Rebane's Ruminations

The Joys of Juneteenth

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Most Atrocious Tax of All (updated 18jun21)

‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

The country’s Democratic radical Left and Team Biden are prepared to expand asset taxes and introduce unrealized capital gains as another taxable form of ‘income’.  If they are successful, this will be the final nail in the coffin of American capitalism, the demonstrated most efficient way to generate and distribute wealth ever devised.

Income – The valuable return or yield from any kind of property, patent, service, etc. received in negotiable instruments, such as nominal dollars, that is spendable in an exchange for goods, services, or labor.  (Passive unrealized appreciation of any asset is NOT income.)

It boggles the sensible mind to hear that government has become so rapacious that it now wants to install a new, game-changing layer of taxes to perennially start taking more of what you have already earned and paid taxes on.  This atrocious taxing scheme comes in two parts.  They will apply one tax rate on the mark-to-market value of assets you already own, and another tax rate on your annual income augmented by the annual unrealized appreciation of those assets.  In other words, they will also perniciously count as income a fictitious amount of money that you never received or spent.

It is this malign definition of income that gave rise to the recent ‘news’ of billionaires paying miniscule tax rates of the order of 1% that came to light after their tax returns were hacked and distributed by the Left.  Where did such small tax rates come from when we know that the top 1% earners pay 40% of the nation’s income taxes?  The answer is easy when you slip in the new Democrat definition of income to include the appreciation of what they already own and have paid taxes on.  Using the accepted definition of income (see above), a wealthy high earner may pay at, say, a 30% rate on such income.  If his income last year was $10M, then his tax bill was $3M.  But if he was a billionaire worth, say, $10B, and his assets appreciated 10%, then Democrats want to call the unrealized $1B gain as ‘income’ and make his tax bill 30% of $1,010,000,000 or $303,000,000.  And if he only paid $3M, then the Left and their lamestream scream that billionaires tax rate is only 0.3% = 3,000,000/1,010,000,000.  And you can hear the envy chorus of the nation’s double dummies holler ‘Yeah, make him pay his fair share like I do!’

Scattershots – 14jun21 (updated 20jun21)

George Rebane

Kamala Harris has been Bumblebrain’s presumptive replacement before 2022.  The thought was that Biden would resign due to health or family or some other reason, Kamala would step in and then be the reigning incumbent ready for a full term in 2024.  It all made sense before the Dems and the country were exposed to Kackling Kamala who has made a fool of herself since inauguration as reflected by the new lows in her approval rating (here).  Now Bumblebrain, even with all of his G7 gaffes (here and here), looks better than his erstwhile VP, which puts the Dems in a quandary.  Everyone knows Joe ‘the Gaffe’ Biden will not be prepared for a second term even if he does finish his first term.  I think the Dems’ new problem is that, given three more years of Kackling Kamala, she also will be unelectable in 2024.  So everyone now is quietly looking for a Plan B.

[15jun21 update]  Democrats don’t have a lock on butt stupid.  That was proved by Republicans, 203 of whom voted for a House bill – ‘See the Crisis Act’ - that would require Kamala to visit the border before she goes on any other travels. (more here)  Such a proscription by one branch of our government on another is not only politically infeasible, it’s also blatantly unconstitutional.  I have no idea why so many Republicans signed on to this political stunt that had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, and made them look like idiots for the attempt.  Both parties have their lapses from sanity, it’s only the relative frequency of these lapses that make the Democrats clear winners in the competition.

[19jun21 update]  ‘Tax break’ and ‘tax loophole’ – where did these terms come from?  This question struck me this morning as we were reading the morning newspapers (at our house these are The Union and WSJ).  After little noodling and discussion, we came to the conclusion that these terms cement in our national understanding the notion that our earnings first and foremost belong to the government.  They may justifiably be taxed or retrieved by the government, at its pleasure and to any extent.  ‘Break’ is meant to convey the meaning of a dispensation and reduction of the tribute that was previously remitted by a large now-favored cohort of taxpayers.  With a tax break they now get to enjoy an interlude or break from having to pay their formerly full fare to the IRS.  Note that tax break is a sometime thing, it is not a permanent reduction in our tax policy and may be revoked without prejudice by the government at any time.  The money is still theirs, you’re just getting a temporary break.

Now a tax loophole is something completely opposite – it is a lawful means of reducing taxes, discovered individually, and valid for an indefinite period until some activist or government worthy successfully militates for closing it.  By its label, a ‘loophole’ connotes something sordid, sneaky, and less than upright.  People taking advantage of tax loopholes, no matter how legal, are assigned to inhabit the nether regions of our ethical society.  A society in which good people would not stoop so low as to busy themselves going through the small print of our tax code to ferret out ways in which only they can reduce their tax and not pay their ‘fair share’.  When found, such loopholes are seldom shared for the same reasons successful investment algorithms are not shared.  But the idea is the same as for tax break – in exercising a loophole, you are denying government its just deserts from your earnings and assets.

‘Some people can be fooled all of the time, and all people can be fooled only some of the time, but most people can be fooled most of the time.’  I recall constructing that shibboleth for one of my past posts.  Giving it more thought now makes it illuminate how the majority of our electorate is constantly bamboozled by the lamestream media as revealed by various polls.  It is also easy to confirm by comparing coverage and interpretations of undisputed facts (almost all government sourced) and related issues reported by the lamestream and the admittedly rightwing outlets.  The asymmetry is in that much of today’s news never sees the light of day on the pages of NYT, WaPo, et al, and the programs of CNN, MSNBC, et al. And what they do report is more often than not contextually false.  This observation alone explains away why such a large contingent of Americans willfully swallow, tolerate, and repeat the growing body of woke insanities du jour – they know no better.

[20jun21 update]  The impending passage of SR1 – the Senate’s version of the horrendous House HR1 – would change the scope of our constitutional federalism and permanently ensconce the nationwide means for voter fraud and irregularities to benefit Democrats.  That party has been issuing a constant stream of lies claiming that the states’ various voter integrity projects will deny the vote to minorities.  The facts from recent elections tell a totally different story.  In sum, there is no evidence that requirements like voter ID, pre-registration, and election day proximal voting periods have ever reduced minority voter turnout or lower shares of voting by registered voters.  This makes no nevermind to the Left that keeps repeating the same lies day after day.  Write your senators to oppose SR1.

Inflation – Up close and personal

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”  Milton Friedman

George Rebane

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And what inflation brings."  (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)  And more specifically we need to be forewarned that inflation is like “the fog, that comes on little cat feet”, and then surreptitiously consumes our plans for the future.

Most people know that the government, through our Federal Reserve, controls the “quantity of money” which pursues available goods and services in our economy.  Fewer know that inflation is really an additional tax on your assets, which for their procurement you already have paid taxes on the inflated income.  Inflation is then another tax, more insidious and mostly invisible that takes buying power out of our pockets and transfers it into the hands of government politicians and their bureaucrats.  And it is they who get the benefits of ‘new money’, because those who get to spend it first, spend it with the value of the ‘old money’ before dilution sets in and the markets react.  By the time you get it, prices have already reflected the additional dollars chasing the same goods and services.

