Rebane's Ruminations

Kamalanomics = Bidenomics on steroids

[This piece was published in the op-ed section of the 4sep24 Union as one of their Other Voices columns (here).]

George Rebane

Since ‘smarts’ and ‘poor’ don’t always correlate well, the financially burdened will again suffer the most if and when Kamalanomics kicks in and amplifies the terrible mistakes of Bidenomics.  From the Democrats’ published record Kamalanomics is a socialist-ingrained misinterpretation of economics that views wealth creation as a zero sum game in which businesses, entrepreneurs, and the wealthy are characterized as “corporate monopolists” and “oligarchs” – in short, they only take money from the middle and lower income classes which must then be forcefully redistributed by government.

As President Obama assured the country’s successful entrepreneurs who do create wealth and provide jobs for the rest of us, “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”  For our progressives it is always the wise and munificent hand of government that actually does the business building and job creation.  Absent government intervention, to our leftwing all else is “trickle-down economics” where some wealth eventually and grudgingly dribbles down an uneven playing field to those less fortunate.  And, of course, the playing field must then be continuously leveled to “grow the middle class out” through still more laws, regulations, fees and higher taxes on the wealth creators to insure that the “greedy billionaires” and “well-heeled” pay their “fair share” in amounts known only to government bureaucrats.  The inevitable result is that everyone’s cost of living goes up and quality of life diminishes.  Check the government data on the impact of Bidenomics over the last 3.5 years.

The exact opposite happened under President Trump according to the Dept of Commerce and IRS.  His deregulation measures and tax cuts resulted in very low inflation and gave rise to 70% faster real wage growth that specifically benefitted our Hispanics and blacks as compared to Obama’s eight years of government-shackled historically slow growth.  However, during Democrat administrations the prime beneficiaries of job growth are new legions of government workers who in the large add sand into the gears of the nation’s commerce and GDP growth.  Biden’s claimed recent creation of 15 million jobs overwhelmingly consists of government hires and those of the inevitable recovery from rebounding COVID job shutdowns.

Now on the road to “happiness and joy” President Harris promises to control inflation under Kamalanomics through policies such as:

• National price controls on goods and services that inevitably result in shortages, distribution disruptions, and lower quality goods and services;
• Nationalized (single payer) healthcare – unsustainable wherever practiced while reducing access and services;
• A 66% increase in corporate taxes always paid for by customers through higher prices and by workers with lower wage gains;
• Capital gains tax will increase to income tax levels (39%+) that will inhibit and distort America’s investment landscape;
• Destruction of small businesses by taxing owners for unrealized capital gains – cash they don’t have and to get they must liquidate their businesses;
• Digitizing the dollar (falsely promoted as “crypto currency”) so that our money’s future as a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account will be strictly monitored and controlled by government diktat and the Federal Reserve. (Kiss gold ownership goodbye.)  For all intents and purposes private property will then be no more (recall that you own something ONLY to the extent that you can dispose of it as you wish).

Liberals don’t understand how human (e.g. investor) behavior is impacted through reducing reward while increasing and/or maintaining risk.  They believe that tax rates don’t impact risk taking.  Progressives demonstrate daily that they have no idea about the sources and levels of risk encountered in starting a business.  Moreover, liberals have no inkling that increasing taxes from their already current highs will actually decrease government revenues – Democrats believe that simply imposing higher tax rates on the private sector will automatically bring in more money.  And that lowering taxes (yes, even on the ’rich’) have never resulted in higher government revenues or increasing our quality of life.

In sum, we have already been told enough about the kind of democracy and freedom that Democrats controlling Congress and the Executive will deliver under Kamalanomics – just look at the countries with all-encompassing autocratic central governments.

STEM education and careers – not for everyone

George Rebane

Our socially destructive culture has long done a number on students with the extraordinary capacity to study and make it in STEM careers.  Part of the socialist agenda for the US is to impress in the population a belief that we are fundamentally all equal, with all of us capable of anything as long as the state suppresses the bad angels of discrimination with which we, especially the whites, are burdened.  And to accomplish this we need to make sure that Billy and Jill grow up in an environment of mirror-fogging equity instead of merit-based equal opportunity in which today DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) is the chosen form of politically acceptable social environment.

Unfortunately, the realworld is fashioned on quite a different landscape where our capacities have developed differentially.  Today diversity is recognized, but in a highly qualified manner and under precisely and politically prescribed circumstances.  Diversity that leads to differential capacities to perform, especially in the cognitive areas, is not only rejected but also proscribed in some places by laws that may lead to incarceration.  Again, science confirms that in almost all dimensions that describe us we are created unique and develop unequally, and in some dimensions these differences are systemic and cannot be overcome by bending the twig according to the dictates of DEI.  

Nationally recognized scholar and political scientist, Harvard/MIT educated Dr Charles Murray, has written an illuminating essay about the extraordinary and special requirements for success in STEM education and subsequent careers.  His ‘The Roots of STEM Excellence - Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is a paramount goal.’ here in the 30aug24 WSJ will now be vilified by all the usual leftwing suspects bent on reducing America into a second-world country.  In this piece he continues reporting on research that established the human diversities we reported on in his previous work Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) which was equally attacked and rejected by the Left. (more here)  (I wrote a Union column on it at the time which could not be printed for reasons its then publisher took great pains to explain to me over one of our lunches.)

The basic thesis Murray presents is that success in STEM requires cognitive abilities that are relatively very uncommon.  The cognitive abilities demanded are present in only the top 0.01% or one in 10,000 people – it’s just the way the cognitive cookie crumbles.  The bottom line is that just being dedicated and working hard will not cut it as it does for almost all other professional pursuits.  It’s the equivalent of not being able to make it in the NBA if you’re short or in the NFL if you’re skinny and slow.  Not everyone has what it takes to make it in any desired career – the playing field is not level, and it was ever thus.  This is diametrically contra to what is told to our K-12 students in progressive public schools.

To nail the point and outline the problem, I will quote some paragraphs from the cited essay by Charles Murray.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence. They use “holistic” admissions algorithms that treat tested cognitive ability as just one of many desirable traits. That isn’t necessarily an educational disaster for the next generation of brilliant performers in the social sciences, humanities and nonacademic majors. They can develop their potential in an ordinary college or even without college. The STEM fields are different, for two reasons.

First, the raw cognitive demands are greater in STEM than other disciplines. People who are merely in the top few percentiles of overall cognitive ability don’t face insuperable obstacles in rising to the top of non-STEM fields given enough determination and hard work. Nothing in their college courses is impossible for them to learn if they try hard enough. That’s not true in STEM. Much of the advanced math required for performance at the top of STEM fields is literally impossible to learn for anyone without math ability deep into the top percentile. Determination and hard work can’t compensate.

The Kamala interview that wasn’t

George Rebane

Last night CNN’s prerecorded 18-minute interview with Kamala Harris, with attendant training wheels Walz, was a giant nothing-burger – a disappointment but not a surprise.  While Kamala was asked some decent questions, she predictably dodged all of them as did her partner in perfidy.  What galled me the most was how she was allowed to bullshit her way out of the question about her manifold and desperate flip-flops on policies she championed in 2019 and her new ones with which she now apes Trump.

