lamestream media where all you’ll get is that the anti-American Biden wants to raise corporate rates to some progressive ‘fair share’ level.  This is guaranteed to take us back to slow and no growth, especially when combined with the rest of Democrats’ butt stupid economic nostrums. (more here and here)

[22apr22 update] ‘If I were the Devil’ broadcast on 5 April 1965 is one of Paul Harvey’s most memorable commentaries.  The legendary radio commentator (syndicated from 1951-2008) looks more than a half century into the future and nails it.  He spelled out then what we all have experienced as the signs of our time.  Definitely worth a listen today (here) as we contemplate our nation's downward spiral.  (H/T to correspondent)

[24apr22 update]  The recent Earth Day should be remembered for marking 52 years of utterly failed predictions by the climate hysterics.  Doesn’t that just frost your external plumbing?  (more here and H/T to reader)

'How America Became La La Land' describes Victor Davis Hanson in some detail.  I would really like to see some of our leftwing readers respond to ANY of the points that VDH makes.  If the past serves the present, that is not to be; for they are all blind or ensconced in Terminal Denial Land.

‘Separation of church and state’

George Rebane

On this Thursday of Holy Week my bride Jo Ann, who is a member of the Union’s editorial board, had her ‘Hit’ published in the 14apr22 edition of the newspaper’s weekly Hits & Misses column.  It read – “Hit to celebrations this week of Easter and Passover.  These observances in our community help maintain our culture and remind us of our country’s Judeo-Christian roots.”

Well, this did not sit well with Laurent Clark, a local anti-American progressive, who definitely considers Jo Ann’s sentiment one root to far according to today’s secular humanist tradition police.  Ms(?) Clark responded today with her letter titled ‘Separation of church and state’ (here) –

This week Ms. Rebane has used The Union’s “Hits and Misses” section to foist her brand of religion on everyone in the vicinity, doing so with a subtle comment that the Easter and Passover celebrations,“help maintain our culture and remind ‘us’ of our Judeo-Christian roots.” … “Us” may remind her that she overstates her opinion by inferring that all of “us” are encompassed within her religious ilk. She further suggests that “us” as a culture should be thankful for those alleged “roots” — an arguable stretch of an opinion. … She might better refer to her brand of religion as a group, sect, clan, etc. and recognize that the rest of “us” may have our own sect, clan, or group, to worship within, as we please … or not.

One is hard put to discover any ‘foisting’ or even anything about "her brand of religion" in Jo Ann’s hit.  We also note that those who did well in American history are familiar with the role Judeo-Christian tradition played in our country’s birth and beyond.  And the last time I looked, The Union was already a privately owned media outlet and not an inseparable mouthpiece of the state, allowed to still practice what passes for vestiges of free speech in today’s America.  But it is revealing to note that progressive statists today consider all organs of the Fourth Estate as responsible for hewing to the Left's socialist narrative.                    

Scattershots – 25jan22 (updated 2feb22)

George Rebane

SAT tests are biased and inequitable.  That is the claim by leftwing academics over the past few years.  The evidence shown for this assertion is that black and Hispanic students don’t get the same pro rata scores with the white students.  Today the SAT people say that they’ll fix that by having different tests for different students which should cut down cheating and drive the test scores into some par region for the races. (here and here)  If white student scores are the anchor range to which other must hew, then that means the black/Hispanic tests will be dumbed down to raise their scores, and tests given to Asian-descent students will be made tougher to lower their scores.  As with all such collectivist social engineering undertakings, the causes – home culture, quality of education, heritance - for the diverse results are either denied or ignored; the overarching motive is political correctness, no matter how much the students and the country are harmed by such ideological machinations.  I covered the race-based reason for such differences in ‘Equity Denies Reality’.

Testing to slow the spread of Covid is futile and also nonsensical, as these pages have revealed over the last two years.  Professor Daniel Halperin makes this point clear in ‘Omicron Is Spreading, Resistance Is Futile’ in the 25jan22 WSJ.  A highlight in the article is its revelation of the difference between the ‘gold standard’ PCR and the more available antigen tests, the former taking days to get results and the latter being the ‘rapid test’.  Both suffer from weaknesses I have described and quantified in previous posts that involve the tests’ sensitivities – P(TP|V) - and specificities – P(-TP|-V).  Sensitivity is the probability of a ‘test positive’ given that you have the virus, and specificity is the probability that you get a correct negative result given you don’t have the virus.  It turns out that the PCR tests have a high false alarm rate, i.e. low specificity; and the antigen tests miss detecting the virus too frequently, i.e. low sensitivity, especially in the critical early days of the infection.  The bottom line is that both tests give jaundiced results in addition to the entire overarching argument that testing doesn’t contribute anything to slowing the spread of Covid.