The blame for the return of inflation is ours.  It is we who voted in the conmen who promised us all kinds of goodies that would cost us nothing – it was always the other guy who would foot the bill.  And we have kept doing it year after year.

The other tax that inflation brings is the usual tax that doesn’t even need to be raised, at least for a while until we’re convinced that our government needs to make even more “investments” in our behalf.  The usual tax bill, not only goes up in nominal dollars, but also increases in the so-called ‘bracket creep’ which puts our inflated dollar amounts into the next higher rate categories.

In the final analysis, as we have said here for years, the dollar must be destroyed in order to satisfy all the obligations – now amounting to over $100T – that must be repaid in nominal dollar amounts.  That means that the dollar’s buying power has to be reduced essentially to zero in order to legally satisfy and defraud our creditors, many of whom are actually ourselves.  The ONLY thing that will save the dollar is an economy that grows at a rate which keeps the current debt levels at a low relative amount to our economy.  Elsewhere in these pages I calculated this annual growth rate to be at least 5%, and that means at least 5% GDP growth year after year with no end in sight.  No economy of our size has ever achieved such a steady state of high growth, and there’s no hope of our achieving it with socialists – who are rock apes when it comes to economics – in charge of our national weal.

The Evil Party – more lives lost to the Left (updated 21jun21)

The fact that Joe Biden is even considering opening our southern border to a group of unvetted illegal aliens in a massive caravan – in the middle of a pandemic, while millions of Americans are unemployed – tells you everything you need to know about Democrats’ priorities.  - Anonymous

George Rebane

In voices hushed by the evil Democratic Party and their lamestream mouthpieces, evidence continues to pile in that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IMT) are effective preventatives and curatives for Covid-19 (more here and here).  Both are worldwide established pharmaceuticals that have been in constant use for various diseases for decades.  HCQ was initially approved by the FDA for treating C19.  Then approval was withdrawn due to a politicized study that itself was later shown to be faulty.  Since then, additional studies have been performed, cited, and censored showing the benefits of both drugs.

The latest is a study of patients already on ventilators who received HCQ in combination with Azithromycin (AZ).  The results showed patients receiving HCQ/AZ had a survival rate almost three times that of those who were denied the treatment.  Other studies that were not recognized in the US showed that both HCQ and IMT were also effective as treatments for C19 in the pre-ventilator stages of the disease.  There are countless reports of both drugs being used quietly by healthcare workers in unpublished subrosa protocols to save the lives of their patients.

When these performance stats are applied to the millions of C19 patients who have died over the past year plus (600,000 in the US alone), then the extent of this evil is revealed, and begins to compare itself to the order of magnitude of the Holocaust and other politically motivated genocides.  The political motivation in our country was TDS – denying President Trump any credit for his successful policies fighting the C19 pandemic.  In this light, our Democrats and their proto-communist factions are directly culpable for the readily preventable deaths of uncounted tens of thousands of Americans.

To our Left, these political sacrifices are merely the “few eggs that must be cracked to make their (socialist) omelet” - with a nod to Josif Vissarionovich.  And there are many more such cracked eggs to come as they continue their unabated fundamental transformation of America.

[21jun21 update]  “New Study Links Ivermectin to ‘Large Reductions’ in COVID-19 Deaths”  The number of lives that could have been saved by the anti-Trump Left not proscribing Ivermectin easily reaches into the hundreds of thousands.  However Teams Pelosi/Schumer/Biden abetted by Team Fauci were perfectly willing to sacrifice these thousands of lives to maintain their narrative driving toward victory in an election year.  For them there was no doubt that the end would justify any horrendous means available.  And as in any communist and/or third world country, no one will be held accountable – ongoing existential evil in our midst.

Toward Reunification, One More Time (updated 13jun21)

George Rebane

[This commentary appeared here in the 5jun21 op-ed pages of The Union.  The response in the newspaper’s online edition comment stream was as predicted (by publisher Don Rogers among others), and I expand on this in the addendum below.]

In my last two Other Voices columns – ‘Farewell Unity’ (2apr21), ‘Where exactly are we going?’ (19apr21) - I apparently miscommunicated the outlined steps to reunify our politically polarized land.  Liberal readers misunderstood that I was inviting our neighbors of the Left to abandon their desiderata for a fundamentally transformed America, and simply adopt those that we of the Right embrace.  Nowhere did I make such a proposal.

My main point was and still is that we should not start on the road to reunification with the much ballyhooed, premature, and therefore misguided search for ‘common ground’.  As it continues to be demonstrated by calls from both sides, that approach has been a futile undertaking over the last few years.  I offered a three-step sequence toward reunification that must start with an heroic effort to meld elements of our distinct ideas for a future America into a compromised list of shared attributes for governance and social policies.

If we can successfully come up with such a collection of ideas, then that list of mutually acceptable and shared attributes will naturally give us the basis for a common ground from which to attempt the concluding step.  The recommended sequence is concluded by both sides joining in the effort to forge a unified format for America’s future, concurrently with the process by which such an envisioned America shall come to pass.  By this I mean that the outlined structure and the process to achieve it, must necessarily be put in place through, say, a productive give-and-take convention of the parties, so that both sides see the same end and also the means to achieve it as a feasible political enterprise to take place in the out years.

The nearby diagram attempts to convey this graphically.  In its examination, it’s important not to get hung up on the descriptions of each side’s currently desired America.  They are included here only to illustrate that it is these disputed objectives, as perceived by the other, that are the underlying causes for our polarization.  If such a reunification process is actually attempted by our Democrats and Republicans, then each will bring to the table their own descriptions of their desired America which will serve as a starting point.  Finally, even this approach does not guarantee success.  Nevertheless, if we cannot agree to work for a common America, then a Great Divide, achieved peacefully or through violence, is in our future.

[Addendum]  A quick perusal of The Union's comment stream to this commentary reveals that the most recent tranche of liberal readers replicate the cognitive deficits exhibited by the readers of my two preceding columns that introduced a more productive process toward possible reunification than the one that starts with finding common ground which has been fruitlessly bandied around by politicians and in the national press.

Again, our liberals show they have no understanding of the direction Biden’s policies and the congressional Democrats are taking the country.  They vehemently deny that it is toward socialism, and some in turn accuse Republicans of promoting fascism as our future.  None of these worthies give a hint that they understand the definitions of either ideology.

I need to point out that predictably Steven Frisch, the local Left’s leading intellectual light, also made his appearance.  And a very disappointing effort it was.  He had no idea what to make of my column, instead he took the opportunity for what he thought would be another personal detraction that would confirm his followers’ rejection of my recommended approach.  His words –

Thought I would leave this little post by George from over at his blog here for people to consider as they think about his system for finding a "Unified Format for America's Future"...."Over the last week or so, the evil party has done everything it could to divide us further and pander to their ultra-left faction and black constituents by hammering the centenary of the Tulsa massacre over every possible channel and at every possible event. After dredging up the terrible details of that riot of the whites, these were repeated ad nauseum over the days as it awakened and drew predictable expressions of rage from the Left and black leaders. Does anyone think that this kind "racial catharsis" has left us more united? " --yep, George Rebane.

