Rebane's Ruminations

FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Residence

George Rebane

Tonight the FBI raided former President Trump’s Florida residence unannounced.  This is an historical  and unprecedented action which has horrible portents for our republic.  I’ll have more to say about this, and so will RR readers who need a place to record their sentiments as this story develops over the next days.  If there is no smoking gun produced by the DoJ in this case, then we have definitely transitioned into a political thugocracy.

Lowest Rung Problem with No Good Solutions

George Rebane

To solve a problem, first you need to correctly define it.

The 1aug22 WSJ had an entire section that examined ‘Why Black and Hispanic Workers Get Stuck on the Lowest Rung’.  In these pages we have covered related aspects of this issue over the years.  Last year noted scholar and political scientist Charles Murray (reviled by progressives) published Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021), which I reported on extensively in ‘Equity Denies Reality’.

The WSJ looked at the lowest rung problem from several angles, with lots of stats showing that the country’s 12.4% Black population is not matched in the 8% of entry level jobs held by Black workers.  Apparently, in the literature these are called “front line workers”, a politically correct euphemism for those on the lowest rung of the employment ladder.  And very few of our larger companies employ even 10% of Black workers.  From there the record gets murkier with smaller shares of front line minorities being promoted to higher positions in mid-management and top slots in corporate leadership.  The unstated thesis of this reportage is that we are falling short on the equity scale in America’s workplaces if we don’t achieve pro-rata population shares of Black and Hispanic workers at each level on the corporate ladders.

Unfortunately, these analyses all ignore some seminal factors needed to understand this employment issue – these being intellectual capacity and intellectual ability.  All the articles in the section make the tacit but questionable assumption that all people have an equal intellectual capacity from which, through education and training, various intellectual abilities can be acquired.  Everyone having equal intellectual abilities flies in the face of government data as reported by Charles Murray and others.

It should be clear that an individual’s capability to acquire intellectual abilities is determined by his intellectual capacity.  Intellectual capacity, also known as ‘cognitive ability’, has various metrics, the most popular being IQ now suffering from bouts of political correctness.  Over populations consisting of all racial and cultural cohorts, average IQ has been normed at the average value or mean of 100, with a standard deviation of 15.  (In a bell curve 68% of the distribution lies between +/- one standard deviation of the mean.  That means that 68% of humans have an IQ ranging from 85 to 115.)

The figure below is from Murray’s Facing Reality.  As can be seen, there is a relative paucity of ‘Latin’ and ‘African’ people, i.e. workers overall, and of those even fewer in the higher cognitive ability (intellectual capacity) region.

This data says that if pro-rata equity is going to be enforced, then companies will need to hire and promote minorities who do not measure up to the existing intellectual standards required to fill upper-level jobs.  The obvious result of that is an expected decline in corporate performance wherever such mandates are implemented.

The woke extremists will continue to claim that there is no difference between cognitive abilities based on race, that the government and academic data is somehow biased and deficient.  But the reality is overwhelming when we take in the K-12 academic performance of the various races cum cultures.  Blacks and Hispanics continue to perform significantly lower than the Asians and European, that happens to be an easily discernible fact also in the workplace.  One can argue that all this is due to the minorities getting the short-end in our public schools, but that is not a factor in the present discussion.

However you come down on our public education and its delivery to, say, whites vs minorities, that is not the point.  We are here discussing ONLY the existential results of the schools’ output as it enters and survives in the workforce.  It would be beyond silly to presume that minority workers as a whole do not bring with them the deficits they demonstrated while in school.  And so far, corporate and government post-school remediation programs have been an utter failure in both their acceptance by the minorities and their effectiveness.

Now that doesn’t mean we should give up and accept race-based promotions or keep the minorities on the low rungs of the workplace.  But it does mean that continuing to do what we have been doing and expecting different results guarantees that we as a society are behaving insanely.  And you can bet the farm that not acknowledging the real dimensions of the intellectual capacities vs abilities reality will continue to prevent us from correctly defining the problem which we as a country have to solve.

Scattershots – 27jul22 (updated 31jul22)

George Rebane

Biden, the killer president – When the tally of all the deaths resulting from his announced policy of abolishing our southern border is calculated, the numbers will now reach well over a 100,000 annually during his term in the White House.  The deaths occur on both sides of what used to be our border.  Thousands have died trying to make it from their native countries before reaching the US, thousands die in transport after crossing over, but the overwhelming number of Biden deaths occur all over the land in America from drug overdoses.  The major cause now is Chinese-produced, cartel-delivered fentanyl that daily floods into the US in amounts that can kill our entire population.  Local jurisdictions are overwhelmed with the number of overdosers dying and requiring critical care (example here).  And the primary cohort of victims is made up of our black, Hispanic, and Indian populations.  Reading the NYT this morning, and monitoring other lamestream outlets, there is no mention of this national emergency of deliberate, ongoing, and cataclysmic human tragedy and flaunting of America’s border and immigration laws.  From the Left nothing but silence and ongoing lies about systemic racism, white supremacy, and social injustice.  If ever there was a reason to impeach the entire executive branch as criminal sacks of … .

Woke medical schools have arrived.  Mandatory woke ideology and CRT curriculum has now infected another STEM field – medicine.  “Future doctors will be obliged to learn how health relates to ‘systems of oppression.’” (more here)  Medical students and residents will be expected to master new “diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies” according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.  These additional courses will be required in all accredited medical schools.  And make no mistake, including this added curricular crap is going to displace real medical education required for today’s physicians to keep up with the rapidly accelerating technology that impacts all aspects of healthcare.  Today’s physicians are already woefully behind on diagnostics, treatments, and pharmacology, as can be verified by any patient with some technical training.  From here on out, according to the AAMC, “aspiring doctors will have to become fluent in woke concepts such as ‘intersectionality’ (defined as) overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.’ Med students who managed to avoid learning critical race theory in college will now get an immersive course.”  Medical mistakes already take more than 200,000 lives annually (here).  And when we calculate the new stats on medical morbidity and mortality, all of us will pay for this next helping of death by government.  Socialism on the march.

[31jul22 update]  President Newsom without a single cast vote.  People are now beginning to accept the likelihood of Biden’s early retirement; something that has been often foretold on these pages.  All the Democratic and socialist leadership of our country don’t want Bumblebrain to run in 2024, and everyone knows that the country’s First Kackle is a joke and will remain a joke.  A feasible and likely scenario has Kamala being offered big bucks (by, say, Soros) to resign and accept a position on the board of a global leftwing organization, purportedly working to save the world from one of many capitalist ills.  Kamala understands that it’s the best deal she can get after her embarrassing performance as VP – she accepts and resigns.  Ol’ Joe is then spoon-fed the reason for his early departure, and the need to make a deal with a compliant and drooling Gavin Newsom.  Newsom becomes VP, and soon thereafter Bumblebrain resigns for health reasons.  Newsom becomes president and immediately pardons every available Biden within that terminally corrupt family.  Newsom appoints his VP – someone like Stacey Abrams or one of the other well-known double dummies.  They go into Dems’ 2024 convention as incumbents, and to loud cheers and lamestream adulation, they emerge as the Democratic candidates for the party’s top of the ticket.  The scenario is perfectly legal and already tested by Richard Nixon when his VP Agnew was caught holding a sack of cash that didn’t belong to him.  Gerald Ford became VP, and the rest is history.