Her response to this line of questioning by Dana Bash was that “My values have not changed.”  And I almost gagged when Bash allowed her to skate with that.  Bash’s next question should immediately have been, ‘That may be, but the whole country has witnessed you doing 180s on your previously championed policies, and it will be your policies and not some ephemeral values that will impact the American people.  On what new evidence did you base your policy pirouettes?’ – or something in that vein.  Kamala’s lame answer again confirmed the low opinion that Democrats have of their loyal, yet demonstrably and reliably ignorant, constituencies who regularly swallow such answers with nary a qualm.

This brings me to my general complaint about the dismal state of today’s journalism that primarily includes the conservative media like Fox News.  Starting with lead political anchor Bret Baier, none of them are either smart or quick enough to follow up Democrats’ stated allegations about Republicans, wrong-headed realities, etc with ‘Sir, you’ve just stated an unsubstantiated allegation to my question ‘On what did you base your claim that …?’.  Please tell us again on what evidence do you base this and similar allegations you have made.’  Always ask for evidence when offered allegations.

Such a follow-up question will inevitably expose bullshit, and may even lead to a more productive discussion.  Instead, our stalwarts of the Fourth Estate just calmly soldier on to their next question to receive a similarly dissembled response by the progressive pundit/politician being interviewed.  And in the end, the interview has again turned into a non-interview in which the devious interviewee’s non-responses were not even exposed.  We viewers (well, some of us) expect to receive such performances on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, … .  But having to regularly consume them on outlets that attempt to champion the Right is downright nauseating.

'Democrats’ Deception May Win the Presidential Election Again'

[This commentary by Gerard Baker, former editor and now editor-at-large of the WSJ, appears in the 27aug24 edition of the newspaper’s op-ed pages.  It succinctly nails a fundamental tenet of Rebane Doctrine numerously repeated in these pages over the years.  (“…, you can fool all the people all the time.”)  Since the publisher invites it to be shared on Facebook, I offer this respectfully purloined version below in its entirety; the original may be read here. gjr]

Gerard Baker

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo’s adage has been updated and adapted by his successors in the modern Democratic Party. The duality they present to voters either side of an election is a deception that has defined American politics and culture for the past 20 years.

As they campaign for office, they present a kind of idealized version of themselves to the electorate as mainstream Americans, seeking merely to bring a little unity and compassion to a fundamentally great country in need of reform. Once in office they act as if they have a mandate to remake a benighted country, to reorder an unjust system, to replace American exceptionalism with European social democracy, and to rewrite the nation’s values with the precepts of their cultural Marxism.

They campaign, to borrow the late governor’s taxonomy, in the poetry of Robert Frost. They govern in the prose of Herbert Marcuse.

Last week in Chicago we got the poetry, a Frostian pastoral of Democrats posing as regular Americans, honest toilers in a darkening landscape (of their own making, as they didn’t tell us). They propose only to enlighten with their benevolence.

I don’t mean poetry in the literal sense. With a few exceptions the quality of our political oratory is dire—and plumbed the usual depths last week. We have reached the point where even the actual poetry is prosaic, as the left’s unofficial poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, demonstrated with another of her recitations of platitudinous banalities and leaden progressive nostrums delivered in her trademark phony iambic meter.

The “poetry,” such as it was—Michelle Obama’s speech was the only moment of the week when the oratory came close to matching the ambition—was figurative, an attempt to paint colorful images of the promise of another Democratic presidency.

Its centerpiece was the semifictional self portrait of the presidential candidate herself. In her own biography-heavy, substance-light acceptance speech, Kamala Harris presented herself as that familiar image from popular story telling—“the happy warrior,” the all-American fighter for our nation’s finest objectives—the tough prosecutor who waged war on crime just as she will wage war on illegal immigration; the proud patriot, product of a classically diverse, American, immigrant family; the commander in chief, ready to face down America’s enemies abroad; the staunch friend of America’s allies—Israel, especially—unafraid to use the military’s “lethal” force in their support, as she explicitly reminded us.

This verbal illusion of American iconography was reinforced by the crowd’s chants of “USA! USA!” like ecstatic fans at the Olympics, and a waving sea of red white and blue “USA” placards.

But the poetry last week came also in the constantly retold personal narrative that was the real theme of the convention. The winsome second gentleman telling cute stories about gawky first dates and tasty brisket like something from the pages of a 1950s yearbook; saccharine testimonies to Ms. Harris’s innate goodness from childhood friends and professional acquaintances; above all, that Giant Middle American Cliché made flesh himself—Gov., sorry Coach, Tim Walz—practically pulling the high-school football playbook out of his back pocket and urging the nation to vote for him so he could go out there one more time and win just one for the Grifter.

Is anyone fooled?

The answer, I am afraid, is yes. Every time.

President Biden is only the most recent example. The lifelong centrist Democrat who campaigned as a regular Joe promising to do his best to heal a divided and damaged country in 2020, promptly became the vessel for a Bernie Sanders policy agenda, splurged trillions in expansive government spending and championed the left’s continuing cultural reformation of America. He prepares to leave office apparently convinced he belongs in the pantheon of great social reformers next to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Barack Obama reminded us in his speech how successful his own self-portrayal was in 2008 as the unifying figure who could bring cohesion and order to a nation battered from the chaos of war and financial crisis, but who again governed, thanks to rigid internal party discipline, to implement an agenda that produced seemingly irreversible shifts in the economic and social fabric.

Above all we were reminded how far Democrats managed to move the needle in government in their direction along the political spectrum by the appearance of those two aging icons from another epoch—Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Clinton’s presidency, which ended a little more than two decades ago, now looks to most Democratic activists like an exercise in political reaction. If many of its ideas were preached on a university campus today, they would probably get the speaker canceled.

Republicans also pitch themselves in campaigns as unifying centrists but in office they have too often lacked the ambition or determination actually to govern as Republicans. It is to his credit—and a reason he is widely loathed—that Donald Trump bucked that trend.

Does anyone doubt that a Harris presidency would continue the Democratic pattern of divergent pre-election promise and postelection reality? Will a President Harris more closely resemble Candidate Harris from last week’s convention than Vice President Harris from the last four years or Candidate Harris from 2019? If you think she will, then it isn’t poetry you’ve been reading. It’s a fairy tale.

Scattershots – 25aug24 (updated 28aug24)

George Rebane

62 since ’62.  We’re happy to report that today my sweetie-pie and I celebrate having been married since 25 August 1962.  We were both then undergrads (seniors) at UCLA.  Now it’s two children, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren later after a long and wonderful road with some inevitable miles unpaved.  Gott sei Dank.

Lies, more lies, and blatant lies.  Among other things, these campaigns will be remembered by all as having issue debates with little basis in reality.  The Repubs are still not weaned of their bombast and bravura when describing their own accomplishments, and the Dems are simply over the top.  Not a single one of their characterization of Trump’s and their own administrations comes anywhere near being factual when compared to the historical record published by the several federal agencies.  Voters who care are left to dig out their own takes on reality and the possible promised futures.  To this degree was it ever thus?  Not in my lifetime. (We await the debates.)