He was quoting from my intro to ‘Sandbox – 2jun21’ in which I took Biden and the country’s lamestream media to task for their obvious use of the Tulsa Massacre to further divide America.  And Frisch, again displaying his extremely limited knowledge of national dialogues, thinks that I am somehow again a misguided lonely and deranged voice in the wilderness.  He has no idea of the number of columnists and conservative academics who measured Biden to a similar standard.  My own opinion was closely matched by black academic Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute from whose linked column I used his “racial catharsis” to characterize the reporting on the Tulsa centenary.

So yes, given this level of ignorance amplified vitriol, there is no indication that any rational approach to reunification will be accepted by the Left.

[13jun21 update]  The comment stream to this piece in the online Union has grown considerably, it now numbers above 150.  What I need to point out here is that no leftwing Union reader has yet to understand and critique the 3-step process to unification that I detail.  Almost all the comments are regurgitations of baseless ad hominems against me and RR.  The sad reflection on the hopelessness of starting a productive national dialogue on ANY issue is that the vituperations don’t even provide any specifics to substantiate their naked assessments and name-calling.  The apologetics to support contentions on this website are voluminous and rich with citations.  The Left’s demonstrated intellectual capacity appears not able to undertake a reasoned debate on any of it.  As a group, they are innocent of even the most basic definitions required to understand and engage.  This is USA in 2021.

The Blessings of Inequality

George Rebane

We are in the age of trading equality for equity.  Why?  Because equality at the start of any road quickly leads to inequality among the travelers - given equal opportunities, some get further ahead than others.  That’s how it has been, is now, and always will be the human condition.  To the socialist such results are anathema.  To them an enlightened governance will use force as needed to assure that society advances in a tight equitable cohort in which no one is left too far behind, and no one gets ahead too far.  And the governing elites will decide and manage what is ‘too far’.

As history has shown elsewhere and also in our land, policies that impose such equities produce stagnating economies in which the lot of the citizenry is uniform misery that takes many forms as individual freedoms are pruned over time.

Over the last 250 years, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the west, we have witnessed an enormous blossoming in the quality of life (QoL) for all classes.  These range from fewer and less menial jobs with shorter hours, better living conditions with more stuff, an explosion of arts and entertainments, and longer lives during which to enjoy all these blessings.  Moreover, these betterments have inevitably spread across the world, raising billions of people out of droll and desperate lives that their ancestors suffered for centuries.

A closer look at how this all came about immediately reveals the role of inequality that sprung up in the new middle classes which were enabled by ever more liberal governments that inherited western culture.  In the 19^th century trade and industry allowed those who could and would to quickly leap ahead of their more sanguine and status quo satisfied neighbors in growing their assets.  The last two centuries contain countless stories of single-generation leaps from abject poverty to undreamed of wealth by entrepreneurs who took risks investing their time, health, money, and comfort to bring something new and useful to market.

And all of them knew that what they introduced would initially garner resistance and criticism in the marketplace.  Their driving hope was always that there would be a cohort of potential customers with the means and curiosity to give the new product or service a try, for these also would be taking a risk to buy something that might not work.  But it was always those having sufficient money set aside who could take that risk to enjoy and/or incorporate the new thing into their lives or businesses.

Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

The Evil Party Marches On (updated 4jun21)

George Rebane

You can fool some people most of the time; you can fool most people some of the time; and today you can also fool most of the people most of the time.

As ensconced in communist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the new Democratic Party has thoroughly embraced its dictum ‘Accuse others of what you are guilty.’  Nowhere has this been more profoundly demonstrated than over the last decade as the Democrats have started their short march to socialism.  The notion of socialism was anathema in post-war American politics as demonstrated by almost daily reports of ruinous suppression of all human rights and freedoms that our Cold War enemies were imposing on their citizens.  Now, going on three generations of the Left’s dominance in public classrooms, the nature of socialism has been obfuscated in the American mind so that at least half of our citizens view it as another viable form of governance that we should perhaps try.

All this has been built on a complex façade of lies designed to install a political monopoly based on constantly customized collective ideologies du jour from the Democrat Party that cascade through the various channels of the now propagandized lamestream media.  A partial list of these very large, significant, and nationally consequential lies includes –

1. Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election;
2. Democrats are not taking America into socialism cum Marxism;
3. C19 from a Wuhan virology lab has been a baseless rightwing conspiracy;
4. HCQ and IVT are not useful for fighting C19;
5. Today China is not America’s mortal enemy;
6. Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon;
7. Our Mexican border is closed and secure;
8. There is no human crisis at our southern border;
9. Raising taxes and regulations does not impact economic behavior;
10. The 6jan21 Capitol invasion was a planned insurrection to topple government;
11. BLM is a protest movement and not a Marxist political organization;
12. America continues plagued by systemic racism; no progress made since 1964;
13. America’s Left and its corporatist allies have not rolled back 1A rights and practiced cancel culture;
14. The systematic destruction of black families and perpetuation of urban ghettos is the Republicans’ fault;
15. Rolling back 2A rights from law abiding citizens will eliminate ‘gun violence’ such as ghetto murders and mass shootings;
16. Police have been purposefully murdering blacks;
17. America’s colleges don’t have racist admissions policies and welcome free speech;
18. The biggest existential threat to America is climate change;
19. There is a scientific consensus that preventable manmade global warming is occurring;
20. The great American experiment was founded on the racist principle, promotion, and practice of slavery; today Critical Race Theory correctly teaches that America is still a racist country, and its teaching is not anti-American propaganda.

And finally, perhaps the biggest, most damaging, and enduring lie is that the solution to the all of humanity’s problems requires our embrace of collectivist governance at its most comprehensive scale possible.  There, the admitted goal is achieving a Marxist-Leninist society populated by the “communist Man”, at which time government will naturally dissolve as the then altruistic humanity marches joyously into a future of eternal peace and plenty.  (A similar list is always invited from our left-leaning readers.)

Memorial Day – 31 May 2021

George Rebane

Most but not all died to save America from a calamitous tyranny; many have also died for America to remain as the world’s white hat hegemon.  On this day we gratefully remember and honor them all.

‘The Soul of Black Conservatism’

George Rebane

Scholar and commentator Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute has written a biography of economist Thomas Sowell, one of the country’s most celebrated conservative academics and intellectuals.  Progressives accuse Sowell’s perspectives on race in America as “going against the grain of fellow African-Americans.”  That on its face is wrong, as Riley points out in Sowell’s own words during a Charlie Rose interview - “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.” (more here)

A main thesis of Sowellian thought on race is that successful racial/ethnic groups in America have assumed their places in our pluralistic society by relying on their own resources and means, and not waiting for the dominant culture to provide them special dispensations to smooth the ‘E pluribus unum’ road to assimilated equality.  “If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes of self-reliance”.