Speaking of double dummies, consider those sharp-witted journalists on the various rightwing media outlets starting with FN and FB interviewing the legion of liars that the administration fronts as their economic experts.  For decades, recession has been defined as two successive quarters of GDP contraction.  This definition has been used by the Fed, ensconced in economics textbooks, and touted by every politician over the last fifty some years.  Biden’s mangling of our vibrant economy during 18 months in office now requires rejection of the established definition.  We’re told by Team Biden and their lamestream lackies that the old definition was never correct (even though everyone is on tape having used it).  They tell us that recession is a more complex matter that has a technical definition which is never mentioned by the leftwing economic experts.  But what’s missing from all these interviews is the question that always goes begging – well then, tell us what is the correct definition of a recession.  There has not been a single journalist with the wherewithal between their ears to immediately ask that question when a Democrat again moves the recession goal posts.  Am I the only one who has noticed this dereliction of journalistic professionalism?  Please tell me it ain’t so.

Social Science Sucks

George Rebane

Harvard and Exeter social scientists just published a new study the implications of which go far beyond the answer to, “Did pandemic stimulus payments harm lower-income Americans?”  The correct answer was a clear YES, and for all the reasons that most RR readers would have predicted.

The study was done professionally, involving over 2,000 in the experimental group and over 3,100 in the control group, all properly controlled for the important societal parameters.  The bottom line was that those receiving the no-strings-attached handouts were not encouraged to practice “better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles. The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet. The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite.” (more here)

In fact, the free money recipients did exactly what most sane observers of human nature know – “Handout recipients fared worse on most survey outcomes. They reported less earned income and liquidity, lower work performance and satisfaction, more financial stress, sleep quality and physical health, and higher levels of loneliness and anxiety than the control group.”  Whouda thunk?

This finding (corroboration?) casts a serious shadow on the impact of contemplated guaranteed minimal income policies.  As RR has argued for years, the penultimate motivator of human behavior is to be relevant within and to one’s society.  Reducing relevance or becoming irrelevant is akin to being shunned by your fellows.  And no one really believes that you deserve to have your hand in others’ pockets just because you can fog a mirror.  They know that you contribute nothing and consume the wealth others create – you are a parasite.

If we peel back the social onion one more layer, we come to the real answer – the culture of the recipient group.  It is culture that determines how social groups behave in various environments of material and financial wellbeing.  Nowhere in human history was this demonstrated more explicitly than in the post-war displaced persons camps of West Germany which were home to tens of millions of east European refugees fleeing communism.  Under UN administration almost all the camps were culturally homogeneous and received equal amounts of aid; refugees were not allowed to work on the German economy and were simply wards of the ‘state’ awaiting determination of their fate over a period of approximately five years.  Many studies were done and books written on how the people in the camps organized themselves and what kinds of activities they pursued.  The spectrum ranged all the way from virtual prisons ruled by indigenous criminal mafias to flourishing societies that replicated the refugees’ native lands and allowed them to develop and pursue education, arts, trades, crafts, etc, some of which they were allowed to sell to GIs stationed in numerous military bases.

But returning to the real point I want to make here is that social science is a broken profession practiced by so-called ‘social scientists’, most of whom have not the most basic understanding of what motivates and rewards human behavior.  This sad condition exacerbates the making of public policies, especially those we are subjected to by leftwing politicians and legislatures.  Citing the results of the Harvard/Exeter study found no difference between the free-cash and control groups. 

But remarkable was the collateral finding, one that will be swept under the rug by the lamestream, that “These findings contradicted the predictions of 477 social scientists and policy makers the researchers surveyed. That’s not surprising. Most liberal academics and politicians believe government handouts are the solution to all problems. If transfer payments were a ticket to the middle class, the War on Poverty would have succeeded long ago.” (emphasis mine)

In sum, we see again that today’s social science is a farcical pursuit populated by the blind leading the blind – these guys are firing blanks and bamboozling both their students and policy makers.  At least half the population of our fair land would have correctly predicted the outcome of this experiment.  But in this light what should concern all of us is the portent of future wealth transfers being able to keep the peace as more and more workers become systemically unemployed, wards of the state, and conspicuously irrelevant.  And nobody cares – yet.

Scattershots – 18jul22 (updated 23jul22)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

The Perennially Confused Grassroots Left

George Rebane

Imagine a country that does not recognize the right of their citizens to revolt.

These thoughts were resurfaced by a comment from local leftwing cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb responding to ‘A Case for the Right of Revolution’.  In it he accuses those of the Right of “blowing up what’s left of the constitution(sic)”, and seeking to install a tyrannical “new regime” that will imprison or execute “those of us who won’t swear fealty to the new regime.”

Bob shares these beliefs and worldview with most of the Democrat mainstream which has been inculcated in the country’s unionized leftwing public schools, with its tenets of received wisdom being reinforced daily by the country’s lamestream media.  These millions of fellow Americans are no longer capable of questioning, let alone critiquing what they are fed in a never-ending stream of propagandized media reportage and ‘entertainment’.

They demand no evidence for the allegations they willingly consume as factual indictments of the Right.  They can point to no part of the Constitution that has been ‘blown up’ by rightwing legislators, judges, or justices in the land.  They demand nothing of their thought leaders save the gratuitously naked lies that the unrevealed evidence exists somewhere, always to be presented at the proper time – e.g. yearslong ‘evidence’ of Trump’s Russia collusion.  Like the highland natives of Papua-New Guinea (here), the video corroborated evidence of a purposely open border is invisible to them as millions of illegal aliens continue to pour in daily.  They have totally ignored the Left’s destruction of the black families launched with the onset of the Great Society policies.  For them the loss of black lives by the thousands really doesn’t matter, which are noted only in their singletons or handfuls when it serves to support their overall anti-American narrative.

The Left’s grassroots have no clue of how their leaders and elites have trashed our Constitution, and constantly make the case for its irrelevance, lack of currency, and need for a total overhaul or rewrite.  All this to foster and enable the country’s progress toward a centrally planned and controlled state under the governance of an implausibly expensive and behemoth bureaucracy.  The Right’s appeal and initiative for a minimally taxing and regulating small government never impacts any inter-ear organ they may purport to have.

They continue their composed mantra that the Right is working to install a fascist state, without any understanding that fascism is a strong form of socialism that requires a very large government to monitor and master its masses.  All the historical and day-to-day evidence of implemented and proposed rightwing policies to the contrary - e.g. reducing taxes and regulations, federalizing national imperatives - they just go on parroting the Democrat party line that the Right is the party of limiting freedoms no matter the impact of leftwing policies in force from Main Street to the nation’s capitals – they are incapable of simply considering how our freedoms have been ratcheted down by the growth of the US Code, regulatory burdens by the thousands, and bureaucracies of leftwing minions numbering in the millions.