[28aug24 update]  Funny business in the polls.  Rasmussen reports (here) that the nation’s pollsters are exposing their leftward tilt by holding back recent polling data that shows Kamala’s convention bounce waning.  Their leftward lurch is such that “people are holding data or not releasing polls to leave Harris-favorable polling alive in the aggregate.  Why put a new poll out if you like the results you got last time?" 

Kamala’s Terrifying Speech

George Rebane

Kamala Harris’ speech at last night’s Democrat convention was terrifying in its unusually professional delivery and its absolutely vapid content.  That lady has surely learned to read a teleprompter.  But the scariest impact of her acceptance speech were the early returns of enthusiasm with which it was accepted by voters outside the convention center.

“The Vice President spoke with authority and admirable brevity (for) 37 minutes. … Kamala Harris introduced herself to the American public on Thursday, and her presentation was much like this week’s Democratic convention: well delivered, confident and optimistic, and mostly devoid of policy substance. Whether she can keep this up, unexplained and unexposed, for the next 12 weeks will determine whether she becomes America’s 47th President.”  This according to the 23aug24 WSJ (here).

But the real problem will be Trump and the Republican response between now and November.  Thomas Sowell’s warning is worth attending.  In his tempest fugit column (here) he admonishes “Republicans better get on the ball.  They haven’t made the case against Harris, (and) the clock is ticking.”

Instead of responding with “political jargon or snappy quips” wrapped in insults, the rebuttals should be a la Reagan, timely and in plain English.  “There are some Republicans today who seem to understand that. But they are not running in this year’s presidential election. Perhaps they may run in 2028. But there is such a thing as a country declining to the point of no return.  Four more years of disastrous Biden-Harris policies, at home and abroad, can take us past that fatal point.”

Bottom line, as they anticipated the 2022 ‘red wave’, the Republicans should never again underestimate the share of our fellow Americans who will swallow hook, line, and sinker the Democrats’ socialist swill.  Donald Trump does not once more need to demonstrate how he can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

America’s Downward Spiral – A Revealing Snapshot

George Rebane

Date Everything - Rebane Doctrine

In this election year which promises to be a political milestone (watershed?) two significant neo-Marxist messages from Democratic politicians blanketed the country yesterday.  Presidential candidate and VP Kamala Harris told the nation that her economic program (here) going forward would be based on government price controls in order to control inflation.  And Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA17) wrote an excellent article (here) in the 17aug24 WSJ contrasting his and VP candidate Sen JD Vance’s (R-OH) views on industrial policy.  Both progressive politicians cannot see America’s private sector making the country’s economy work without massive participation by the federal government that involves more regulatory controls, more directed subsidies, higher taxes on industry and ‘the rich’, and a heavily unionized workforce blessed with ‘living wages’ and price controls.

Rep Khanna’s piece is well written and very convincing to an audience mired in ignorance about economics, finance, human behavior, and the history of socialist governance here and abroad.  Unfortunately about two out of three Americans are so burdened as they attempt to make sense of the current daily tsunami of political punditry.  Khanna’s essay is both effective and impactive through the way he erroneously characterizes conservative thought, policies, and its ideological tenets.  He constructs excellent strawmen (i.e. lies) which are then readily demolished by his adroit wordsmithing.

One of the prime fallacies both Harris and Khanna promulgate is that government price controls actually work in managing a national economy to the benefit of its citizens.  Each presents that as an axiomatic notion of truth requiring no evidence to support it.  Central to their message to the benighted is that fixing prices does not affect supply and stifle economic growth.  The common thread from both politicians is that the Democrats have been and are the competent stewards of our economy who build factories and make jobs for main street.

No one of the Left understands any of the basic science of how nature manages complexity.  Their ideas about how complex economies work is based on a small trove of simplistic slogans and shibboleths that are demonstrably wrong.  And principles like ‘you cannot control what you cannot measure’ is also beyond their ken.  They still have no idea how primitive are our methods of collecting relevant, accurate, and timely economic data, and then using it to fashion information that would come close to supporting correct policy decisions made by a cohort of centrally controlling technicians.

As a coda to the above riff, I want to remind present day readers, most not all that interested in the view from my perch, that a prime motivation of this blog is to insert a collection of my observations into the great archive in the cloud – ‘the internet is forever’ – which may someday be dredged up by future data archeologists studying the mentality of the citizenry that allowed their great nation at its apex to go to hell in a handcart.

Scattershots – 16aug24 (updated)

George Rebane

The UK is on the threshold of totalitarianism.  To illustrate the devastating slippery slide that comes with socialism, one of Europe’s oldest democracies has now descended into prosecuting its citizens on the basis of thought control.  Not only is free speech in Great Britain’s past, but their hubristic bureaucrats promise to threaten foreigners outside their borders with extradition is they overstep the new restrictions on newly disallowed publicly expressed opinions. (here, here, and here)

‘Islam and the Future of the West’.  Islamophobia is a clearly warranted reaction to the long-standing writings and recently reinforced statements by leaders of trans-national Islam.  “Any reading of the Koran, as Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Sina, Ibn Warrak, Rebecca Bynum, and a host of other excellent scholars make abundantly clear, will reveal ayah after ayah commanding acts of grotesque violence against unbelievers. The reward for the martyrs who have been slain in service to Allah will be peace, loveliness, and virgins with pear-shaped breasts, as stipulated variously in Sura 44:45-55 and 78:31-36 of the Koran.” (more here) According to our neo-Marxists defending your culture against the promised and ongoing Muslim onslaught is ignorant and despicable racism.

“Inflation is down!” trumpet our lamestream media outlets.  NPR even coordinates its ‘news’ items with featured programming subjects in promoting this jaundiced view of the nation’s economy.  In their coordinated support of the Democrats’ campaign talking points, the Left’s lightly-read legions are spared the difference between ‘inflation level’ and ‘inflation rate’ in the constant cacophony they consume daily.  Contrary to what they experience in their wallets, they are led to believe that prices are actually going down in this Biden/Harris economy.

[16aug24 update] Dems move to red states.  The conspiracy to soil the remaining states not embracing socialism is in full swing.  There is now an organization called MoveIndigo -  MoveIndigo encourages Democratic flight to swing districts with Republican congressmen, often in swing states. Its goal is to “reset the balance in our country” and elect a more “representative” government. That’s doublespeak, but the group has also put it plainly: “It only takes a few Democrats moving to crucial toss-up districts . . . to take control of the House”—even to have “a profound impact on the Presidential race. (more here)  None of the migrating progressives are smart enough to ask what has made their selected red state so desirable compared to the shithole state they are abandoning, and moreover, what makes these leftwing double dummies think that the arrival  of more like them will not turn their new home also into the same kind of socialist quagmire they abandoned.

[update]  Georgia non-citizens registered to vote.  The Heritage Oversight project interviewed residents of a large apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia asking its residents 1) were they registered to vote, and 2) were they citizens.  14% answered that they were non-citizens who were already registered to vote. (more here)  With this kind of evidence of what is most likely happening to some extent all over the land, it was a very reasonable and legitimate request to Georgia SecState Brad Raffensberger by Trump to have their vote counts checked to discover more legal votes that may favor him.  There was never any demand to “overturn” the Georgia election.  Restricting voting to America’s legal voters is trumpeted as ‘voter suppression’ by our leftwing sleazebags, and their lightly read constituents lap up this ongoing lie.