Sowell has also maintained that “government has a role to play in social mobility, albeit a limited one, and incentives matter”, but he remains worried about “handouts that ask little or nothing of the recipient, and thus risk creating dependency”.  Thanks to the Democrats’ imbued plantation mentality on the nation’s blacks, that kind of dependency has now been created and etched in stone as the foundational principle of modern black politics – white supremacists have taken the blacks’ share of the common weal, and through the practice of ‘systemic racism’ deny blacks the ability to garner their fair share of the nation’s riches.  Hence, America must be fundamentally transformed so that a more comprehensive and encompassing government can then use its gun to force an equitable redistribution.  The Left teaches that is the only way to achieve social justice in the land.

As a concluding thought, Rebane Doctrine holds that to the extent that systemic racism can be shown to exist in America, it is practiced and maintained by the country’s elitist Left (both black and white) with the unwitting support of their purposely under-educated legions of urban African-Americans.  Our main street whites have long been indifferent to the racial make-up of their neighbors, team mates, fellow workers, and even spouses.  Nowhere has this been more demonstrated than in our post-war military.  A litmus test for the end of such racism will be a time when we no longer require organizations, institutions, and agencies to have race-specific names, race-based memberships, and that provide race-based dispensations.

Scattershots – 24may21 (updated 31may21)

If "being shot is a risk police officers take with the job", then isn't being shot a risk criminals take when breaking the law?

George Rebane

Tomorrow our Left will celebrate the life of George Floyd on the anniversary of his death last year in the custody of the Minneapolis police.  The ‘celebration’ itself is a specious undertaking of political propaganda at its most blunt delivery while cloaked in the highest level of obfuscation for the nation’s hoi polloi.  Mr Floyd was a career petty criminal and drug addict, in and out of jails, who devoted his life to victimizing fellow blacks.  His unfortunate death at the hands of white police officers set in motion a perfect storm that has been used by Democrats, cum socialists and communists, to convince the country’s lightly read that America remains a deeply racist country with persecuted minorities, especially our African-Americans, whose lot has not improved since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Huckster Al Sharpton will feature prominently in the coming kabuki, as will President Biden’s White House meeting with the Floyd family to assure all the country’s blacks it is America’s racist Right that has deprived them of their ‘fair share’, and has kept them suffering on the plantation all these decades.

Victor Davis Hanson (here) and Bret Weinstein (here) whose essays have both hit it “outta da park” according to a longtime commenter, who again joins with RR’s cohort of other astute commenters who regularly bring to our readers’ attention significant commentaries that reveal and characterize these historic times, during which our country is rent and the world order is changing.  These pages have featured both writers over the years, and again their recent contributions do not disappoint.

Systemic Racism in America

George Rebane

Systemic racism is alive and well in America, and it has been in a fine fettle for most of the last fifty years.  We have our progressive and Marxist neighbors to thank for bringing it to our attention, only not in the way that they have massaged the national message.  All of our divers ethnic groups are aware of what the euphemistically labeled ‘Section 8’ promotions, admissions, awards, distributions, recognitions, … have been all about.  (I believe the origin of this label generalized from 'Section 8 set asides' in a HUD regulation that would assure minorities and low income applicants would get their share in certain kinds of contracting and allocations.)  Black intellectuals like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and the late Walter Williams deplored Section 8 advancements, not only for their racism, but for the explicit message that our African-Americans are somehow intellectually inferior and need special favorable dispensations to enable them to approach par with the other racial groups that participate in our public forums.

In our land over the years Section 8 advancements have been brought to bear to a fare-thee-well.  We all have seen it, and now witness its application in steroids.  (Un/fortunately, my professional experiences also abound in this realm.  And these have obviously shaped my socio-political beliefs.) Today even the simplest of statistical tests will confirm that the public face of our society is racially composed and biased.  The histrionics of the current ‘woke culture’ daily exposes a bevy of new insane interpretations of our language, America’s traditional culture, along with lunatic efforts to amplify systemic racism to bring about ‘equity’, the new scourge of progressive social engineering.

The resulting intellectual rot our Left is rapidly inducing into all of our institutions has, of course, already swept through academe, wreaked havoc in transforming capitalism into corporatism, seeped into the very fiber of our military, and today is finally broaching the formerly secure intellectual ramparts of our technical disciplines.  As we now see, equity is Section 8’s bastard issue.

A specific example that clearly illustrates the above is found in today’s academe – specifically, in math education.  Powerline presents the evidence in ‘Math is hard – hardest of all for the Left’.  From there we learn “that certain Virginia public school districts (and others elsewhere in the country) will discontinue advanced math classes, because (of) ‘equity’, and the University of California will permanently discontinue using the SAT for admission purposes.”  The graphic below explains the Left’s concern.  (Click on image for a larger presentation.)

The article by Steven Hayward goes on to explain, “If there’s one thing the left can’t abide at the moment, it is unequal racial results in achievement tests—tests that, let us recall, were largely invented by the liberal establishment decades ago as a means of making meritocracy count for more than family connections, private school pedigree, and so forth. It is not surprising that the left is turning on meritocracy right now.”

To further emphasize the extent of African-American and Hispanic academic deficits, which must be hidden/ignored, take a look at the graphic below that contains a SAT performance data matrix from the DoJ’s recent investigation of Yale’s admission practices.  Note the obvious bias in the admission of blacks and Latinos.  Only 20.18% of whites in the 10th decile (the top 10% of students’ SAT scores) were admitted, whereas 60% of similarly scoring blacks were admitted.  The admission rate for blacks did not sink to the level of the top admission rate for whites until the black students’ scores were in the 5^th decile (in the lower half of test scores) where their admission rate was still 20.85%, higher than that of the highest scoring whites.

Here then we see one of the actual faces of existential systemic racism that has been resurrected in America.  This is the decades-long fruit of Democrat public policies, especially those promoted by their virulent Marxist anti-American wing under the new cynical rubric of ‘equity’.  To continue in power and our country on the road to autocratic socialist mediocrity, the Democrats cannot afford to have America’s blacks and Hispanics understand what has been done to them since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  With the Left’s control of our educational institutions and the media, there is little chance for them to enjoy any ethnic and/or racial epiphanies anytime soon.  Thus, America’s systemic racism is not only sustained, but also assured growth.

All the news youse can use

George Rebane

Ever try to find a coherent set of TV program ratings on the web?  I just tried to do it again, after avoiding the frustration for a number of years.  My sweetie-pie and I were having one of our breakfast conversations when the topic turned to a news article that cited how informed Americans were about our country’s basic facts/numbers.  The 18may21article from Rasmussen Reports (cited by a reader), headlined ‘Conservative Viewers Are Better Informed About Important Topics’, got us thinking about the information sources regularly accessed by our mostly uninformed neighbors across the land.

So, we wondered how many people got their daily news from where.  And that again turned out to be a no easy task to google.  After some considerable surfing of various web sites I was able to assemble the following somewhat coherent table drawn mostly (entirely?) from Nielsen ratings.  I look at these numbers as being a snapshot of a noisy time series of viewers of the six major cable and mainstream television news outlets.