And the piece de resistance of their imperturbably smug belief system is their view of those on the Right as a uniform mass of fundamentalist Christian, bible-thumping end-timers who are itching to “empty the nuclear arsenal on the heathens” while “convinced you are going to your great reward in heaven, (thereby) burning the planet shouldn’t cause you any pangs of guilt.”

So there you have it, the latest communication from the Left’s grassroots, that continues to bear witness to the utter void where we might find common ground between our polarized population, each side seeking to go in a direction that is a complete anathema to the other.  There is no longer an opportunity to start a civil, let alone productive conversation.  How do you answer someone like Bob Crabb who believes in the sanctified state against which no hand shall ever be raised?

A Case for the Right of Revolution

George Rebane

[This piece appears as my column in the 16jul22 Union (here).  It is a response to the latest in the newspaper’s thread of Second Amendment debates that started with my response to ‘Read it yourself – A well-regulated militia’ by a local leftwing gun controller.  To this I responded with ‘The Many Ways to Regulate Militias’ published in the 14jun22 Union (and here)  This was responded to by another leftwinger’s 21jun22 column, ‘The role of a well-regulated militia’.  Just to pile on, yet another anti-gunner’s column ‘This July Fourth, enough with misguided patriotism’ taking me to task, was published in the 30jun22 Union.  The piece below seeks to put paid to my 2A critics, but unfortunately only those who have some claim to critical thinking.  I invite RR readers to examine the comments of those who lack such a skill in my column’s comment stream.  It is witness to the dominant sign of our times.]

In his 21jun22 column Mr Dick Sciaroni limits the 2nd Amendment, arguing that in our nation’s founding and the establishment of its republican government, “it defies reason that (the Founders’) focus would include condoning a revolt against that very government.”  Were Mr Sciaroni to expand his historical studies, he would quickly discover that it was exactly that focus which inspired, nay demanded, the inclusion of the “right and duty of the people to alter or abolish a government that acts against their common interest and/or threatens the safety of the people without cause.”

The Founders were learned men and students of Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Johnson, et al who taught the ‘Right of Revolution’ against governments gone rogue.  Our nation’s birth came about through the exercise of that right against its then government gone rogue.  History is replete with numerous justified revolutions against governments turning against their people.  Our Founders were very aware of that and enshrined their sentiments in our Declaration of Independence – “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (the citizenry) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

Our Constitution contemplates and provides for two distinct ways to change our government – an orderly process through amendments and constitutional conventions; failing that, then through armed revolt with the means provided the citizenry through the 2nd Amendment.  The Founders were neither hubristic nor naïfs when they gave us “a republic if (we) can keep it.”  They were sufficiently wise and humble to know that they had not created the perfect government incapable of going rogue, so they provided us, under law, with the ultimate means of redress.

The Bitanic Presidency

George Rebane

The number of political icebergs that have gashed this presidency has gotten hard to track.  The only thing that is now obvious to all, especially to Democrats, is the irreparable amount of damage this president and his administration have brought on themselves.  But before we’re too hard on this incompetent Bumblebrain, we should also acknowledge that the “responsibility for the public failure of this government lies with the Democratic Party.”

The case for this is made clear, concise, and complete by nationally prominent WSJ deputy editor Daniel Henninger in his 14jul22 column ‘Joe Biden’s Sinking Presidency’.  The main factor corroborating the Oval Office disaster is that the lamestream media – e.g NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, … - are daily clutching their worry pearls in the public fora for what they now label Biden’s “lame duck presidency”.  Led by his own party, no one wants him to run in 2024, and more every day want him to resign early for ‘mental health reasons’ – the ‘mental’ part going unsaid yet understood by all.

As if to fully accept that assessment, the man continues to deny being responsible for any of the massive mess in which he and his have mired the country – he lives in la-la land and that is finally being recognized by progressives.  “RootsAction, a group aligned with Bernie Sanders, is planning a #DontRunJoe campaign.”

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the Dems’ Plan B is Kamala Harris, a kackling black woman having served her purpose and since then shown demonstrably unqualified for any conceivable task required in public office, let alone producing the work products of the West Wing.  Her early ascendancy will cause major heartburn to Govs Newsom (CA) and Pritzker (IL) who are already circling the White House after having put paid to two of the most prominent shithole states in the Union.  They each are ready to do the same to our beloved Republic.

So, with 2 of 3 Dems wanting someone besides Biden for 2024, over 9 of 10 under 30-something explicitly saying they don’t want Bumblebrain to run, and 7 of 10 Americans telling everyone that the country is headed in the wrong direction, it’s hard to see how the Democratic leadership will allow ol’ Joe to even finish his present hitch let alone sign up for one more.  The Left has always had more than one way of ridding themselves of dogs that don’t hunt.

Ruminations – 6jul22 (updated 12jul22)

“Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” David Horowitz re harassment of Justice Kavanaugh at DC restaurant.

George Rebane

Illinois Gov Pritzker typified the profound ignorance that most (all?) leftwing politicians have about guns, ‘gun violence’, and the effect of existing gun regulations.  In signing a law banning the sale and possession ‘ghost guns’ (AR-15 style untraceable componentized semi-automatic rifles) he made this audacious claim that was not rebutted by any of the media; to wit, “… even our revolutionaries did not use assault rifles, they used muskets.”  The idiot governor has no idea that muskets were the assault guns of the 18^th century.

[7jul22 update]  Over 550 colleges have hired for-profit education vendors for delivering their online programs under the schools’ names.  The students seldom know that their courses are delivered by employees of companies like 2U instead of the universities’ academics.  It’s an attractive fire-and-forget source of revenues for the schools that get 20% of online ‘bootcamp’ tuitions and 40% of semester course tuitions from the vendors.  Bootcamps go for upwards of $10K, and semester courses for more than $60K.  Modern school daze. (more here)

The Victims of Communism Museum in Washington opened last month.  It “unsparingly illuminates the most murderous ideology of modern times.”  The museum was funded by donors and the governments of Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia.  Communist regimes have killed well over 100 million of their own citizens, and today 1.5 billion people still live under communism.  Unfortunately, more countries, including our own, today seek to increase their governments’ role in “abolishing private property and controlling the means of production and distribution of goods and services.”  “Under the pretense of classless, egalitarian society, Communist regimes rely on force, use brutality, and repress speech, religion, assembly, and all rights and freedoms.”  (more here)

[8jul22 update]  The Democrats are desperately trying to divert the country’s attention from the ongoing foreign policy mess, the open border crisis, exploding crime rates, soaring inflation, shelves empty of critical goods, historically high gasoline prices, ongoing Covid muddle, fetid cities filled with vagrant encampments, dysfunctional public schools, pending recession, and announced policies guaranteed make each of these social catastrophes worse.  The only diversions they have left now is to blanket the country with lies about J6, SCOTUS, and “the best economy in our history”.

Abortion is a latent right, even though it isn’t in the Constitution, so argue all pro-abortionists and progressives.  A favorite supportive citation is Madison’s inclusion of the 9^th Amendment in which he wanted to make sure that unenumerated rights would henceforth not be excluded.  The big problem this argument launched is who decides what the next unenumerated right is, and how many of these are there waiting to be ‘discovered’ and codified by the politicians who happen to then have control the government gun.  We now have a culture in which new rights are immaculately conceived daily out of thin air, rights that inevitably reduce freedoms for the rest of us.