Trump’s November Chances – 11aug24 update

George Rebane

This is a lament.  From his statements and recent – post Tim Walz – behavior it looks to me that Donald Trump has really gone off the rails and is headed for a massive defeat in November.  As the record of these pages confirms and given the available choices, I have been a qualified Trump supporter ever since he became the Republican nominee in 2016.  During the entire time I have been chagrined at his tendency for bombast, bravura, and exaggeration, especially when on the campaign trail.

Today, when finally presented with an ideal pair of very vulnerable opponents, and eight years of experience under his belt in how his off-track shooting from the lip has been received, he still pays no mind to the harm he does to himself and the Republican party by continuing on the same path.  And he is doing it proudly as he has declared to his audiences that he has no intention of changing his gratuitous personal attacks on anyone that happens to cross his mind while on the podium.

So now the country’s conservatives, capitalists, and small government devotees have to suffer through daily doses of free leftwing talking points served up to the lamestream media by Trump.  Their news stories and commentaries almost write themselves from the copy spouted by our former president.  Instead of focusing on the rich trove of Democrats’ lies and policy screw-ups from the Obama and Biden/Harris administrations, Trump continues to be the petulant third grader on the playground focusing on lurid descriptions of his opponents’ real and imagined personal shortcomings.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of his campaign is that he has no strong adult advisors in his inner circle who can tell him daily when he needs zip his lip.  It’s hard for me to believe he doesn’t have a cadre or even a small clutch of such people in his inner circle.  But it is clear that he is flying blind without the aid of such critical navigators.  Were such people to exist, we would by now have seen them resigning one-by-one as Trump continued to ignore their counsel.

Given this ongoing travail, my own assessment of his probability of winning in November started with a paltry 0.45 and eked up to 0.48 (here) after the assassination attempt.  But taking into account what has happened since, my belief in his chances for regaining the White House has plummeted to 0.22, or a bit more than one in five.  This new assessment accurately represents the dour mood that the Trump campaign has me in.

Scattershots – 4aug24

George Rebane

Kamala Harris is a DEI VP and now is a DEI candidate.  That was made clear when Joe Biden told the nation that his VP pick would be a “black woman”.  The lamestream media has now added that to their repertoire of Trump attacks for reminding the country of her qualifications for making Biden’s cut.  Of course, she was also a DEI office holder for all her previous positions before being anointed VP.  But now that progressive attribute has suddenly become tabu even as formerly compliant corporations are dropping DEI among their criteria for employment. The hypocrisy of the leftwing media is both unfathomable and unending.

The Project 2025 policy book was composed by Heritage authors many of whom were Trump cabinet members and advisors.  It mostly contains policy recommendations that conservatives believe.  One of Trump’s recent bevy of mixed messages – another one of his lipshots - is that he rejects P2025 in toto.  That is plainly not true, but it is just more grist for the Democrats’ mill in mischaracterizing what Trump proposes and what the document contains.  For example, being purveyed on the lamestream is the report that ‘90% of Americans’ are opposed to it.  That is a specious argument instigated by the Left’s media mouthpieces.  Ninety percent of Americans don’t know what P2025 is and much less what it contains; they are again just mouthing what the lying liberal outlets are telling them.

Vance’s cat lady remark - In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." (more here)  On its face the statement is true, and it’s also true upon deeper examination.  The lamestream’s actual attribution to Vance is that he claimed women and couples who have children are ‘worth more’ (to society) than those who are childless.  Well of course.  All other things being equal when comparing such cohorts, it’s not rocket science to acknowledge that our species would come to an end were it not for children being conceived, brought to term, and raised to adulthood, if for nothing else than to provide humankind continuity.  But such arguments are too deep to be pondered in the public square, and again advantage Left.

Climate Change Liars Unrepentant

George Rebane

As part of its overall evil intents for the future of America, the Democratic Party is comprised of the copious material liars on our political landscape.  Almost every pronouncement by their minions is refuted by the government’s own statistics ranging from inflation, the economic impact of the recent tax cuts, to border security.  However, their lies about climate change, upon which to base adoption of their destructive public policies, are almost certainly the most harmfully impactive on our quality of life.

In today’s WSJ internationally recognized climate researcher Bjorn Lomborg, of the Copenhagen Consensus and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writes ‘Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions’ in which he outlines some of the major lies that persist in the public mind through the daily efforts of Democrats, their lamestream media, and progressives in general.  Some examples –

• There is no extinction danger to polar bears. Since hunting them has stopped, their populations have surged.
• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is not being killed by rising temperatures, but instead has recovered itself to new record levels since the hurricane that damaged it in 2009.
• Small Pacific islands are not being swamped by rising sea levels, but instead are increasing in area due to natural processes involving the dynamics of old coral.
• “Killer heat wave” deaths are being misrepresented by a factor of 25. Their death rate has actually declined worldwide due to the rising prosperity provided by technology.  Cold kills 25 times more Americans, and that due mainly to our country’s climate policy boosted high energy costs.

Activists do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview. There is ample evidence that man-made emissions cause changes in climate, and climate economics generally finds that the costs of these effects outweigh the benefits. But the net result is nowhere near catastrophic. The costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies prevent each year.

Telling half-truths while piously pretending to “follow the science” benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.

Trumps November Chances – 25jul24 update

George Rebane

The Lip from the Hip has done it again.  With his 18jul24 convention acceptance speech he took a cinched November win and threw it back into a campaign maelstrom welcomed only by Kamala Harris and the Dems (and Putin and Xi).  My own immediate reaction to his convention performance was posted here, and since then literally every left and right commentator has agreed that Trump blew it.

Trump’s self-declared return to a barroom brawl mode of campaigning has put his road to the White House back in play, even with the likes of an unaccomplished opponent and grifter like Kamala as his opponent.  WSJ’s Dan Henninger summarizes her chances in today’s paper (here).

With a flawed candidate like Trump already problematic when he was running against Bumblebrain, on 15 June I did a little work in extracting my own assessment of Trump’s probability of winning in November (described here).  The result (0.45) was not promising.  Given all that has happened since – assassination attempt, enthusiastic Republican convention, reversion to rambling stump speeches, … - I redid my probability assessment, hoping against hope for a better outcome.  The resulting probability came in at slightly north of 0.48, not much of an improvement when considering the woulda/coulda/shouldas.

Given her documented far left ideology and promised public policy initiatives a Kamala Harris presidency would be cataclysmic for our republic.  And Trump’s loose cannon tactics promise to make the interval to November a real nailbiter.  Is there no one on his team of advisors with the courage and gravitas who can tell him to stuff a sock in it and give acting presidential a try?

Scattershots – 21jul24 (updated 22jul24)

George Rebane

Given the nature and extent of America’s ideological schism, all effective public policies should be made in the anticipation that this schism will endure.  Existentially we are no longer one nation.  Rebane Doctrine, 2024.