Looking at the above numbers, let’s assume that another 50% of our news consuming countrymen (which definitely includes women and others of all kinds of sexual orientations and configurations) get their news from other TV, print, and online outlets, in more or less the same liberal v conservative proportions.  That brings our total of, shall we say, ‘informed cohort’ to about 40 million.  Say, that this cohort is drawn from those aged 20-84 potential news consumers (and voters?) who currently total about 230M out of a population of 331M.  This number ties nicely to the total number of potential voters in the country, of whom only 55-60% or 127-138M actually, on average, turn out to vote.  (2020 was an extraordinary year in which almost 67% of eligible voters voted.)

From the above table we note that between 1 of 7 and 1 of 8 voters get their information from what can be labeled as conservative or rightwing sources.  The remainder get theirs from robustly liberal or leftwing sources (in these pages charitably labeled the lamestream media).  This provides conservatives a core of about 31M informed voters.  Through daily contacts with neighbors, it is these right-leaning Americans who convince the remainder to bring in the remaining Republican votes during elections.

Here you can see what kind of an uphill battle this disorganized core of conservatives have in order to take their message to the news-oblivious masses so that election outcomes are as tight as we have witnessed.  This ideological war is made even more one-sided when you consider the progressive propaganda that is constantly purveyed through academe, institutions, entertainment, and now also corporatist sectors.  Into today’s maelstrom of Marxist thought and values, the Republican party barely responds as it is outgunned in the public square by Democrats who effectively control the majority of the non-news voting community.

Retired flag officers break their silence

George Rebane

Having served in America’s military constrains neither an individual’s 1A rights nor his duty as a concerned and patriotic citizen in calling attention to a grossly misguided government.  To remain silent in such a case is, at a minimum, the height of cowardice and dereliction of duty.  Seeing the destruction of our republic that the Biden administration is engineering with their even more radical colleagues in Congress, over 120 retired flag officers (generals and admirals) came together to sign an open letter to the nation (here).  In this letter they express their deep concerns about what is going on currently in our country, and what this means to the future of America and Americans.

In response to the publication of this open letter, the always anti-Trump and sometimes right-of-center Foreign Policy was given to vapors as it digested “this piece of appalling partisan invective” (here)  It came out with a strong editorial that took the former flags to task, even accusing them of being unpatriotic, and declared that the “open letter by former officers calling the president a ‘Marxist’ dictator is a greater threat to US democracy than the ouster of Liz Cheney.”

The FP mavens even went so far as to accuse these civilians of having “violated the norms of their profession and contributed to the erosion of healthy civil-military relations in the Untied States.”  Apparently they missed that part of their political science studies that taught them when and where members of the American military are to remain non-partisan.  The strictures when on active duty fall away once their military careers are over and they re-enter civilian life.  Our country’s history is full of episodes of former military officers becoming quite partisan after their service terminated – at least five of them even became presidents, hundreds have served in partisan elected offices, and thousands more let their subsequent partisan voices be heard in the public square.

To FP and like-thinkers, these former officers “are now doing their level best to undermine (the Constitution) and, in particular, the crucial principle of civilian control.”  As you read the flags’ open letter, you will see that they do none of what their leftwing opponents accuse them.

Equality vs Equity

George Rebane

The latest socialist bamboozle is the Democrats' new declaration that America is now more racially divided than it has been for years, and what we now need to fix our society is to pass new laws and regulations to instill equity across the land.  Forget about equality, we’re now told that is a white supremacist cum racist term and concept.  From here on out equity is ‘where it’s at’.  So, what’s the difference?

It turns out the difference is not only big, but requires a very large government, which in turn requires a much greater collection of tribute to bring about nationwide equity.  Part of the big bamboozle is how our leftwing propagandists demonstrate the difference between equality and equity using the graphic below.

All this equity business is being built up to stamp out racism and white privilege.  Pew Research has found that the “public has negative views of the country’s racial progress; more than half say Trump has made race relations worse.”  (more here) What evidence does the average person have/cite that makes him believe that, while the rest of the world’s poor and ‘people of color’ consider that notion to be utterly false (aka bullshit) as attested by their heroic attempts to get into America.  The ‘evidence’ provided the average American has been a steady 24/7 drizzle of racist propaganda from the lamestream as part and parcel of serving up a constant anti-Trump diet for the last five years.  Sadly, the critical thinking skills of our hoi polloi are of bottom-of-barrel quality.

An obvious aspect of the above picture of equity as it concerns wealth redistribution is that their scheme keeps the amount of wealth constant – you just reallocate the existing boxes.  A more complete definition of equity includes the dictum of equal outcomes – equal opportunity is not sufficient because that then requires differential effort to achieve equal outcome.  And a fundamental tenet of socialists everywhere is that enabling the poor and ignorant to compete will tend to make them more independent and accomplished, and less needy of socialist succor.  For the success of socialism, best to keep them on the plantation and be seen as their only reliable source of life’s necessaries.

Scattershots - 12may21 (updated 14may21)

George Rebane

Online cheating at all time high (here).  Getting someone else to do your assignment or take your test is a big business in the current epoch of remote learning.  Students cite the difficulty in learning anything in the remote and virtual presentations of material they are offered.  Others say that the stress level to achieve today is higher than ever.  Both reasons seem to justify cheating by hiring online ‘tutors’ to do their work.  Online cheating is very hard to detect, and everyone believes that what was put in practice during the C19 pandemic will be continued in the new post-pandemic ‘normal’.  Combine this with the already crap for curriculum that unionized public school teachers deliver, and the future for the next generation of ‘educated’ workers looks very dim, … and what does that do for America having to compete in international markets and maintaining leadership in defense technologies?  All this is being brought about in an environment of classroom chaos tolerated more than ever in the name of ‘racial equity’.  (more here)

Everyone is testing Biden on the world stage, and so far he continues to fail every test.  As most of us predicted last year in these pages, Bumblebrain as president would be subjected to a battery of international ‘crises’ as soon as he was sworn in.  And true to form, every bad guy on the geo-strategic stage is now taking advantage of the American president renown for his absolute ignorance of how the world order works as attested to his record of past failures in assessing international events and problems.  Bumblebrain has surrounded himself with a remarkable cadre of limp-wristed policy makers and enforcers who have garnered no respect from our allies and antagonists (e.g. note how Alejandro Mayorkas SecDHS continues to deny the border crisis and push the administration’s Big Lie that “the border is secure”).  The likelihood for a major conflict and/or setback on the world stage increases daily.