[9jul22 update]  The dollar will be destroyed to pay off or at least allow the Treasury to keep borrowing to service the $23T+ national debt held by the public ($30T+ total).  This has been covered many times over the years in these pages (e.g. here and here).  Now the Mises Institute is also putting out papers that warn us of this (here).  Destruction will occur through sky-high inflation which allows the debt to be serviced in ever cheaper nominal dollars.  As I see it, the real news here is that we Americans are simply too stupid to be concerned, let alone do anything about it at the ballot box.  Witness the comment stream below.

Poetry more relevant today than ever to illuminate the upcoming mid-term election.

[11jul22 update]  Repeal the 2^nd Amendment is the latest brainchild of communist filmmaker Michael Moore (here), who proposes adoption of a 28^th Amendment that would explicitly do that, and make civilian ownership and use of firearms a joke that would please only those Americans born with serfdom in their veins, aka Democrat voters.

[12jul22 update]  So how to interpret the Trump/Biden polls for 2024.  Depending on the poll and its qnaire, it’s hard to really tell what the legitimate backing is for either man’s 2024 candidacy. (more here)  I estimate that half of the right and leftwingers are contras – the rightwingers wanting Biden to run, and the leftwingers wanting Trump to run on the theory that either man would be the loser in any feasible match-up.  Me?  I definitely want Biden to run again, and Trump to leave the field and lose his 'the 2020 election was stolen', no matter the merits of the argument.  So now you know how people like me would respond to pollsters, but that doesn’t help knowing that the, say, pro-Trump respondents would also include a hefty share of the man’s political devotees.

‘Bumblebrain bows out before 2022 election’ predicts Athena Thorne of PJ Media while crowing that she is the first to make this prediction (here).  Sorry to burst the bubble of this Jenny-come-lately, but RR readers had already had this discussion more than a year ago and even entered into a monied bet in July 2021 on exactly when we would get a new president (here)

Happy Independence Day 2022!

George Rebane

Think of all the things that have happened in and to our beloved Republic during the last twelve months since we last celebrated our country’s birthday.  In this interval the country has again grown more apart than it has been since our 19^th century’s ante-bellum days.  The two sides seek markedly different futures for America – one side decrying the nation’s past and publicly denying their desired destination, while the other side spells it out and celebrates the historic road that, with some miles unpaved, we have traveled.  But even with our life-threatening wounds, we all should celebrate that we still live in a land which allows both sides access to sufficient public podia from which to make their case for America’s best future.  (A couple of years ago this was our 4^th of July outlook.)

 

SCOTUS to Congress: Legislate!

Know how to let the blame slip upon another ... .  Gracian #149

George Rebane

The overwhelming share of congress critters don’t like to make laws that spell out what we citizens can/should do in conducting our lives and businesses.  They know that if they put down what they really mean, then a good fraction of us would get pissed off at them and let it be known at the next ballot box.  So members of both parties have figured out how to avoid this pesky aspect of law-making.  They know the ideological and bureaucratic tenor of the various departments and agencies that will implement the laws, and they write the laws in a namby-pamby language that leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation by the unelected and anonymous bureaucrats who also regularly get sub-rosa offline directions from the camouflaged politicians.  Sleazy politics and corrupt governance.

Given that our federal and state bureaucracies are staffed overwhelmingly by incompetent leftwingers, it is the Democrats who are the architects of the most cynical, ambiguous, and amorphous legislation, while the Republicans stand by grumbling with their thumbs up their … well, you know.  In the 1jul22 WSJ Kim Strassel writes (here) -

Conservative Republican legislators report that this cynicism has now reached new heights. They note that their Democratic counterparts routinely write legislation that is deliberately vague, so as to give the administrative state maximum flexibility to impose programs Congress won’t take responsibility for passing. This also ensures that the federal bureaucracy—which largely shares the left’s political ideology—can continue its work even under Republican presidencies and Congresses.

America’s informed readers have known this for years, but they (we) too have yet to raise hew and cry about the matter that impacts the behavior of the bums they (we) send to state houses and Washington.  Perhaps this oversight is due to our having become too comfortable and ignoring our duties required to maintain the republic.  But the evidence of electoral ignorance and neglect are visible all over the land.  So finally, we get a SCOTUS with a majority that recognizes the problem and has the backbone to correct it.

Scattershots – 1jul22 (updated 5jul22)

George Rebane

Legal lying that powers today’s lamestream.  The lamestream has been exposed for its lies, misinformation, fake news, and defamations in general.  As a result, its shrinking audiences are made up of the most dedicated and/or ignorant leftists in the land, augmented by some residual uninformed mid-roaders.  Their legal underpinnings to carry on with this atrocious so-called journalism is provided by today’s defamation, libel, and slander laws which have been purposely degraded by leftwing lawyers and politicians in order to continue delivering their substance-free narrative to the hoi polloi.  This may be coming to an end if Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have their way, and get SCOTUS to rule on a case that would finally mandate Congress to pass a strict and clear law which demarks ‘public figures’ and ‘private individuals’ as targets of purposed and publicized sleaze.  (more here)

Biden’s open border policy makes him guilty of killing thousands of illegal aliens as they attempt to gain entry and disappear into our hinterlands.  Open border invites hundreds of thousands of economic migrants to start their long journeys from all over the world to our southern border.  It is an easy argument to make that many more of these people die from divers causes and are killed en route than the alien deaths counted only on our side of the southern border.  Mexican President Obrador blames the US for the deaths because we don’t control our border.  Of course, he omits the fact that Mexico has facilitated the transit of these millions of migrants over the decades.  As a terminally corrupt and criminal country, Mexico’s economy does not generate the jobs needed to sustain employment at levels required by its formerly high birth rate.  (Things have gotten so bad that the country’s birth rate has plunged in recent years.)  So first and foremost, the hordes of illegal aliens entering the US still consist mostly of Mexicans.  Their government abets this exodus for obvious reasons – relieves population pressures on the economy and increases the inflow of foreign capital.  And our anti-American Bumblebrain has elevated this game of import vote buying to a whole new level with his and his shills' daily declarations that our border is "secure" and "closed" while millions pour in. (more here)

[4jul22  update]  ‘71% of Voters Don’t Want Biden in 2024’ according to the just out Harvard CAPS – Harris Poll.  Them that follow these things should get another view from all those reports of Biden doing well and Trump doing badly.  It seems the reasons Americans don’t like Bumblebrain are all over the map; nobody has anything good to say about him, including the Democratic leadership.  My own assessment is that history will judge him to be hands-down the worst president since the Gilded Age, and the best thing that has happened to Jimmy Carter’s legacy.  Trump isn’t even in the running in this competition – if they had a ‘Shoot from the Lip’ category, the Orange Man would be right in there.  (more here)

[5jul22 update]  Putin’s view of Russia’s geo-strategic position, its goals of resurgence, and the forces arrayed against it are revealed in a blockbuster Russian TV series that launched in 2014 and has run now for 3 seasons containing a total of 40 episodes (more here)  The documentary soap opera has won numerous awards in the Russian Federation, and was released to Amazon Prime in 2017.  Widely read columnist and academic Walter Russel Meade writes a revealing column (here) (here) in the 5jul22 WSJ making the case that the series provides an important insight into the mind of Putin and his enlarged aspiration for Russia.  Since its enormous popularity with the Russian TV viewership, Mead argues that it also explains away Putin’s continued popularity with the Russians and their stoic acceptance of the historical hardships Russians have had to suffer under many rulers who sought to ‘make Russia great again’.  ‘Ekaterina: The Rise of Catherine the Great’ is definitely on the Rebane family viewing list.  And Mead’s message sums to, “To grasp the Russian president’s worldview, just binge-watch ‘Catherine the Great.’”

Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

I was shocked to read in the 75^th anniversary issue of ACM Communications, the flagship publication of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery, that computer science education in the US needs to be revamped.  Three maximally woke socialist (communist?) professors of education spell out their proposals in ‘Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship’.

Computer science is a vast field that encompasses and entwines many technical disciplines.  It has boggled many capable minds in the task of developing undergraduate CS curriculum that fits into a four-year baccalaureate program.  Now there has started a neo-Marxist initiative in education that seeks to inject into the curriculum the propagandizing of students with the tenets of critical race theory, social justice, equity, and inoculation against white supremacy, racism, and other social sins that originated in white Europe.

To accomplish this added and/or integrated layer of indoctrination will require the elimination or diluting beyond recognition of core subjects required by entry level practitioners in the field.  The authors already specify that merit and acquiring technical skills must be moved aside due to their longstanding systemic racist and white supremacist taint.  Time must be made instead for integrating students’ race, cultures, and life experiences which should shape the revised curriculum.  Added to that, the students will be encouraged (required?) to consult with their “community elders” to make sure that their CS training encompasses community, criticality, and citizenship.

The introduction of leading-edge technology has involved taking risks as the bugs are worked out of early-adopted commercial products.  Well, if something goes wrong with, say, an autonomous vehicle involved in an accident, then the new-age CS practitioners should be able to critically assess and assign blame to the appropriate participating agents ranging from the vehicle’s design, all the way to the way it was fielded to drive on the roads.  Our triumvirate of educators expand on this –

In order to bring such criticality to computing education, we will need to move away from focusing solely on developing technical skills and move to understanding and challenging the role of CS in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices. As a first step, we must engage educators in critical conversations that explore their own identities in order to move away from color-blind approaches to teaching CS. In addition, we must support educators by developing curriculum and pedagogy that challenges the “unbiased” and “objective” nature of computing. As educators develop their own critical computing competencies, it will lead them to “create spaces for collective development of critical consciousness, help develop plans for action to make the world a better place, and develop a sense of agency among learners.”

One thing is certain.  The Russians and Chinese are laughing their collective asses off, and doing everything they can to fund, through well-oiled circuitous channels, more of these woke initiatives to infect STEM education in the US and the west.  Read the short article to get a better picture of what we're up against.

Right v Left Reporting

George Rebane

The most recent SCOTUS rulings on abortion and gun rights got me thinking again how the Left and Right differ in the manner their outlets report the news, debate issues, and frame their commentaries.  As shown here for years, the asymmetry is pronounced since the Left has never had supporting arguments for their positions and policies that survive in the light of the record and reason.  It is easy to confirm this claim by just tuning in to, say, FN, and then to MSNBC, CNN, or any of the big three.

Roe v Wade RIP (updated 26jun22)

George Rebane

It warms the cockles of me heart to hear that SCOTUS has put the abortion issue back into the jurisdiction of the several states where it belongs. (more here)  The Constitution is very clear on this – if the issue is not specifically covered in the Constitution, then its resolution and/or application does NOT ‘revert’ to, but 'remains' with the states to dispose of as they individually will.  Constitutionally, abortion never was a federal affair.  My own take on abortion has been covered extensively in these pages, and is accessible from here.

[26jun22 update]  As the lamestream lies continue about the SCOTUS ruling, shown below is the real state of abortion laws across the country.  The ruling will now remove a 50-year-old unconstitutional law of the land which SCOTUS had no business legislating in the first place, and put it back into the hands of Americans living in the several states to elect representatives and/or vote on initiatives to determine the legal state of abortion where they live – democracy in action.

SCOTUS on gun rights

George Rebane

SCOTUS on a good day for gun rights that removes the 'proper cause' requirement many states require/allow CCW granting jurisdictions to impose.  The suit was brought against the state of New York.  Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, with Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissenting.

“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,'” ... “The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different. New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.”

See also 'The Many Ways to Regulate Militias'.

Scattershots – 21jun22 (updated 25jun22)

George Rebane

Solar Tax – California, as regular as the sunrise, is again showing the world that it knows how to expand its unchallenged butt-stupid ways to govern possibly the most blessed land mass on God’s green earth.  Sacramento, led by our idiot governor, is contemplating levying a tax on homes that have installed solar panels.  These are housing units that use less electricity from the grid, and also pump back electricity into a grid that is already overloaded, poorly maintained & managed, and expensive to boot.  Instead of encouraging the installation of more environmentally friendly photovoltaics, the state wants to dun those who already have them, and provide more reasons why not to install more of these home power-generating systems.  Call your governor and tell him what you think of the Democrats’ latest brainchild.  (info here)

Right/Left Polarization is a Myth

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right vs Left – what distinguishes us (updated 17jun22)

George Rebane

Of the several correspondences in which I am currently active, one is on the perennial topic of the Great Divide and America’s irredeemable polarization.  In these correspondences with two of my left-leaning intellectual friends, we are attempting to create a mutually acceptable inventory of ideological belief tenets.  These would form a starting point for another attempt at finding any common ground to support dialogue from which some form of rapprochement could result.  This is a work-in-process in which I think some of our readers might be interested, and to which they could contribute their own thoughts toward progress in this enlarged conversation.

I attach the following pdfs for your critical comments and perhaps even reading pleasure.  The first piece - 'Versions of Fundamental Transforms (2020) - serves as background, and the second piece - 'Right/Left Belief Inventory' (v14jun22) - is a WIP currently in discussion with my correspondents.  Notwithstanding general interest, I do want to include these in the RR archive.

Download VersFundTransforms

Download BeliefInventory_220614

[17jun22 update]  A longtime RR reader posted the link to an important or possibly a milestone essay – ‘Heading Toward the Abyss’ - by David Horowitz on the nature of the Left, and particularly the Democratic Party, with which America is contending today for its survival.  The points that Horowitz expands on are familiar to RR readers.  I highlight the essay in this update so that it does not get lost in the comment stream below.  H/T to Mr Tozer.