The mentality of collectivists – progressives, liberals, wokes, socialists, communists, neo-Marxists, … - ranges within a space anchored by insanity, cynicism, and evil. The evidence continues to pour in.  Today we hear leftwing commentators on lamestream media attempting to foster doubt that there was an actual assassination attempt on Donald Trump.  Their cynical cum evil proposals to their ill-informed audiences are that the blood letting was staged and/or was caused by some mysterious shards of broken glass exploding out of somewhere.

As expected, Bumblebrain is out and an even worse choice in Kamala Harris is now undemocratically foisted by the Dem elites as their new standard bearer. (more here)  But everyone knows Kamala will just be the next empty pipe to power for those who have been acting as the administration’s Star Chamber.  She will be a compliant conduit between the leftwing power brokers and the public policies they intend to implement, much like Joe Biden has been during his term.  From my perch I see the political landscape between now and November as a minefield for Republicans, especially Donald Trump.  There will be an opportunity to make countless politically destructive gaffs when shooting from the lip as the campaign really heats up.

[22jul24 update]  POTUS is NOT the hardest job in the world as any casual perusal of history will confirm.  In fact, POTUS may be the most fault tolerant job ever.  For how else do people with no executive experience and a woefully limited knowledge base perform more or less adequately – i.e. they didn’t start WW3?  Almost anyone who reads English can assume the position and make it through with on-the-job training that is amply available to a president.  Since FDR, consider the tenures of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Obama, and now Biden.

PJ Media is not a credible source of news and information due to its conservative outlook – so again posits one of our leftwing commenters after I cited it above in reference to the ‘undemocratic’ way that the Dems have hoisted Kamala to be their standard bearer.  What I always ask these liberal critics is for the evidence they have to support their assertion.  They can never provide any such backing for their gratuitous conclusion.  This is in opposition to conservatives dunning liberal outlets like NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS as willing shills of the Democratic Party publishing years of unrecanted lies to their audiences.  As evidence just consider their years of ongoing reporting on the Russian election interference, that the border is secure, onset of inflation, Trump instigating insurrection, FBI doctoring FISA evidence, Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation, Hillary’s paying for generating the infamous Trump memo, and on and on.  And now we know that the whole cadre of the country’s Left has been covering up and lying about the cognitive breakdown of Joe Biden which has been obvious to Americans during his entire term as POTUS.

Assassin’s Bullet Grazes Former President Trump

George Rebane

‘Political violence has no place in America’ was professed by tens of media mavens and history-light politicians immediately after Republican candidate Donald Trump almost bought the farm in Butler, Pennsylvania this afternoon.  Bumblebrain even went on the air to state that such an act was “unprecedented” and “totally unacceptable” in American history.  Au contraire.

Trump survived the event and was defiant with his fist in the air as he was rushed off the podium and into his waiting SUV.  Two rally visitors were not so lucky – one was killed in the ensuing exchange of fire between the assassin and the Secret Service, and another attendee was wounded and is in serious condition.  The assassin was brought down quickly by pre-positioned counter-sniper fire.

But to be clear about the historical precedents – violence is a long and well-established practice on the country’s political scene.  The number of successful assassinations over the centuries are many, and the number of thwarted attempts are countless.  This is not unusual in relatively free countries where people have access to firearms and other weapons, and is a price we pay for having the Second Amendment.  In tightly controlled autocracies where people are kept unarmed, assassinations still occur at a good clip, but it is the tyrant and his thugs who do the killing of undesirable political opponents, uncooperative journalists, and recalcitrant intellectuals.

Tonight most of America is thankful that President Trump escaped with his life.  Many of us have had trepidations over the last years about his open campaigning style which has continued to invite such attempts on his life, attempts that are nigh well impossible to guard against.  (In this incident the ‘secured boundary’ from beyond which the assassin fired was less than 200 yards from the podium.)  We will learn more about all this in the coming days.  But I venture to say that Trump’s chances for returning to the Oval Office increased significantly tonight.  Thank God he’s OK, and long may he wave.

Happy Independence Day - 2024

George Rebane

'Nuff said.

Culture Drives Reality

George Rebane

It is the unfortunate case that individuals can not only have their own opinions, but also their own facts that substantiate those opinions. – Rebane Doctrine

A person’s reality is a manifestation of his culture.  More specifically, an individual’s ontology or worldview of reality is, at a minimum, strongly influenced or maximally determined by the culture in which he was raised or has since adopted, and now lives.

This thesis has been argued by philosophers, historians, and psychologists for the better part of the last 50 years, and today goes a long way to explain the behaviorally cohesive cultural cohorts worldwide.  In America we have reverted into a strongly politicized polyglot of cultures (tribes?) whose diverse adherents no longer practice a common culture in the public square.  Instead, we take great pride in demonstrating to one and all our particular complement of unique behaviors which declare our cultural bona fides and tribe memberships.  And woe be it to anyone to dismiss, discredit, or discriminate against such behaviors as expressions of a sacrosanct culture whose dimensions include any combination of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.

Everyone has unique rights when operating under the obvious mantle of their culture, since all cultures are held to be valuable and of equal worth.  Actually, upon closer examination, some cultures have been and remain definitely worth more to humanity than others, especially if they derive from western or European cultures.

To illustrate the veracity of the above thesis, we can appeal to several examples that range from recorded history to current events from the present day.  We start by recognizing that one reality of human consciousness itself rose from a cultural transformation that reaches back to about 1200 BC (or BCE, if you prefer).  The late Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes gave a very convincing account of how consciousness, in the sense of the rise of the personal agency of I/me, arose in the middle east during the 400 years of the so-called Dorian Invasions (1200 – 800 BC).

In his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1990) Jaynes describes how ‘pre-Dorian’ people, who then lived nomadically or in small towns and villages, actually saw and interacted with their gods.  They recorded such occasions and incidents in their written records and graphic arts (e.g. murals and pottery).  From early youth their cultures taught them to see and hear such gods, and behave as the gods’ agents, essentially expressing little or no of what we today call consciousness or ‘free  will’ – in short, you did what the gods prescribed ‘in vivo’ or in your culture’s recorded scriptures/myths.  Personal decision making and its attendant stress were minimized or even absent from such people’s lives. (more here)

In the pre-enlightenment age even the most advanced western nations/kingdoms had populations that overwhelmingly believed in and interacted with witches and other agents of evil.  They actually ‘saw’ witches fly and cast hideous spells, and therefore felt quite justified in denouncing them for extreme punishments by the authorities.  These beliefs were cemented early on by the religious teachings of their culture.

In more recent times we have teams of cultural anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) who have encountered and studied primitive tribes with cultures that embed drastically different realities in their members.  An example of such a discovery occurred in the Papua-New Guinea highlands during the pre-war years.  There a tribe was discovered whose members believed that the world ended in the middle of a river on whose bank was their village.  They literally saw nothing of the other bank less than a hundred feet away.  Anthropologists visibly encamped on the other side were received as aliens emerging from a fog in their inflated dinghy.