Almost all economists cannot make useful predictions of economic behavior and events.  My view of economists, especially those professing quantitative models and more so those of socialist leanings, has been justifiably dour for most of my adult life.  Today these know-nothings are especially in demand by the Dems and the Biden administration to sprinkle some progressive pixie dust on the country’s path to ever more comprehensive socialism.  But as usual, they make huge errors that would be egregious in any public forum attended by an informed and numerate population.  That being far from the case, the current cadre of economists are free to continue their nonsensical blatherings without harming any one but America’s taxpayers.  The most recent example being their prediction of a million new jobs for April that turned out to be less than one fourth that number. (more here)

Anybody know what Trump did that was unconstitutional?  The Dems and their lamestream lackeys repeat that charge daily in their desperate attempts to divert attention from their own anti-constitutional proposals and policies.  Today the list of the most egregious anti-American activities of the Dems is headed by their utter abandonment of border security and their promotion of HR1 in Congress.  The latter’s provisions are based on enormous lies and cynical assessments of our national elections and the country's state of affairs in general.  Their intent is to bring the nation’s elections under federal control, in distinct contravention of our Constitution’s prescriptions.  True to their rampant road to socialism, HR1 would destroy the federalism under which the several states conduct their elections. (more here) Central planning and control über alles.

CDC, NIH, WHO, …, all of them have shown how politicized science can mismanage responses to the Covid pandemic at all levels of government.  The potpourri of pronouncements from such agencies over the last year have been all over the map, and continue to this day.  Their main function has been to let politicians establish and extend illegal, unnecessary, and harmful public policies, the only function of which is to reduce individual liberties and expand the establishment of a powerful centralized government.  The latest such revelation (which is not news to most RR readers) is CDC’s lying about the C19’s outdoor transmission rate which enables politicians to double down on social distancing and mask mandates.  These substantive big lies have been enthusiastically backed by the Dems and trumpeted daily by their lamestream media.  Their impact on the nation’s economic health and forms of transforming governance will be studied for decades by free-thinking historians.  Government historians have already written this history and incorporated it into the nation’s school curricula.  (more here and here)

[14may21 update]  Masks still required for the vaccinated frequenting crowded spaces.  So can someone from the vaunted ‘party of science’ explain how the immunizing and prophylactic properties of the vaccine diminish when the vaccinated walk into one of these crowded space?  The CDC failed to expand on that point.  Even David Leonhardt of the NYT penned a critical commentary of the CDC (here) about its baseless, fluid, and science-free face mask mandates. (H/T to reader, and more here, here and here)

Covid, the third greatest killer in the land?  This little stat is being purveyed perhaps to justify the mostly insane response policies that have been recommended and implemented by government agencies and jurisdictions over the last year.  Our own Don Rogers (Union publisher) writes today – “Some of us also learned folly, depression, grief, though these were not nearly so widespread nor the disease so deadly as at first feared. Still, it is widespread. It is deadly. It is the third-leading cause of death in America, right behind cardiac disease and cancer whether you count by diagnosis or annual deaths above average. It is real.”  Such naked reporting overlooks C19’s role as the stand-in grim reaper for the elderly and/or infirm who were statistically on death’s door with or without the pandemic.  Some malady was going to take these people in any case, and it turned out to be a dreaded disease that had little if any measurable effect on the mortality rates of the young and younger.  C19 was able to rack up its score and place third this time only because of its (not so exceptional) virulence and some wrong-headed and random response policies.  But writing reports which make the lightly-read reader believe that now we have permanently ensconced a new third-place killer is both misleading and wrong.  All that such journalism does is perpetuate continued and docile acceptance of population control policies, no matter how ill-advised.

In a country of wimps and wooses

George Rebane

We’ve been on travel over the last couple of weeks, doing a ‘southeast’ tour that started in Washington DC and worked its way down the coast to Miami, and then up the gulf coast visiting friends along the way.  We are currently in New Orleans and will finish in Houston after seeing our niece and her family in San Antonio (another set of California expatriates).  There is a lot to report on what we’ve seen in all the states we’ve been in, especially as it comes to how the country continues its pandemic response.  The bottom line of all that we’ve witnessed is that 1) there is no consistency in what people are doing and 2) the state-to-state public policies.  How/when/where people wear masks and socially distance varies all over the place.  No one seems to be sure of anything, except that they must comply to whatever insane diktats of their governor or mayor they believe to be in effect.  I am sad to report that in the large we Americans are a bunch of subservient wimps and wooses demonstrating over-abundant cautious behaviors - timid, compliant, and confused - that were more appropriate to serfs than a population of informed and independent minded citizens of a free country.  That kind of responses the Left appears to have successfully beaten out of us – ‘I don’t know why I’m doing it other than following orders.’  

Neil Patel of the Daily Caller is one of several national journalists who observes the same degradation of our citizens, and in his ‘Masks In Cars — What’s Behind America’s COVID-19 Insanity?’ writes –

If you wanted to teach a class on how to cause confusion and distrust, you would follow the U.S. government’s coronavirus playbook. A lot has been written about the historically low levels of trust Americans have in their leaders and institutions. There’s been less analysis on what happens when a government has no faith in its own citizens. We are seeing the results today. From the start of the pandemic, health authorities have chosen gamesmanship over honesty. This has resulted in muddled and inconsistent messaging from national leaders. The end result is a broken country of citizens at one another’s throats. Mask fights, deboarding flights and, of course, the crazy people driving around alone in their cars with masks on all stem, at least in part, from a government that refused to treat Americans like adults who could handle the truth.

Scattershots – 21apr21 (updated 1may21)

George Rebane

In a democracy it's never the minority, but always the lightly read majority that votes in the tyrant.

“… scientific evidence supporting facemasks’ efficacy is lacking, adverse physiological, psychological and health effects are established.”  So reports our NIH here.  And it’s federal law that you have to wear a face mask during your entire flight when traveling.  Another righthand/lefthand confusion by government that no liberal in the land notices as they back more and more things an ever larger government will do to us.  The rest of us see it for what it is – perennially expanding state power and control.

Rebane’s “far right ideology” continues to be a characteristic of my political demeanor that is oft cited, yet unsubstantiated, by local liberals.  Now don’t get me wrong, I may have no problem being characterized with that label if I or my detractors knew the tenets of a far right ideology, tenets which I share as demonstrated by my published credo and extensive oeuvre of socio-political commentaries.  I am truly interested in getting some liberal of sufficient intellect to offer up a cogent list (it doesn’t have to be long) of evidence that places me in their concept of the far right of our political spectrum.

[1may21 update]  Not one of our leftwing worthies would/could? step up to the plate and give even one substantive example of my ‘far right’ attributes.  This, of course, speaks to the larger problem shared by our semantically simplistic Left.  They have no idea what are the definitions of the everyday words they use, like  ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘white nationalist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘rightwinger’, …, and now ‘far right’.  To them it is all part of the approved narrative passed to them from their thought leaders – it’s completely acceptable in their circles to simply parrot, as long as you parrot the proper words.  And speaking of semantically simplistic, to them such terms as ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’ have binary meanings.  If a person or country does not explicitly subscribe to ALL the attributes that define a socialist, then neither he nor the jurisdiction is socialist.  The same goes for socialism; it’s all or none – nothing is seen to progress toward socialism until its final attribute is in place and verified.