Scattershots – 11jun22 (updated 12jun22)

George Rebane

The professionally produced prime-time J6 congressional kabuki has the obvious dual objectives to 1) divert the electorate from the incompetence and trumpeted disastrous policies of Bumblebrain’s administration (here), and in the process 2) pillory Trump as the Dems’ perennial punching bag.  The one-sided charade is celebrated by the lamestream’s idiot pundits, and the latter objective is even uncritically abetted by conservative outlets such as FN and the WSJ.  Therein my critique of the WSJ’s editorial policy centers on their dismissal of the 2020 election ‘fraud and irregularities’ allegations is based on nothing but citing a chain of opinions by certain judges, Trump administration officials, and Republican politicians – a chain of he-said, she-said reports.  A more persuasive indictment of Trump’s attributed Big Con of his supporters would be to also cite major attempts to support the ‘stolen election’ claims such as what happened in Wisconsin (here), as shown in the ‘2,000 Mules’ documentary (here and here), and Mollie Hemingway's Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections (2021).  Heads up journalism would have presented the existential evidence as to why these were dismissed by those investigating last November’s election.  Instead, they leave knowledgeable readers with obvious questions unanswered.

The collectivists of the Left don’t understand human nature – that has been the evidence cited over the last century by many political observers (including me in these pages).  They simply have no clue about how or what individual motivations contribute to sustainable social orders and organizations.  The only human response the Left has discovered is the elicitation of confessions under torture as demonstrated in the dungeons of Stalin, Mao, Castro, … .  This overall deficit has been uniformly absent in today's political commentaries by the Right, who dun the Left’s policies without giving the underlying reasons why they have never worked, and can never work.  Finally, we have an exception in the WSJ’s 11jun22 piece by Peggy Noonan – ‘The Boiling Over of America’.  Therein she covers a litany of fundamental and unredeemable deficits of the progressive’s mind.  Examples –

• They don’t listen to anybody. To stop them you have to fire them. They’re not like normal politicians who have some give, who tack this way and that. Progressive politicians have no doubt, no self-correcting mechanism.
• They are more loyal to theory than to people. If the people don’t like the theories the progressives impose, that’s too bad; the theory is pre-eminent.
• The progressive can’t understand why. (E.g. SF’s recalled progressive DA Boudin) tells reporters the voters are “in a bad mood” because of inflation and housing costs.
• A final characteristic of progressive politicians is that they tend to be high-IQ stupid people. They are bright and well-educated but can’t comprehend the implications of policy. They don’t understand that if an 18-year-old is repeatedly arrested for assaulting people on the street and repeatedly let go, his thought may not go in the direction of, “What a gracious and merciful society I live in, I will do more to live up to it.” It is more likely he will think, “I can assault anyone and get away with it. They are afraid of me.”

[Update]  Dead people are voting, no matter how vehemently it is denied in the lamestream and by their grassroots sheeple.  And our corrupt LE authorities and judicial system do nothing to get hundreds of thousands of the dead off the country’s voter rolls.  “The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s database of the country’s voter rolls found nearly 350,000 deceased registrants before the 2020 election. The inevitable question is always, well did any of them vote. Unfortunately, some always do.” (more here)

[12jun22 update] Re the J6 imbroglio and Pence's constitutional power over the proceedings to certify the vote. I am reposting this from a recent comment stream where I answered a liberal commenter about possible outcomes of the 6jan21 congressional certification of the electoral college votes.  “First, we presume that the congressional certification was never meant to be a pro-forma kabuki ritual. Were that not so, then all attendees could have been replaced by their cardboard cutouts, or they could have mailed it in. Second, given that the certification, by those gathered, was to be performed after due consideration of the submitted materials, then the designated process had to have the ability for more than one canned outcome. … Constitutional scholars are still debating what that decision space should look like - e.g. accept as submitted; reject submittal and return to states with instructions for resubmittal; table proceeding to give time for further study of any material contentions, inviting both sides to come and testify before resuming the certification process; and so on. You and yours, of course, were awaiting a kabuki performance; the other half of the country had concerns about the election.” 

Readers should note that this aspect of the J6 proceedings has never been discussed in the media, which presumes without pause that only one outcome is supported by the Constitution.  Is this an intellectual bridge too far, or does the media correctly assess the public’s inability to parse the unexamined requirement of the proceedings to end with certification, arrived at through several possible contingencies ranging from immediate acceptance of the electoral votes to going through various further procedures of vetting the votes before finally certifying them?  To the nation’s hoi polloi it is presented as immediate certification or our democracy comes crashing down.  President Trump was right insisting that VP Pence did not have to immediately certify the votes, but wrong in restricting the only alternative to summary rejection of the November 2020 election results - another nuance beyond the media and the public.

The Many Ways to Regulate Militias (updated 21jun22)

[This post also appears here in the op-ed pages of 14jun22 Union.]

George Rebane

In his 10jun22 ‘Read it yourself – ‘A well-regulated militia’’ Union columnist Taylor Carey seems focused only on the interpretation of the nation’s leftwing anti-gunners.  The Left has always held that the Founders' intention for the Second Amendment was that members of the local militias were to be unarmed until their government decided to assemble them and issue guns from the local armory.  That was and is the only mode of regulation that makes sense to the big government, command/control progressive.

Private possession and ownership of guns is not necessary in a well-regulated and organized collective because the government will fulfill all functions of internal security and external defense, arming trained citizens to augment the standing LE and military only as and when the leadership determines that the need arises.  Being at the mercy of armed criminals or the insane until, or if, LE arrives is just the price people must pay to live in a civilized society.  Your personal safety is the responsibility of the collective, and your home is definitely not YOUR castle.

And perish the thought that either the state or its LE cadres go rogue.  In the socialist ideology there is no provision for such an eventuality, no matter the abundant historical evidence to the contrary.  A centralized state under the leadership and administration of educated elites dedicated to the proposition of their interpretation of common good, that benefits everyone equitably, there is no provision for such roguish contingencies – by definition, the state is always fair and just, and as such, brooks no challenge to its power to organize and administer society.  Revolt and revolution by an armed populace in the embrace of a “rabidly corrosive cult of individuality” is “inimical” to such governments that deliver and sustain “ordered liberty” according to Mr Carey.

Inflation Tax – Silent Rape by Government (updated 10jun22)

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."  Will Durant

George Rebane

The ongoing rape of America by the evil party has more dimensions than just government induced inflation and higher taxes.  Victor Davis Hanson gives a short yet comprehensive summary in his ‘The Subordinate Citizen’ of this unbelievable yet ongoing injustice against all Americans, perpetrated by our federal government under the Biden administration and the Pelosi/Schumer Congress.

In these pages we have covered extensively the impact of taxed inflation on investment returns, and made the quantitative case showing how inflation is an added tax that is confounded with the apparent IRS and state-quoted tax rates.  The details are found here, here, and here.

In this little review I want to draw your attention again to the four important formulas that let you calculate the impact of taxed inflation on your own finances.  These are given in the figure below.  The image is from a spreadsheet tool I made that allows you to change the blue numbers denoting R, the nominal return on an investment, the inflation rate I during the investment, and the overall tax rate R_T that must be paid when realizing the nominal return.