A similar culture-induced reality was enjoyed by tribes on a neighboring island during the Pacific campaign of WW2.  The island had an airstrip for receiving cargo laden C-47 military transport aircraft.  To the natives these giant aircraft were bringers of never-before-seen wondrous things to enrich and expand their lives.  Not familiar with manufacturing processes, they believed “that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture had been created by spiritual means.”  And no matter how many times it was explained and demonstrated to them, they never saw the airplanes as mechanical things operated by humans – to them they were simply alive as large flying creatures.  When the war moved on and the airstrip was abandoned, the natives were bereft – the wondrous creatures stopped coming.  Their response was simple, they formed what became known as a ‘Cargo Cult’ whose members continued to maintain the landing strip, and built decoys in the shape of airplanes to attract more of these giant flying critters full of presents. The clear and demonstrated reality of the foreigners did nothing to change their culture-rooted alternate reality. (more here)

Neo-Marxism and Climate Change – the one-two punch

'The Death of Direct Democracy Has Been Understated', WSJ headline

George Rebane

The full court press of collectivist neo-Marxism in its progressive, woke, and Democratic Party versions pairs with the programmed hysteria of ‘Climate Change’ (nee global warming) as the two most significant and compelling worldviews being promoted across the globe by developed nations.  Both have now reached the heights of religion and actively reject any and all reasonable arguments to refute or falsify them – therefore both are ideologically and firmly anti-science.  Their maintenance in the public mind is through a steady and ubiquitous distribution of lies across the educational, entertainment, and news media.

A correspondent sent me a short piece (here) by Chris Martz on the current heatwave harassing the eastern part of the country.  Led by the notorious climate science high priest and master of the 'Hockey Stick', UPenn’s Dr Michael Mann, and his big lie du jour is again that such weather/temperature episodes are “unprecedented”.  Martz cites the four actual historically high June heatwaves that occurred in 1936, 1944, 1953, and 1988.  Nothing has matched them since, and he presents temperature data from several cities on the current heatwave demonstrating their non-sensational statistics.

If we take a slightly deeper look at just the four cited record-setting heatwaves, and treat them as Poisson arrivals (a correct and common approach to use with all kinds of sequentially occurring randomly independent events), then we calculate an arrival rate of 4 per 52 years or 0.0769 arrivals/year.  An even lower arrival rate can be argued if we extend the period covered by these four events to the present day, giving us the arrival rate of 4 per 88 years or 0.0455 arrivals/year.  Neither is exactly the blistering pace supported by the ongoing climate hysteria.

In fact, we can now use the well-known Poisson process formula for computing the probability that k = 0,1,2,3,… record breaking heatwaves should have occurred in selected time periods after the 1988 heatwave, given that the world was indeed getting alarmingly hotter.  (BTW, for the record my position on climate change remains anchored to the interpretation from the Copenhagen Consensus Center as proselytized by its president Bjorn Lomborg.)

So, without further ado the Poisson formula for the probability P(k) of k events in the time period in which arrival rate λ is calculated is simply P(k) = exp(-λ)*λ^k/k!.  For the 0.0769 arrivals/year rate we can examine the following 36 year period (1988-2024) during which time we would have expected an average of 36*0.0769 = 2.77 record setting heatwaves to arrive.

The graph below displays the calculated probabilities that at least the indicated number of heatwaves should have occurred in the last 36 years given that the climate process indicated by the recorded heatwave arrivals continues.  Of course, the argument made by the climate change calamatists is that things have steadily gotten hotter so that the arrival rate of record setting heatwaves should really have been increasing.  This would have upped the probabilities indicated in the graph.

As it stands, we should have had at least one additional record setting heatwave with probability 0.937 during this period, and we have had none.  This does not support the ongoing global propaganda of a rapidly warming earth.  (30jun24 more here)

The 27jun24 Presidential Debate

George Rebane

Tonight on CNN we had a trainwreck unsuccessfully disguised as a presidential debate.  The Democrats will never allow Joe Biden to debate Donald Trump again.  And on the off chance that they will, Trump will refuse to participate on humanitarian grounds.  In the interval, Kamala Harris please call your office, there are some people there who want to talk to you. (more here)

Inflation? Most people don’t have a clue.

George Rebane

Evidence rolls in daily that Americans in the large do not have a clue about what is inflation and how it affects their financial wellbeing and quality of life.  This wholesale ignorance is constantly being reinforced by our news media of all political colorations and the Democratic Party.  The egregious journalists mostly congregate on the Right since they have no hidden agenda to hide the meaning and impact of inflation today spawned by Bidenomics.

The confusion arises from the use of the single misleading ‘inflation’ to variously describe three distinct and separate attributes of inflation – inflation level, inflation rate of change, and the change in inflation’s rate of change.  (Mathematically these are known as simply the first three derivatives of inflation’s price curve – respectively the zeroth, first, and second derivatives.)  The figure below illustrates.

Today we hear all kinds of reports citing inflation numbers that totally confound the average American – ‘inflation was xx% under the previous administration’, ‘inflation is now higher/lower, ‘inflation is going up/down’, ‘inflation is slowing’, and so on.  What almost no one understands is that claims that 'inflation is going down' is a bald-faced lie designed to fool the light thinkers.  Whatever the current level of inflation - i.e. Biden's 9% increase in market prices (here) - it is already baked in.  You will continue paying them and they will NOT go down as long as demand increases and supply does not.  So Team Biden's propaganda that they are 'reducing inflation' (#1) is utter BS; even if they reduce the inflation rate (#2), the current level of inflation will remain and prices will still go up.

Nobelist Milton Freedman and his forebears long ago advised us that inflated price increases are always a monetary phenomenon in which the government ‘prints’ and releases more fiat money into an economy to chase the same amount of goods and services, hence prices increase and we call the whole thing inflation.  The overall impact of inflation has always been that prices only ratchet up (increase monotonically) over time, and consequently the dollar in your pocket inevitably buys less stuff tomorrow than it does today.  But that is only the beginning of the story of government misuses of inflation to abuse and steal from its citizens.  Historically, great empires have inevitably laid themselves open to collapse and/or invasion by diluting/cheapening its money to the point that people no longer want to use it as the medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of wealth.  Hence, the economy’s wealth generation grinds to a halt and tax revenues can no longer pay for implementing public policies including maintaining its sovereignty with secure borders and an able military.

The real story of inflation is much more opaque.  Inflation is really a multi-level tax levied by governments that can no longer openly increase tax rates, so instead the steal money from their own citizens.  Notice that over the years the general level of people’s wealth has not increased much, if at all.  To be sure, enormous wealth has been generated in our economy by the commercial/industrial sector due to the invisible hand of market capitalism and ever-present competition.  And along with that, the quality of life for the broad population has increased by the introduction and affordability of all kinds of new products and services generated by corporations and entrepreneurs to whom justifiably the overwhelming majority of the new wealth accrues, since they are the ones who successfully invest their own monies and undertake the risks such ventures demand.  In spite of that, a large share of the population still lives paycheck-to-paycheck and has precious little saved for discretionary spending, investments, or a rainy day.  Increasing their debt and succumbing to more government welfare is their only alternative.