The Futility of Searching for Common Ground

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Race Theory and the March of Marxism

[CRT is the most putrid piece of anti-American pedagogy to infect our institutions in at least the last 100 years.  Thanks to the Democratic Party, it is now rampant as it metastasizes the minds of our lightly read neighbors, products of schools that for years have focused their students on America’s sins.  Today CRT is being rapidly incorporated into California’s public schools, government agencies, and politically compliant corporatist enterprises.  Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo recently gave a speech at Hillsdale College on ‘Critical Race Theory: What it Is and How to Fight It’ which was published in the March 2021 Imprimis.  It is the most cogent, clear, and concise description of CRT and its current spread across our land.  It is reprinted here by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  gjr]

Christopher F. Rufo

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

Quo tendimus? (updated 20apr21)

George Rebane

[My ‘Farewell Unity’ commentary was also published in the 3apr21 Union (here). Its lengthy comment stream made clear again that most liberals had trouble understanding my proposition for finding common ground.  Nevertheless, the piece has since then garnered considerable interest.  This week the newspaper printed on separate days not one, not two, but three op-ed columns by liberals delivering most revealing critiques of the future Americas desired by both sides – ‘Path to unity in America’(13apr21) by Elliot Schneiderman, ‘A point of near unity’(15apr21) by Paul Hauck, and ‘Finding Unity in America’(16apr21) by Nory Fussel.  When “retired scientist” Schneiderman took me to task, I responded with the piece below, prematurely, it turned out, since I was not aware of the subsequent op-eds by Hauck and Fussel.  I address the latter two in the addendum to this post.  Perhaps all this interest provides hope that the conversation toward unity, which I outline below, will start here or elsewhere.  20apr21 update - an edited form of this commentary was published here in the 20apr21 Union.  More here.]

I was halfway heartened to read ‘left-leaning neighbor’ Elliot Schneiderman’s 12apr21 ‘Path to unity in America’ response to my 3ap21 ‘Farewell Unity’ column.  It appears both of us support a future America that is persistently hailed by our Right, and seldom if ever described by our Left.  In fact, Elliot takes exception to the neo-Marxist future that I describe, and the one to which the current administration and the Democrat leadership publicly subscribe.  These disparate visions of America are well documented by the commentariats of both sides.  Elliot writes -

George quite wrongly states that “our neighbors on the left work feverishly for” this Marxist global government world view. I’m on our country’s left and will have none of it, I don’t personally know a single American that would ascribe (sic) to it, and I am convinced that the vast majority of our country’s left do not ascribe (sic) to it.

This remarkable view from the Left is easily explained by the recorded half-century decline of our progressive schools that have assiduously omitted any mention of such historic realities.  And it is easily confirmed through conversations with a sampling of your left-leaning neighbors, especially the ones cited by Elliot.

Scattershots – 11apr21 (updated 17apr21)

George Rebane

The attack on Georgia’s new voter law is turning out to be a national disgrace.  The evidence is clear – it is not the launch of Jim Crow 2.0, neither does is suppress black voter turnout.  As many have shown, in the 40 states that have similar election laws, the ratios of black voter turnouts have been higher than those of white voters.  Yet the Biden administration is doubling down on their Big Lie about Georgia, with all of it being picked up and echoed by the lamestream.  Most revealing is how the corporatist CEOs are falling in line to support the leftwing narrative.  As always, the Democrats’ African-American constituents don’t have a clue about any of this, and continue their plantation lives blaming the whole thing on ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’.  

JFK was elected on an historical Big Lie – the non-existent 1960 “missile gap”.  In fact, the missile gap did exist, as subsequent post-USSR revelations attest, but was definitely in favor of the US.  Nikita Khrushchev had very few long-range ballistic missiles that could hit North American targets, and for that reason he got Castro to permit him to secretly station Soviet mid-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.  As history has shown, it was basically dumb luck that kept the world from a global nuclear exchange, and not anything that Kennedy and his military planners did back in October 1962.  (more here)  LBJ followed suit four years later with his own Big Lie about the Gulf of Tonkin ‘attack’ that got us bigtime into Vietnam.  The upshot of Vietnam was Jimmy Carter’s military standdown that invited Brezhnev into starting WW3 in Europe.  The Soviet leaders knew that the USSR economy was on its last legs in being able to maintain par force with America and NATO; for the communists in 1980 it was now or never.  And it was Reagan who convinced Brezhnev and then Gorbachev that ‘never’ was their best option.

The Left's response to the above Big Lies is to point at Bush2 getting us to invade Iraq after 9/11 because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.  That was true because Saddam used his Soviet-era WMDs on his own people.  There are a number of explanations as to why none were found when the Americans finally got to search the country.  (e.g. where did Syria subsequently and suddenly get the WMDs to use on its people?)  But Bush2 didn't tell a Big Lie, because both our and EU intelligence sources confirmed the existence of Iraq's WMDs, and all western leaders accepted that report even if they all didn't agree on how to respond.  This debate continues to this day.

[12apr21 update]  Biden one-ups Obama’s “fundamental transformation” with his insane program to erase America as we know it.  Kevin McCullough writes (here) – “He’s attempting to undo American accountability in elections through his support of HR1. He’s attempting to undo our economic foundations with massive printing (read that: devaluing) of our currency. He’s attempting to destroy free enterprise and job growth with coming massive tax increases. He’s attempting to take away individual liberties with proposed mask mandates, and desired lockdowns. He supports any attempt to end the Senate filibuster—in order to push through horrific laws by the thinnest margins ever attempted. He’s attempting to overwhelm our security at our borders by encouraging 100’s of 1000’s of unverifiable persons of unknown origins to cross our borders without scrutiny nor penalty. He wants the police weakened. He is pledging to take guns away from law abiding owners. And he wants to pervert the justice system so dramatically that the Constitution becomes unrecognizable.”

[14apr21 update]  The typo in my ‘Farewell Unity’ column in the 2apr21 Union continues to draw the ire of local liberals, most recently today’s letter from a Ms Rachel Howard (here).  I had already posted the correction in these pages and on Union’s online edition, but that has made no never mind to our progressive neighbors.  What really needs pointing out repeatedly and often is how the Left responds to analyses like mine regarding the tragic condition of our national unity – Ex uno pluria.  For most of them, understanding that the first step toward a common ground that can launch a productive conversation requires understanding each other’s desiderata for our country’s future, this is an intellectual bridge too far.  Anyone who posits such a requirement by identifying potential targets of a transformed America is immediately vilified for, of all things, seeking to sow the seeds of disunity.

[17apr21 update]  Here’s a hit to The Union for bending over backward to tolerate broad-based bullshit, no matter how off-the-wall it is.  ‘Cancel culture and voting rights’ by Richard Stormsgaard gives us this sample – “Reagan ridiculed the concept of good government as advocated by Lincoln and Eisenhower. Gingrich wanted to flush government down the tub. Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser, advocated blowing up all of society. And by 2018, Donald Trump regularly attacked national security and military leaders for resisting his efforts to subdue all branches of government to his personal whims. … In all other Western liberal democracies, conservatives, liberals and laborites generally pursued the common good from their different perspectives, as was the case in the United States prior to the Reagan revolution.”  The remainder of his outpouring is an equal barrage of partisan allegation free of a single supporting statement that would give some substance to his naked claims.  And then there’s the revelation by another leftwing worthy, Jon Schwarz, telling his followers (here) that we’ve had it all wrong about which side enforces political correctness.  All along it’s really been the Republican Party and the Right.  I guess we’ve had a hard time seeing it through the lying lens of their lamestream media that continues denying the daily proto-Marxist machinations of the Democratic Party whose constiuents pull down historical statues, riot, loot and burn, and erase the names and history that don’t measure up to their narrative – i.e. political correctness.  Examples from the Right seem to be missing.