Here R = 10%, I = 8.5%, R_T = 30%.  Note that inflation reduces the effective return of the investment to RI = 1.38%.  But now comes the hit.  The 10% nominal return is taxed at 30% which further reduces the actual return to a negative 1.38%.  This is what really happened to the buying power of every dollar you invested.  Not only did you not make any money, you lost some.  In this situation you would have done better by keeping it under your mattress.  Your invested dollar now buys only 98.62 cents of stuff.

In this double whammy inflation/tax environment you need to make at least 12.14% just to maintain the buying power of your invested dollar.  And, of course, 12.14% returns don’t come without any risk.  Does that turn on any lights in liberal heads as to why the economy suffers under government induced inflation and rapacious tax rates?  Since Karl Marx the answer has been a resounding NO.  Socialists have no clue as to what causes inflation, and they all know that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.

This preposterous situation arose because, as we see in the figure, the effective total tax rate, R_ET, in the above scenario turns out to be a whopping 113.82%, taking all you nominally gained and then some.  And all of this outright larceny is so well hidden from the average Joe, that it doesn’t even make a visible ripple.  Joe just bitches a bit about the high prices and that he’s not making enough money.  His government tells him that it’s all the fault of the greedy corporations and the rich who don’t pay their ‘fair share’.  Apparently this is totally acceptable, as witnessed by the comment stream below.  But I may be wrong, and people really do care.

[10jun22 update]  Lest you wage earners with no investment portfolios think that you have been spared – ‘fraid not.  The inflation formulas above apply equally to your take-home pay.  Suppose you’re fortunate enough to have gotten, say, a 10% raise and your overall pre-raise tax rate is 20%.  We’ll let inflation stay at 8.5%.  When you bring home that paycheck containing the raise, it’s exactly the same as if you sold your stock portfolio that has increased 10% at the end of the year.  But fasten your seat belt, the results don’t look good.

Assume first that your overall tax rate stays at 20%.  Then your effective raise considering only inflation turns out to be 1.38%.  And taking out taxes reduces your effective raise into a pay cut of 0.46%.  You would have required a raise of 10.63% to just maintain your wage’s buying power.  When all is said and done, you have paid an effective total tax rate of 104.61%.  In short, the government took from you more in taxes and buying power than your employer’s raise, and then some.

But what if your increased wages now put you into a higher tax bracket, say, at 22%?  Then the above 1.38% remains unchanged, since it does not involve tax rates.  But your former effective pay cut now increases from 0.46% to 0.65%.  And now you would have required a 10.90% raise instead of the previous 10.63% raise to maintain buying power.  Finally, your total effective tax rate has now increased from 104.61% to 106.45%.  Oi weh!  

We must always remember that government revenues increase during inflation because inflation pushes nominal wages into higher tax brackets, which for the consumer/investor is the monetary equivalent of a tax increase.  And the final kick in the gonads is that the government knows that most average Joes out there don't do numbers, and therefore to them the above discussion is boooring.

There's also a Lucky Strike Extra for you fastidious number crunchers who have survived this far.  Fiscally pernicious governments like ours, that purposefully create inflation by flooding the economy with new money not supported by increased productivity, they get a bonus by being the first able to spend the new cash (the Fed prints it and buys govt bonds from the Treasury) which always has the buying power that is subsequently to be reduced by the inflation caused by the new tranche of money into the economy.  Inflation does not increase suddenly and in lock-step across a large economy like ours.  It takes some time for the new cash to work its way through the various commercial highways and byways, bidding up the prices of what is bought by successive handlers of those new 'crisp dollar bills'.  Or is it 'crisp dollar bits'? 

Scattershots – 2jun22 (updated 5jun22)

George Rebane

Bumblebrain wins the prize, hands down, of being the most ignorant American president about guns – every facet of firearms and their uses is a mystery to him.  We see this from just his last week’s bevy of encounters with a microphone.  What puzzles me is why his handlers continue to let him make a fool of himself in public without providing him with even the basics of what guns are all about.  It’s as if they really do want to portray him even to the Left as the double dummy the Right has known him to be even before he ran for president.  What is in their interest to do that?

So now the hysteria to “do something about guns” has even infected Republican politicians.  Notice that no one is saying or talking about ‘do something about protecting our children’.  In the diatribes we hear, there is not even a connection made between the laundry list of new gun restrictions and how they would prevent school shootings.  None will ask how the next ‘do something about guns’ will reduce the chances for another school massacre; that is the farthest from any politician’s mind.  Now it’s all about the Left wanting to take the biggest possible step toward their perennial goal of eliminating private gun ownership, and the Right wanting to seem  caring while minimizing damage to the 2^nd   Amendment and not pissing off their tried and true constituents.  Both sides are calculating the impact of their respective kabuki dances on the November election, the children be damned.  More national insanity on parade.

[5jun22 update]  The 2^nd Amendment is our Founders’ legacy to enable Americans to successfully revolt when their government goes rogue.  This fundamental truth about the governance of our democratic republic was made clear this morning on FN’s Media Buzz by Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist.  IMHO this seminal aspect about gun rights is constantly overlooked by our conservative media (and, of course, denied by the lamestream) when reporting on ‘doing something about gun violence’.   And again, no one is talking about what any of these proposals will do or would have done to protect the children.  For the Dems it's all about ratcheting toward the final removal of the 2A using every calamitous opportunity and with every useless (re school massacres) notch to constructively further limit the ownership and use of firearms by the law-abiding public.  "A democracy, if you can keep it." - the real purpose of the 2A is keeping the basis of our constitutional republic; it should be part and parcel of every discussion and debate about reducing ‘gun violence’.  Rogue governments have ALWAYS been by far the greatest killers of their own citizens.

“… to protect the children.” (addended with 9jun22 update)

George Rebane

That is the only slim thread of agreement that the Republicans and Democrats have for new legislation pursuant to the mass killing of students and teachers in Uvalde, Texas this week.  Yet the Dems’ solution continues to be to enact senseless gun legislation to stop senseless mass shootings.  Their entire initiative is based on appealing to the hoped for raw emotional response of their constituents to ‘do something’, or anything that can be used to advance the final objective of removing firearms from the country’s law-abiding civilian population.

The Dems’ entire argument is that since ‘guns kill people’, the “gun lobby” (aka NRA) wants more people killed through the unhindered sale of more guns.  For the Left there are no other considerations for the private ownership of guns, least of all the antiquated and misconstrued Second Amendment to defend against rogue government.  Every successive gun control measure is understood to be nothing more or less than a ratchet toward socialist autocracy’s final objective of an unarmed, compliant citizenry.

In a country with over 340 million variously un/registered firearms, there is no guarantee that a quietly deranged person with no previous criminal record or recorded history of mental instability will be stopped from a serendipitously inspired and spontaneously launched mass murder.  LE officials have told us for decades that no level of gun restrictions will bring an end to what happened in Uvalde.

What journalists and clear-thinking politicians don’t ask, during the inevitable gun control hysteria that follows every mass shooting, is ‘what is the evidence that this legislation would have stopped the previous mass murderers, or will stop them in the future?’  Posing this question will quickly reveal the real purpose for the newly proposed gun control measures.