Looking under the hood of our economy and taking note of how our government inserts itself to gather tribute from the unsuspecting masses, it becomes clear that it is Big Brother run by sleazebag politicians and their deep state bureaucracies that effectively and continuously scrape off any ‘excess wealth’ that may accrue to the unsuspecting on main street who are lulled by a constant stream of bread and circuses from our political betters and their elites.  The whole program of mollification begins with a public education system that guarantees our young will be carefully taught to believe in the largess of government and the evils of private enterprise.

Two years ago I presented RR readers with the chapter and verse of how all this perfidy is executed in the public square.  You can and should review ‘Inflation Tax – Silent Rape by Government’, it will put some scary meat on the bone of the above arguments.  Unfortunately the bottom line here remains immutably unchanged.  We witness no awareness of all this by our friends and neighbors – you have yet to see protesting throngs with pitchforks and torches demonstrating in front of government buildings across the land.  (Also check out this post's comment stream.)  No one is aware of what is being quietly vacuumed from their wallets by the various levels of government ranging from local to federal.  All is well, just reduce your carbon footprint and embrace DEI wherever it may next be introduced – behave yourself.

Scattershots – 10jun24 (updated 20jun24)

George Rebane

Government inevitably corrupts and/or badly screws up the projects it initiates in the public sphere.  This thesis has been a common RR thread for years and forms a basic tenet of Rebane Doctrine.  The 9jun24 WSJ has a short and succinct column, ‘Your Government at Work’ by Andy Kessler that summarizes this ongoing process of ineptitude.  And, of course, our government is not the only one charged; it is a common trait of all large bureaucracies operating without proper incentives and feedback.

Women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark didn’t make our Olympic team, it turns out, because she wasn’t diverse enough – i.e. white, straight, European, and all that.  The given bullshit reason was the claim that her fame would disrupt the historical somnolence with which women’s basketball has been received in the Olympics.  And all this in the face of multiple efforts to promote a more broad and enthusiastic reception of the sport’s distaff participation.  So now the public pushback has caused the sport’s political hacks to instate Clark as a first alternate in the event one of the twelve chosen can’t play.  Can you imagine the mentality of the jerks who made the decision to exclude her in the first place? (more here)

[11jun24 update]  Pelosi pleads pretermission about J6 security preparations for the Capitol.  Finally, the former Speaker admits that a mass protest with unknown consequences was long anticipated at the Capitol by both the DHS and the FBI for the Senate’s 6jan21 electoral vote certification.  Neither agency issued a timely intelligence report on this, and “Congressional leaders, including Pelosi, chose not to deploy the National Guard early over concerns of ‘optics’ amid 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots, according to a 2022 GOP report.”  Meanwhile, everyone including then President Trump got blamed for the Capitol breach, even though he was perfectly in his rights to encourage his supporters to protest the certification – there is no evidence that he directed the demonstrators to enter the building or do anything illegal. (more here)

[12jun24 update]  ‘Sports Should Unify, Not Divide Us’ writes Clay Travis in a compelling piece featured in the recent issue of Imprimis (here).  He again illustrates the deep evil that the woke Democrats have unleashed on the land – in this version another piece of established western culture targeted for destruction to achieve their dissolution of America.  And it boggles my mind to realize that these people walk and live among us as they do their dirty work while we remain ignorant and/or indifferent about the impact of their labors.

[13jun24 update]  Ignorance on parade.  In a recent Union Jo Ann pointed out the asymmetric street level responses of the Left vs Right when addressing public policies they don’t like.  As evidence abounds, the Left likes to riot, burn things down, and in general favor violence instead of more peaceful means.  Local leftwing worthy Daryl Grigsby writes in today’s Union (here) that my sweetie is totally wrong in her observation.  His cutting response alleges equity in that conservatives are “silent as election workers are harassed and threatened, promote divisive language, and see anyone seeking basic human dignity as Marxists.”  And, of course, J6 “was an attempt to burn down democracy”.  His intellectual coup de grace was citing the 1921 Tulsa massacre when white Jim Crow Democrats “burned down 1400 black homes and businesses, murdered over 300 African-Americans, destroyed the black business district, …”  Reaching back over a century and then missing the politics of his own white racist forebears is the best counter he can offer?  Point, set, match!

[20jun24 update]  Democracy on the block.  The Democrat sleazebags continue telling their know-nothing constituents that Trump and the Republicans will kill democracy in America if they get elected.  Meanwhile it's the progressives who now actively thwart democracy wherever they find it.  Check this that just came out of Sacramento.

America's Dystopia has Dawned

Dystopia has dawned – Trump convicted on all counts.  The greatest American travesty has happened in my lifetime.  I have seen my country slide from its heights of glory to the now confirmed beginning of its dark age from which recovery to its former self is unlikely.  With evil and corruption now firmly ensconced in our government, it is doubtful that my children will ever again witness America in its full promise as the shining city on a hill. (more here and here)

Memorial Day 2024

Scattershots – 26may24 (updated 29may24)

George Rebane

Gracian (#261) speaks to Bumblebrain – Do not persist in folly.  Some make a duty of failure and having started down the wrong road, think it a badge of character to continue; they accuse themselves of error before the bar of their inner selves but before the bar of the outer world they excuse themselves, to the end that if at the start of their unwisdom they were marked imprudent, in its prosecution they are marked fools; neither rash promise, nor wrong resolve lays obligation upon any man; and yet some will on this account continue in their sulkiness, and carry on in their contrariness, wishing to be known as constant in their idiocies.

Reasonable fear of Islam.  If Islamophobia is the “unreasonable fear” of Islam, then what is the term for a reasonable fear of Islam?  I am among those who identify with such a reasonable fear the evidence for which abounds as proclaimed by both Muslim intellectuals and the Muslim street.  As an example, consider the opening comment to the 7may24 Sandbox (here).

[29may24 update]  The New York judicial system is rotten to the core as demonstrated by the Trump hush money trial judge’s instructions to the jury.  He never told them what was the specific crime that Trump was supposed to have committed when his financial records showed the $130K payment to Cohen as a ‘legal expense’ (which it was).  Instead he invited each juror to come to their own conclusion on whatever crime suited each the best, and the court would still accept that as a ‘unanimous’ judgement.  So now the precedent is set that New York (and other?) juries can be exhorted to convict the defendant on whatever crime each juror would gin up – no agreement or cohesive thought needed.  That’s one way to  avoid hung juries and nail whoever the trial judge does not like.

‘The End is Near’

George Rebane

Were we to discuss really serious topics beyond Trump’s trials and Biden’s lies, I can think of one no more important than that brought up by Victor Davis Hanson in a recent interview (here).  We have extensively covered the various national and geo-strategic factors that portend to end America’s run as the world's leading democratic republic, economy, and white hat world hegemon.  However, most of our neighbors neither care nor are aware of what’s happening.  As witnessed on these pages, if anything, they are more interested in Stormy Daniel’s testimony and various topical policy atrocities launched by our doddering idiot for president and Democrats at all levels of government (especially California).

This is not to say that there is no traction to the warnings issued by our more thoughtful political leaders and commentators (e.g. here) – so far, a sparsely populated bunch.  Today more people are starting to take notice that there is now in the offing a likely “extinction” of the United States we have known.  Letter writers (here) to serious publications like the WSJ acknowledge the current deterioration of America’s defense posture and industrial might, and are showing concern.