Other dubious Covid stats we are inundated with is “Covid hospitalizations” and Omicron deaths.  The former bamboozled number counts “patients admitted for other reasons who incidentally test positive” that analysis shows these amount to about half of the hospitalizations.  And fear-mongering Omicron deaths is done without telling people that these number no more than the normal death rates encountered during normal flu seasons.  Dr Halperin concludes with – “It’s past time to shift focus from trying to stamp out all new infections to protecting the most vulnerable from severe disease directly through vaccination and other evidence-based measures and alleviating hospital staffing shortages. Ending mask mandates, de-emphasizing isolation and encouraging vaccination ought to be a compromise most of us can live with.”  Finally, as we have known all along, masks are a farce – more below.

Local bureaucrats are still attempting to mandate masks in their allocated public spaces.  Today the 25jan22 Union features their lead story (here) telling of an encounter between a citizen group wanting to enter the Nevada County Clerk Recorder’s office to check on the proper filing of their BoS recall papers, the directions for which were confused by the Clerk Recorder staff.  They were denied entry because they did not wear masks.  Such a denial was totally illegal since there is no state or county mask mandate in force.  Tinpot bureaucrats cannot just make up their own rules for how the public must deport themselves when entering their fiefdom.  But that is the way of our country now – the Left fear-mongers Covid for establishing a new precedence for public control, and the Right refuses to play along while pointing to constitutional norms that prevent such gratuitous imposition of arbitrary rules.

[27jan22 update]  “Fair and honest elections, with votes cast by knowledgeable and informed citizens, are an integral part of our democratic republic”, asserts Terry McLaughlin in her excellent 27jan22 Union column on voting rights (here).  On the other hand, I’m in receipt of an email from a liberal friend that contains a desperate Democrat plea for funds for their ‘Ron Begone’ with which to defeat Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida, the man they perhaps fear the most on the 2024 Republican ticket.  DeSantis is launching a voter integrity program, manned by “far-right election police” that the Dems claim will “intimidate and discourage Democratic voters”; yep, only the Dems will be kept away by this new program designed to “erase the voting rights” of, wait for it, only Dems.  It’s unbelievable how dumb their elites consider their grassroots true believers to be.  Their ‘Ron Begone’ brochure concludes with, “MAGA Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is the worst Governor in America and an utter nightmare for Floridians. He is relentless in his praise for Donald Trump, he completely botched Florida's pandemic response and put lives at risk, and he gave scarce COVID vaccines to his major campaign donors instead of the most vulnerable Floridians. He MUST be defeated in the next election. We know for sure that Donald Trump is going to go ALL OUT to help DeSantis win, so we need to start fighting back today by building a massive coalition of good Democratic supporters.”  Exit problem:  Count the number of lies in this plea for money.

[2feb22 update]  Re the restraining order against my daughter and two other individuals active in promoting the recall of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors as reported in 2feb22 Union. (here)  The accounts of what happened in the brief encounter at the Clerk Recorder’s office differ widely.  What is clear is that the staff of the Clerk Recorder decided unilaterally to establish and physically enforce a mask mandate.  Such a mandate was not in force in Nevada County or at the Rood Center.  The restraining order appears to be a political instrument launched by Rood Center insiders opposing the recall, and using for its substantive basis a staffer becoming somewhat hysterical about her safety after being asked to give her name to one of the recall promoters who entered the office.  Here the fundamental question is, does a subordinate public bureau of the county government have the right to unilaterally establish and enforce mandates on the public to restrict legitimate business with the bureau, mandates that have not been established by the county nor enforced by its law enforcement arm (i.e Sheriff)?  For the record, neither Jo Ann nor I are in favor of the recall.  Our adult daughter follows her own counsel and ideology which does have considerable overlap with ours, while neither being the subset of the other.

Check your PG&E bill (updated 11jan22)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 3jan22 (updated 7jan22)

 

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herding CRT's Ideological Cats

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruminations – 27oct21

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

The Union – no room for blasphemies du jour

‘All great truths began as blasphemies.’  GB Shaw

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Leftwing Journalist Admonishes

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

River Fire Reflections

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

Terry McLaughlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Parents wary of critical race theory’

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

Terry McLaughlin

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

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