The real solution – possibly unattainable – is what may be called a ‘cultural reset’.  The American culture of, say, fifty years ago prevented such mass murders occurring in a population equally populated with firearms – both semi-auto pistols and long guns.  Today, wholesale human life is cheapened and cheap.  With widespread and instant salacious news coverage, we continually hear of hundreds of people gunned down weekly without giving it much if any thought.  Unless the life belongs to family or close friends, the deaths don’t matter much irrespectively how they are snuffed out.

And our polarized society no longer supports community-wide solutions.  Remaining solutions have become very personalized – you pull up stakes and move to a safer place if you can, or you stay put, become insular, and hunker down while the killing continues around you.  That will continue in perpetuity as long as the state makes it so that only criminals have guns to use with impunity on an unarmed citizenry.  To various extents this has proven to be true both under so-called liberal democracies and police-state tyrannies.

A cultural reset, even if attempted, will take at least a generation to gain traction in our society.  In the meantime, IMHO we should recognize the ground truth that active killers with guns are stopped only by defenders with guns.  So, if we really have an interest to do something to protect the children, then we must always remember that when seconds count, LE is minutes (or more) away.  Actually, an hour away in Uvalde and similarly at previous shooting sites.  As far as the killer is concerned, LE has not arrived until he is assaulted with arms.  It doesn’t matter how quickly LE arrives on the scene, the clock starts when the killer perceives that his further intentions will now be curtailed.  For example, LE getting to the Uvalde school and dicking around for an hour before a Border Patrol agent confronted and shot the killer, means that LE effectively arrived an hour late.  So consider -

Policies that don’t work – place one security officer per school.  These have proven to be career-limited, marginally trained, timid people who either have no idea that killing is taking place in another part of the school, or who will not confront the killer until summoned LE people (‘back-up’) arrive to take control of the incident.

Policies that have a chance of working – Every teacher and certain staffers are trained and required to be concealed-carry armed when on duty.  This policy is then made public.  Israel has demonstrated the efficacy of such policy.  (more here)

[Addendum]  In ongoing discussions about solutions to such wanton and unpredictable massacres, it was brought out that there may be a significant share of teachers who will refuse to be trained and armed.  The point makes sense since so many teachers are liberals/progressives whose logic doesn’t always concur with reality – e.g. similar to those leftwingers who believe that declaring a building or facility a ‘gun-free zone’ will hinder instead of attract the manic mass murderer.  No matter, for whatever reasons, not all teachers can qualify or be relied upon to be armed and confront their students' would-be killer.

The alternative to concealed-carry teachers in the classroom is a cadre of volunteer CCW holders who would also receive the required additional training.  These would come from the students’ parents, grandparents, and (retired) friends or community volunteers.  I’d bet the farm that there would be more than enough volunteers to sit in the back of classrooms while instruction is going on.  Each school could have a ‘security coordinator’ volunteer to coordinate with the school’s administration, maintain the active roster, and manage the ‘duty calendar’ for the classroom security volunteers.  The marginal cost to the school district and community would be nil.

Given today’s mobile devices (laptops, pads, smart phones, …), the security volunteers can easily be productive on their own projects as they carry out their assigned watches.  I know from our family’s circle of friends and contacts, that almost everyone would volunteer who could pass the training requirements.  As an example, for years I was a member of the Banner Mountain firewatch team and pulled many a 4-6 hour morning and afternoon stints on the tower (until the tower was decommissioned).  It was a rewarding experience, as I’m sure it would also be to serve as a classroom security volunteer.

(For the record, America's CCW holders are the most reliable and law-abiding cohort of citizens when it comes to psychological stability, gun safety and proficiency, and criminality/gun violence.  Statistically, you are six times more likely to be assaulted by a rogue LE officer than a CCW permit holder.)

[28may22 update]  A commenter raised a valid question about the availability of sufficient volunteers to implement the above described classroom security approach.  I’ve taken a more detailed look at the numbers, and it appears to be doable.  These back-of-envelope calculations are available here -  Download Classroom Security Volunteers.  Readers thoughts are always welcome, especially as they point out any errors or weaknesses (not already covered in the comment stream below).

[4jun22 update]  Certify retired military personnel to serve as armed school security guards – so proposes Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC).  Above I have made case for such a solution that can be implemented more rapidly than any ineffective anti-gun legislation.  (more here)

The Left, of course, is dead-set against such a practical solution, and surprisingly they are joined by some folks from the other side who also think it’s the dumbest thing they ever heard of.  Nevertheless, that kind of solution, using trained and certified volunteer security guards, is staring us in the face with no reasonable opposition save ‘schools should remain a gun-free zone’, or more simply, ‘it’s a stupid idea that will never work’.

[9jun22 update]  Well, things may be looking up with getting more defensive guns into schools and classrooms.  Reports are coming in that in certain red states teachers are volunteering to carry guns (here).  And we now hear that even in progressive New Jersey militant parents are convincing school districts to hire off-duty and retired LE officers to serve as added security in schools (here).  These people will be paid.  So that brings us a few steps closer to the volunteer security concept outlined here as the affordable solution to protect our children.

BTW, does everyone notice that the ‘do something’ new gun regs coming out of the House have nothing to do with protecting the children?  (They’re just a desperate Dem election issue since everything else they propose is a demonstrable disaster for the country.)  And no Republican has the balls to resist the new ‘do something’ hysteria by asking why existing gun regs – from past ‘do something’ hysterias - aren’t being enforced and/or have proven to be totally ineffective in reducing ‘gun violence’.

Scattershots – 20may22 (updated 22may22)

George Rebane

‘Biden’s Strange Help for Cuba’  To be charitable, Team Biden’s foreign policy continues in chaotic shambles.  Cuba, Russia’s prime ally in the western hemisphere, is economically and politically on its ass, and Biden is now going to help stabilize the country by relaxing travel restrictions, money transfers, and commercial financing from the US.  From the 20may22 WSJ, “The Administration says it wants to help the Cuban people. But like the Obama Administration, Team Biden fails to acknowledge that the cause of the island’s privation is the regime itself.”  This is the same for America today where Biden daily denies that the cause of our privations is his incompetent cum anti-American regime.

[21may22 update]  To those of us who continue to suffer the outrageous slings and arrows of woke progressives in our daily round of jousts, the words of Charles Mackay (1814-1889) are an ever-timely tonic.

[22may22 update] ‘Russia/Putin & the West’ is an extensive two-part pro-Russian harangue on today's geostrategic politics and the evolving world order by someone signing himself as ‘Sam Parker’.  The document is published on an extensive website called Behind The News Network, and it was composed just before the Ukrainian invasion which it anticipates.  The piece came across my desk from a correspondent questioning the authenticity of the essay, which in Part1 starts out as sober and neutral look at the modern history of Eurasian Russia cum USSR, and then (in Part2) morphs into a pro-Russian propaganda piece detailing the country’s military superiority over anything the US and NATO can muster to counter Russia’s just aims to militarily defend itself against the geo-strategic machinations of the sinister US-based ‘Rockefeller Empire’.  To me it comes across as a sophisticated outlet of anti-western fake news.  Judge for yourself.