Material arguments summarize as follows –

• The US industrial base to make things from ships to medicines to machine tools is essentially gone.
• Our military is tragically under-manned and woke-corrupted with traditional cadres of enlistees no longer willing to join, let alone make military their career. Our country can no longer find enough people willing to fight for it.
• Our unimaginable national debt and reckless social spending programs are destroying the dollar and unseating it as the preferred currency for international commerce.
• Our open borders and illegal alien import policies are destroying the remnants of America’s public cultural cohesion with new levels of unassimilating multi-culturality never before witnessed in a sustainable and geographically compact jurisdiction.
• Our traditional allies in Europe and Asia are aware of America’s weak (non-existent?) leadership and feckless foreign policy, and are seeking alternative geo-strategic relationships that serve their national interests.
• Our electorate is split and largely ignorant of the issues facing the nation; and are in no shape to unify and support reasonably coherent policies to attempt a return to a usefully educated, economically healthy, fiscally sound, geographically secure, and culturally unified sovereign nation-state. Over half of us don’t care and want an autocratic global government run by elites, and the remainder want to return to a liberal constitutional government based on free-market capitalism.
• By passing laws, regulations, and prohibitive tax rates in a transforming neo-Marxist society, we no longer educate a sufficient cadre of high-end (STEM) workers with needed skillsets or provide them the means to produce wealth in an open-market capitalist economy.

So instead –

   

Scattershots – 22apr24 (updated 5may24)

George Rebane

The worldwide climate ruse continues.  Now it’s come out that for years NOAA has been reporting and continues to report bogus temperatures from non-existent “ghost” recording stations.  For its nationally accepted temp data NOAA relies on published reports from the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) that operates the stations.  “NOAA fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 USHCN reporting stations that no longer exist. … They are physically gone—but still report data—like magic.”  Anyone who cares to look under the hood of the ongoing climate change hysteria would see countless holes in the reported ‘science’ and the legions of just plain lies broadcast daily about a non-existent catastrophe intended to more firmly establish the control of the elites both nationally and globally.  (more here and here)

“There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy,” advised Trump lawyer Todd Blanche. (here) That should be obvious to anyone with even a room-temp IQ – but apparently it is not.  This little item came up about the 2016 election during Trump’s hush money trial.  The entire purpose of election campaigning is the attempt to influence voters to vote for this rather than that; it was ever thus.  But not according to the Democrat pinheads prosecuting the former president.  And while we’re at it, can anyone really make a reasonable case against confidential agreements between private individuals concerning their private relationships that don’t violate any laws and don’t injure third parties?  If Trump reported the hush money payment as a legal expense, then that frequently encountered ‘error’ should be the concern of the IRS and so adjudicated, instead of making it an obviously trumped up felony prosecution.  The only more stupid and vindictive prosecution would involve parties, all of whom were willing and profiting participants, in which no one was harmed.  (Oh yes, Trump has one of those going on also.)

California’s plunge to authoritarian destitution continues.  This morning I had a blood test with a phlebotomist; a very nice young lady, native of Nevada County, loves what she does, and a lifelong happy camper in California.  But now she is moving to Colorado because, as she tells it, even though single, she can no longer afford to live in our socialist state.  Certified phlebotomists in California make $35K-53K a year.  These are hardworking, lower-tier, middle-class people, who constitute part of our ‘makers’, who contribute to the hoard of taxes and fees that the state and its local minions extract from citizens.  It’s been the oft-told story of upper and middle class exodus from the once golden state – they are the job-makers and those trying to build a nest egg for retirement.  We have become blasé about those folks turning tail for greener pastures.  But now the gun-toting government grifters are reaching down to people on the lower economic rungs who remain here trying to build careers.  Even for the Sacramento socialists that is a new low.  I can still hear her plaintive “Would you believe I had to pay $5.46 for a gallon of gas yesterday?!”

[24apr24 update]  Biden had his SecDHS Mayorkas divert congressionally approved border wall construction funds to do environmental studies and mitigation on the harm caused by the already built wall sections, instead of continuing to secure the border.  Meanwhile the SOS (sack of …) kept lying to the public at every chance that the “border is secure” as millions of illegal aliens used their Biden free-pass to invade the country.  (here)

Criminal campaign conspiracies exposed.  David Pecker (yes, that’s his real name), chief exec of American Media, testified that he agreed to publish only good stuff about Trump and bury the bad stuff (‘Catch and Kill’) during the former president’s 2016 campaign.  The hush-money trial prosecutor claims that this was a “criminal conspiracy” designed to influence the election’s outcome.  Well, no sh!t Red Ryder.  Thanks for that epiphany on a practice that the lamestream media has practiced for years using fabricated lies and paid pejorative sources against Trump while backing every leftwing candidate.  Showing media bias for your candidate is only allowed for Democrats, for others today such longstanding campaign practices are considered criminal conspiracies.  (more here and here)

[1may24 update]  Developing: Russia is jamming the heck out of GPS around the Baltic Sea, the Financial Times reported Sunday, citing the foreign ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The jamming, which seems to have escalated since December, is so disruptive that two Finnish airliners en route to the Estonian city of Tartu were forced to turn around on Thursday and Friday last week. 

The jamming is also affecting boats in the region, “leading to warnings from the Swedish navy about the safety of shipping,” FT reported. Unnamed experts told the outlet they believe there to be possibly three different sources for the jamming, “with one seemingly based in Kaliningrad, another responsible for the disturbances in Estonia and Finland, and a separate source affecting the far north of Norway and Finland.”

This was sent to me by a longtime friend and correspondent.  It is remarkable that such ongoing aggressive electronic warfare by Putin has not been part of the daily news about the thug’s plans to expand Russia’s control of its near-abroad lands.   NATO, with US leadership, needs to respond; isolationism is not a long-term solution for peace.

The Niagara of evil and dumb Democrat policies keeps washing over the country.  Jason Riley outlines Gavin Newsom’s California idiocies that inevitably go on to infect our land (here and here), and now we hear that Bumblebrain has been sneaking illegal aliens into the country via a taxpayer sponsored airlift directly from their countries of origin.  But the latest is that our excuse for president is also planning on importing America-hating Palestinian Arabs in a program that will guarantee them a fast track to citizenship.  It’s hard to come up with more destructive ideas for our country than those proposed daily by the woke and progressive Democratic left.

[5may24 update] Christian Nationalism – The Left’s new target.  “The label is ‘assigned’ to Americans who believe there is a link between faith and freedom.” (here and here)  It is a historical fact that our Founders forged a specific form of republican democracy that would only endure with a citizenry that is educated and shares a common culture of morality.  At the time (ca 1790s) they thought they were on firm ground with that prescription since the country was in-the-large uniformly Christian.  But even then they had some apprehensions – witness Benjamin Franklin’s “A republic, if you can keep it" response to “What kind of government have you given us Dr Franklin?”.  The last fifty years have clearly demonstrated that in America’s ideologically fragmented multi-cultural society we no longer enjoy such a common morality, and require more and more the presence of laws, regulations, and the government gun in the attempt to keep the peace.