Corrupt climate change calamities.  Working separately, two prominent climate scientists have again assembled a considerable amount of science to expose the history of global warming hysteria, and its current expansion on steroids promoted and pushed by Biden Big Lie Machine.  I’m cobbling together the recent writings of Drs Steven Koonin of Caltech and Richard Lindzen of MIT.  Climate change was becoming a bit long of tooth as the raison d’etre for fundamentally transforming America into a socialist autocracy.  Along came Covid, a godsend on steroids for the Left’s command/control central planners.  But now those damn vaccines are making the people have wrong ideas again about risk and their freedoms, so it’s time to crank up the global warming catastrophe again.  The works of Koonin and Lindzen are timely calmatives that will be fiercely attacked in the lamestream and by every Democrat politician who can find a mic.

Socialist Semantics

“When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just when and what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things. ' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.”  (With apologies to Lewis Carroll.)

George Rebane

We talk past each other because we share no common logic, reasoning, history, facts, …, and yes, no common semantics.  One side demands to know what words mean during a dialogue or debate, the other side wants to avoid such revelations at all costs.  This has been clear since at least the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, because for the Left history is in a constant state of political and ideological revision.  The role of any given word today may have to change markedly tomorrow when responding to unforeseen events or opportunities.

We recognize socialism as one of the prominent limbs of collectivism, a form of that overarching ideology that readily can morph into communism or one of many less-formalized forms of totalitarianism.  The common denominator of all these is that the individual derives value only to the extent that he succumbs to and supports the regime in power, all others are cast into various groups of traitors, seditionists, insurrectionists, and other repressed kinds of ‘counter-revolutionaries’.  Today in America we see and already experience harbingers of such class categorizations by the ascendant Left and their lamestream media.

As examples, none on the Left can or will give the public any stable or even conditionally stable definitions of their workaday pejoratives like ‘racist’, ‘nationalist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘fascist’, ‘deplorables’, ‘sexist’, ‘misogynist’, … , and terms such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white nationalism’, ‘equality’, ‘equity’, ‘racial preference’, … , and of course ‘sedition’ and ‘insurrection’.

Such use of slippery semantics by the Left occurs at all levels of our society ranging from the federal government all the way down to our local leftwing worthies who comment on RR.  Examples of these abound.  On one end, we refer you to today’s attempt by Biden to end-run Congress on gun control and the Second Amendment collected under the undefined rubric of ‘gun violence’.  Any reasonable view of his “six initial actions” (here) reveals that nowhere does he define or point to definitions of such key terms as ‘ghost guns’ and ‘assault weapon’, or the scope of his proposed nationalized ‘red flag’ law.  Everyone on both sides knows that the objective here is to enable another major ratchet on restricting the constructive use and ownership of firearms, therefore definitions always need to be malleable.

On the local level a leftwing worthy continues to echo (here) the Left’s Big Lie that the 6jan21 storming of the Capitol, enabled by an incompetently led and permissive cadre of Capitol Police, was an “insurrection”.  I countered with my habitual attempt to uncover the Left’s pernicious use of language by citing the classical definition of insurrection.  (See also the RR ‘Glossary & Semantics’ and ‘A Conservetarian Credo’.)  The only response that our leftwinger could muster was to accuse me of hiding behind semantics, the correct use of the English language – to wit, “… semantics, the weakest of all responses to be used only when you have nothing else to say.”  There was no need for anyone to say anything more in that case than to point out the man’s egregious use of language.  Yet, at a loss for a wider access to vocabulary, he then demanded what I would call the 6jan21 event at the Capitol.

Well, since there was no evidence whatsoever of any preparation or execution of actions to overturn our sitting government and replace it with one waiting in the wings, I would call the penetration of the building a spontaneous civil disobedience, a mob action, or even a directionless and chaotic riot by a frustrated crowd.  To confirm this, the investigations launched in response have not been able to find evidence for anything more sinister and/or organized that occurred on that day. Yet it was an event which daily our Democrats still attempt to inflame and divide Americans by equating it to the 7dec41 and 11sep01 ‘days of infamy’.  Here we see one more subversion of semantics by the Left, as they broadcast propaganda at its best and most effectively against intellectually defenseless people burdened by being educated in progressive public schools.

Scattershots – 7apr21 (updated 10apr21)

George Rebane

Crime rate spikes ignored by Democrats and their local lackies.  Notice that no one on the lamestream commentariat or in the Dem leadership has even breathed of the massive increases in serious crimes that have occurred across the country in response to their butt stupid policies to cut back on police support, both financial and political.  (google 'crime rate spikes')  All of this is part and parcel of the national decay that leftwing anti-Americans of all stripes are vigorously promoting.

Only the Dems’ leadership and the country’s Right know that the Dems’ progressive policies are designed for a socialist future.  The Left’s rank and file remain eternally bamboozled as to where their leaders are taking us.  They literally have no clue as to the nature of our intended destination (e.g. note leftwing commenters here and under my ‘Farewell Unity’ column in The Union).  I keep being told that there is no evidence that any such policies exist and/or are publicly promoted and planned.  These lightly read innocents have been taught to deny all such evidence, be it crime rates, border crisis, climate change regulations/taxes, infrastructure stimulus, or extended Covid lockdowns.  Now they upped the game with their characterization of the new Georgia voting law as being the return to Jim Crow, and then continuing to maintain that chorus of lies even in the face of broadcast side-by-side comparison of Georgia to other states, and the collected participation stats from past elections.  Their leadership knows that their constituencies are too comfortable to remove their heads from their eternally shady orifices (example here), so they and the lamestream keep repeating everything, only just a little bit louder.  Note also the op-ed participation of our local practitioners of fair and balanced journalism.

[10apr21 update]  At Crabb’s Colloquium there’s a lively debate about who in Georgia can offer water etc to people standing in line to vote (here).  There the local lefties all echo the lamestream in claiming that the state’s new voter suppression law contains a blanket prohibition for anyone offering such succor, and is not limited to those wishing to solicit or impact votes.  The legislators who drafted the law and the country’s Right all interpret the law correctly as intended, and claim no such prohibition absent solicitation for votes.  Our local Left instantly claims that anyone (like me) who expresses such erroneous thoughts is either ignorant or lying; for them there are no other alternatives.  For them ‘E pluribus unum’ always means that from the many other available and reasonable possibilities on any issue, there is only the one possibility which corresponds to the Left’s narrative du jour.